Media Matters - February roundup
The media landscape continued to morph and shift in February with restructures, copyright battles, yet more job cuts, and high-profile departures from our pages and screens.
In an unusual and stunning show of unity, on Tuesday this week almost every UK daily newspaper committed its front page and website home page to the “Make it Fair” campaign against government proposals to create a copyright exemption for?AI?companies. Earlier in the month, as a forewarning of the potential wave of legal cases to come, Thomson Reuters won a major copyright legal case as a judge ruled a competitor using its work to train an AI tool was not fair use.
However, it hasn’t all been good news for journalists, as a federal judge denied a request by the Associated Press to restore its access to presidential events, after the outlet refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America”.
The challenges of the digital age are hampering even the most well-read papers. Following the 900 jobs cuts endured by UK and US journalists in January, it was revealed that the Daily Mail plans to cut a further 100 jobs as part of its plans to merge the print and online teams. And one third of Observer staff are set to take redundancy ahead of the impending Tortoise transfer.
Another major M&A deal in the media world is in the works, as ITV began to explore a potential deal for its production arm. Rival studios and private equity are now “circling” as ITV holds early talks with RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed investment group that last year acquired UK rival All3Media for more than ￡1.1bn.
There have been a number of high-profile journalist moves this month. After “over a million minutes of live TV news” spanning five decades, including coverage of the death of the Princess of Wales and 9/11, Kay Burley announced her retirement from Sky News, the channel she helped launch in 1989. Katy Balls also announced she will be leaving the Spectator after ten years to become Washington Editor at the Times and Sunday Times, and Kate McCann, formerly Political Editor at Talk Radio, left the station to join rival Times Radio to host its breakfast show.
Never a family to be out of the spotlight for too long, the Murdoch-Succession drama continued, as details of the private court case were shared in a New York Times article and an interview with James Murdoch in the Atlantic fueled speculation that this could mark the beginning of the end for the media empire.
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