Business of Media
Glossy mag printer Ovato hits the wall after 50 years
A 50-year-old printing business headed by one of Australia’s richest families has called in administrators leaving hundreds of jobs at risk and impacting iconic magazines like Australian Women’s Weekly, reports News Corp’s David Ross.
ASX-listed Ovato has been placed into administration after years of shedding operations and employees.
FTI Consulting was appointed on Thursday morning to operate the printer, which has sites in NSW, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and New Zealand.
Ovato, which prints Australian Women’s Weekly, Gourmet Traveller, The Economist, Woman’s Day and some News Corp magazines among many others, will continue to trade while an assessment of its financial position is undertaken.
It was also the publisher of mass catalogues for the likes of Harvey Norman, Coles and Woolworths.
TikTok is fastest growing news source for UK adults, Ofcom finds
Watch out Huw Edwards, the TikTokers are coming. The social video platform is the fastest growing news source for UK adults, according to a survey, but nearly half of people using it for current affairs turn to fellow TikTokers rather than conventional news organisations for their updates, reports The Guardian’s Dan Milmo.
TikTok is used by 7% of adults for news, according to the UK’s communications watchdog, up from 1% in 2020. The growth is primarily driven by young users, with half of its news followers aged 16 to 24.
Ofcom’s annual report on news consumption in the UK showed that for teenagers aged 12-15, Instagram has deposed BBC One and BBC Two as the most popular news source among teenagers, closely followed by TikTok and YouTube.
Facebook to restore chronological feed of posts from friends
Facebook is going back to basics, restoring a chronological news feed to its app to make it easier for users to keep up with posts from their friends, reports The Guardian’s Alex Hern.
More than a decade after Facebook updated its patented News Feed to default to showing “top stories” rather than a chronological list of posts from friends and pages, the company is restoring the ability to “easily see the most recent posts from your friends, Pages and groups”.
Facebook is splitting the feed over two tabs on its iOS and Android apps – Feeds and Home. “One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don’t miss friends’ posts,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a post announcing the feature, “so today we’re launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order.”
Agencies
303 MullenLowe welcomes Marque Kabbaz as executive director CX and digital
303 MullenLowe has appointed Marque Kabbaz as executive director CX and digital, strengthening the agency’s digital capabilities as the group continues to grow.
The strategic design expert brings more than three decades of experience across creative, service design, strategy, and digital transformation sectors to the newly created national role.
Kabbaz was most recently at Merkle ANZ, where he has been head of strategic design, and prior to that at Isobar where he led the national strategic design and digital transformation capability. His experience is also underpinned by strong start-up leadership, having been head of strategy at Clearmatch, and also scaled Capgemini’s Service Design agency, going on to lead the global brand strategy.
The newly appointed executive director will be based out of 303 MullenLowe Sydney. He joins the agency management team and leads the customer experience and digital practice across Australia and New Zealand.
News Brands
BBC apologises to royal nanny swept up in Diana reporting furor
She was collateral damage in one of the most sensational reporting scoops in British TV history, a royal nanny to Prince William and Prince Harry tarnished by the BBC in its quest for an interview with their mother, Princess Diana, reports The New York Times‘ Mark Landler.
On Thursday, the BBC apologised to the former nanny, Alexandra Pettifer, then known as Tiggy Legge-Bourke, for spreading false allegations that she had an affair with Prince Charles and had undergone an abortion after becoming pregnant with his child. The BBC also agreed to pay her a substantial, if undisclosed, amount in damages.
“These allegations were fabricated,” Pettifer’s lawyer, Louise Prince, read out in a jointly agreed statement in the High Court in London.
Television
Netflix boss says TV will be dead in ‘five to 10 years’
Netflix boss Reed Hastings says traditional TV will be dead in “five, 10 years”, reports News Corp’s Frank Chung.
The co-founder and co-chief executive of the streaming giant made the prediction in Tuesday’s investor call as the company reported its second-quarter earnings – which surprised markets by showing a loss of one million subscribers, significantly lower than the 2.4 million Netflix had projected it would lose.
Asked what had driven the better-than-expected result, Hastings explained that Netflix was “executing really well on the content side”, pointing to the success of titles like Stranger Things and Ozark.
“We’re improving everything we do around marketing, improving the service, the merchandising, and all of that solely pays off,” he said.
The great Covid-19 gap: Why is pop culture ignoring the pandemic?
It is 2070, and my future grandchildren have just been told by my son that he grew up during a global pandemic that killed millions of people. Tens of millions, actually, reports Nine Publishing’s Cole Haddon.
In this vision of my family’s future, my grandchildren, who worship the moving image as much as their long-dead grandpa once did, have never seen any reference to this lethal pandemic in any of the classic early-21st century films and archaic 2D television series still popular on the holo-net. It’s impossible for them not to think my son is taking the piss. “Good one, Dad,” they laugh. “Tens of millions dead, yeah, right.”
Increasingly, I fear this outcome is inevitable. And if it’s not, then a realistic alternative is that any future whisper about the pandemic will be accompanied by fantastical inaccuracies since perhaps the only record in popular culture about it will be found in books (good) and on social media (bad).
Rewind, back to the present. Or rather, the global pandemic we are, in fact, living through despite its near-total omission from film and TV series.