Media

Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) wants to buy the 50 percent stake it doesn’t currently have in personal finance mag SmartMoney from Hearst, the WSJ reports, citing unidentified sources. No word on what price DJ is offering for the magazine, though a deal could be hammered out by next...

After a series of delays, the Reader’s Digest Association has finally emerged from bankruptcy having reduced its debt by 75 percent, the company said. The publisher, which filed for Chapter 11 protection last August, has received $525 million in exit financing from a bond refinancing that will provide RDA with an estimated $30...

Playboy (NYSE: PLA) Enterprises’ hopes for a planned sale were dashed during Q4, as its revenue troubles continued as well. As the company’s loss narrowed to $27.8 million from last year’s $146.8 million, combined print and digital revenues fell 14 percent. On its own, digital slid 10.7 percent in Q4.

In...

Playboy (NYSE: PLA) President Alex Vaickus opened up the company’s Q4 earnings call with a big “thank you” to pop singer John Mayer, whose controversial interview in the March 2010 issue has been covered by 1,500 media outlets. But as he and CEO Scott Flanders made...

Venerable publishing institutions are not overlooked by the crosshairs of technological and economic disruption. Seventy-two years after its first edition, the Reader’s Digest’s UK edition, which bills itself as “the world’s favourite magazine’, has filed for administration, after failing to win government backing for a pension fund rescue plan.

This was...

Update: It has been announced officially by the two companies: Canon Communications is buying four brands from Reed Business Information-US: Electronic Design News (EDN), Design News, Test & Measurement World, and Packaging Digest. This is a worldwide deal for the brands bought, not just U.S.; the acquisition of the US assets was...

Jeff Price is back in the sports media biz—and this time his responsibility stretches across all platforms. Price, who left as president of SI Digital last April during a series of changes at Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX), joins The Sporting News as president and publisher. He’s on his way to Charlotte now...

What’s the standout feature of Apple’s tablet that promises a step-change in our app economy? There isn’t one. “It’s really just the bigger screen,” says Colin McCaffery, product director at 2ergo, one of the industry’s leading mobile app developers.

But that won’t dishearten newspaper and magazine publishers. Because, for all the bluster about iPad...

Nielsen has finally found a buyer for Kirkus Reviews, which was threatened with being shuttered following the sale of its b2b pubs, the NYT reported. Herb Simon is the pub’s new owner. While he owns an independent bookstore in Montecito, CA., Simon is also known as the owner of Indiana Pacers NBA...

Magazines’ newsstand sales were a mix of good and bad during the latter half of ‘09, as Audit Bureau of Circulations’ Fas-Fax (sub. req.) for magazines report. In its survey of 472 mags, publishers said that newsstand sales dropped 11 percent in h209, flat compared to the 11.1 percent during the...

In detailing what helped Time (NYSE: TWX) Warner’s return to profitability, CEO Jeff Bewkes started the Q4 call insisting that the company has completed many of the goals it laid out last year, including cost reductions and the spinoff of Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC)...

When a quarter is as rough as Q408 was for Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), anything decent is going to look pretty good in comparison. Comparing last year’s $16 billion loss with its massive writedowns to the Q409 net income of $627 million broke the calculator we use for our charts but what...