Recent Stories
Video Interview: Jeff Price, President, SI Digital, Time Inc
By Rafat Ali
- Sun 11 May 2008 11:28 AM PST
At our recently concluded EconSM conference in LA, I did a short video interview with one of our speakers, Jeff Price, the president of SI Digital, the digital sports media arm of Time Inc. SI Digital has made a slew of launches, investments and acquisitions in the space, all in an attempt to reinvent the magazine and compete against the big giants in the sector such as ESPN (NYSE: DIS), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Sports and others.
We talked about:
-- SI’s swimsuit franchise and its multiplatform approach.
-- SI’s investment and M&A strategy: FanNation, Takkle, and others.
-- Competing against ESPN and others...non linear programming and the future.
-- Leagues and competing against their plans. League’s short term philosophy vs them.
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EconSM Video: Getting Real: Grown-Up Start Ups
By Amanda Natividad
- Sat 10 May 2008 05:05 PM PST
In our second video from EconSM 2008, Social Approach’s CEO Shawn Gold moderated Getting Real: Grown-Up Start Ups with Dalton Caldwell, imeem’s founder and CEO, Seth Goldstein, SocialMedia Networks’ co-founder and CEO, Keith Richman Break.com’s co-founder and CEO, and Toni Schneider, Automattic’s CEO. In this panel covering the topic of moving start ups past the early adopters phase and finding a lucrative exit, Caldwell pointed out the importance of taking time to “suck” in order to learn from mistakes. Meanwhile, Goldstein revealed his own motto to be to “hire slow and fire fast,” getting out the employees who just don’t work out, and not being afraid to hire under-experienced people with “a lot of hustle.” Check out our coverage of this panel and watch the video (RSS readers will have to click through). All of our EconSM 2008 videos will be posted here.
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News Corp. Withdraws Bid For Newsday; Likely Winner Will Be Cablevision
By Tricia Duryee
- Sat 10 May 2008 10:42 AM PST
News Corp (NYSE: NWS). has withdrawn its $580 million bid for the Tribune’s Newsday, calling it “uneconomical,” according to Reuters. The remaining likely bidder for the New York newspaper is cable TV operator Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), which also operates in Long Island.
A News Corp spokesman told *Reuters* the company was unable to justify outbidding Cablevision’s $650 million offer, calling it “uneconomical.” New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman also has out a matching bid to News Corp, and suggests it could close a deal faster so it should be the preferred buyer.
Staci adds: Murdoch has known for more than a week of the higher bid, choosing the very public forum of News Corp’s earnings call Wednesday to express confidence in his company’s chances even at the lower price. He told a Newsday reporter on a conference call that he didn’t think Cablevision would win, implying an existing deal with Tribune CEO Sam Zell, and to “just be patient for a couple of days, will you?” But he also added: “We are certainly not in the business of getting into an auction here.” A day later, he told a NY Observer reporter: “Yeah, I might have gone a little too far saying it was a certainty. I was telling the truth, but you don’t know until...”
Zell also known all along that News Corp, Murdoch’s bluster to the contrary, faced a tougher hurdle than most other buyers when it came getting federal clearance for the acquisition. He might have been willing to take the chance for the right consideration and the chance to build a cooperative relationship with Murdoch but Cablevision’s significantly higher bid threw a spanner in the works.
Newsday: Zell and Murdoch shook hands on a deal in April. The paper also suggests that Tribune and News Corp still could work together on cost-cutting ventures, including printing both papers in one place.
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