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Monday, November 16, 2009

Waiting for Vivendi: Comcast-NBCU Deal Needs a “Oui”

roundersWhen will Comcast and GE’s NBCU finally unveil their hookup plans? When Vivendi says they can. Which should be sooner than later.

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Monday, October 26, 2009

BusinessWeek’s Fire Sale Nets McGraw Hill $5.9 Million, or $15,000 Per Staffer

dark-knight-burningMcGraw Hill isn’t quite done with BusinessWeek–it isn’t supposed to formally hand off the magazine to Bloomberg until later this year–but it is just about there. Today the company told investors just how much it will net from the sale of the 80-year-old title: $9.3 million, or $5.9 million after taxes.

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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Bloomberg Buys BusinessWeek For a Song, Plus Up to $5 Million

newstandWhat’s one of the biggest names in magazine publishing worth? These days, maybe $5 million.

That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek. Next question: How many of the magazine’s employees stay on once the deal closes later this year? BusinessWeek publisher Keith Fox can’t make any assurances. But he does call the deal “exciting.”

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Friday, October 9, 2009

The Secret of Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s Famous “Two Kings” Video. Revealed!

chad hurley and steve chenThree years after the Google deal, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley explains some of the cryptic language in the clip that defined the Web 2.0 era. Also, he’d like you to know his site is generating more than a billion views a day.

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Monday, September 28, 2009

Time Warner Dumping Its Magazines? Not So Fast.

time titlesHeavyweight media investor Gordy Crawford–who happens to own a big chunk of Time Warner–says the conglomerate plans to dump its magazine business. But I get the sense that Jeff Bewkes and company plan on keeping at least some of the unit’s iconic titles.

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Back for Yet Another Season: The “What Will GE Do With NBC?” Show

the_office_promo_pic_nbcEven when the M&A market was shut down, Wall Street couldn’t stop speculating about GE’s intentions for its NBC Universal unit. And now that it’s deal-making time again, the chatter is getting very noisy.

Hence the flurry of coverage over yesterday’s remarks by Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, in which he said…not very much.

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Thursday, July 2, 2009

Illegal Downloads, Meet Suspicious Stock Sales: The Pirate Bay Story Gets Even Murkier

takethemoneyandrunThe more I hear about the supposed plan for an Internet cafe company to buy the world’s best-known illegal file-sharing site, the more I think that the whole thing is a farce.

So this one doesn’t even faze me: Swedish regulators are looking into insider trading charges at Global Gaming Factory X, which saw shares jump several days before it said it would buy The Pirate Bay.

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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Is The Pirate Bay Really Going Legit? Of Course Not.

the_pirate_bay_logoYou can hear the head-scratching going on at movie studios and music labels across the world: What just happened to The Pirate Bay? Reports out of Sweden are murky at best. But supposedly, a Scandinavian software outfit is buying the world’s most notorious file-sharing site for about $8 million and will create a service that pays copyright owners when people download their work. But let’s be honest: That’s never going to happen.

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About Peter

Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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