US judge blocks Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster’s £1.9bn merger November 1, 2022 A US judge has blocked Penguin Random House’s planned $2.18bn (£1.89bn) purchase of Simon & Schuster, after finding the move would hurt competition for anticipated best sellers. Judge Florence Pan of the US district court for the District of Columbia said that the combination of Bertelsmann owned Penguin and Paramount Global owned Simon & Schuster would “substantially” [...]
Starmer says Tories are ‘dragging feet’ in making platforms pay for news November 1, 2022 Sir Keir Starmer has backed calls to make social media platforms pay for news content, accusing the government of dragging its feet on the matter. Writing for campaign group Journalism Matters, the leader of the opposition said that big tech’s dominance of the online advertising space is to the detriment of consumers, other rivals and [...]
‘Royal Mail have just declared war on your postie’: Union snubs yet another pay offer October 31, 2022 Postal workers have warned the public that “Royal Mail have just declared war on your postie”, batting away yet another pay offer from the firm. Royal Mail today proposed a new conditional pay-for-change offer to the Communication Workers Union (CWU) worth nine per cent for CWU-grade colleagues. The offer includes a seven per cent salary [...]
M&C Saatchi dodges hostile takeover as offers lapse October 31, 2022 M&C Saatchi has dodged its hostile takeover, with offers from both Next 15 and AdvancedAdvT lapsing. The advertising titan confirmed that directors were unable to back the conditions outlined in Next 15’s “Scheme Document”, and the offer had now expired. Although Next 15 cleared its final regulatory hurdle earlier this month, the offer needed some 75 [...]
Warner Bros Discovery said scrapping content could cost over £2bn October 25, 2022 Warner Bros Discovery said that charges associated with cutting content could reach $2.5bn (£2.2bn), as the media giant continues down its cost-saving path. According to a security filing posted on Monday, the merged firm said restructuring costs could total up to $4.3bn through 2024, including between $2bn and $2.5bn in “strategic content programming assessments”. It [...]
Adidas terminates Kanye West’s Yeezy brand over antisemitic comments October 25, 2022 Adidas has terminated a multi-billion pound deal with music superstar Kanye West over antisemitic comments he made. The iconic German sports and fashion brand issued a statement today ending his ‘Yeezy’ brand, after the artist said he couldn’t be dropped. This comes after West, who officially changed his name to ‘Ye’, had his Twitter account [...]
Apple ups prices for music and TV for first time ever October 25, 2022 Apple has hiked its prices for its music and TV services for the first time ever this week, perhaps signalling things to come for its biggest streaming rivals. The tech giant said it would be increasing the price of Apple Music globally by $1 to $10.99, and breaking away from the standard ‘9.99’ price level [...]
WhatsApp down globally, 40m Brits and hundreds of millions impacted around the world October 25, 2022 Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp went down for over an hour this morning in dozens of countries around the world, including the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Kenya, India, France and most of the United States and Canada. City A.M. can confirm that the outage was for both personal chats as well as group chats and hundreds [...]
Kudos for OnlyFans: Watchdog says smaller video platforms need to do more to protect kids October 20, 2022 New research from Ofcom has found that smaller adult video-sharing platforms need to do more to prevent children from accessing porn. In a report published today, the media regulator said it was concerned that whilst smaller companies had some age verification measures in place, they did not go far enough. One unnamed adult platform told [...]
Environmental terms confuse Brits and make them wary of greenwashing says ad watchdog October 20, 2022 The advertising regulator has called for greater standardisation of environmental terms after it found that many Brits struggled to understand what terms like “net zero” actually mean. In a report published by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this morning, it said that while “carbon neutral” and “net zero” were the most familiar phrases, there was [...]