»
News Corp.’s internal plans to launch Fox Business Channel are surprisingly cautious, writes Fortune. The company is earmarking $100 million in initial capital for the business channel, which will go head-to-head with CNBC.
The channel, slated to launch in October, is in the process of hiring about 400 people, according to a News Corp. insider.
For News Corp., $100 million is merely a drop in the bucket, and suggests that the company may be wary about entering too deeply into the cable business news, an industry that has seen high-profile flops like CNNfn and the Financial News Network.
“$100 million is not really much to launch a typical cable network,” Derek Baine, an analyst at Kagan Research, is quoted as saying. News Corp spent $400 million to launch Fox News, and it took about five years to break even.
All sectors of the media business will suffer from the weakened economy in 2008 and 2009, with a slump in local advertising particularly hurting newspapers and local TV, according to a new projection from Goldman Sachs.
Broadcast nets will experience…
The New York Times is shuttering its International Herald Tribune site; NYTimes.com will soon host the international news normally reserved for its sister website.
The move is not about cost savings, but rather about growth, NYTimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller…
Unilever’s Vaseline set forth on an unusual research project in a small town in Alaska. Setting up a storefront, the company began giving away free bottles of lotion and asking recipients to name the person who had recommended they come…
Meet the Press, the show hosted by Tim Russert for 17 years before his death last June, is beginning to slip in ratings.
Last month, CBS’s Face the Nation pulled ahead of Meet the Press for the first time in two…
Bloggers collectively create nearly one million blog posts each day, and half of bloggers believe blogs will be a primary source of news and entertainment in the next five years, according to Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report, MarketingCharts writes.…
Wal-Mart and Costco reported same-store gains in September, with sales rising 2.4% and 9% respectively. Sales at Target stores open at least a year fell 3%, writes Retailer Daily.
Below, fiscal results from the discount retail giants:
Sales of food and…
