Berkery Noyes Quarterly Media Deals Reports

Berkery Noyes just released its Information Industry report for Q3 2013, which covers merger and acquisition (M&A) trends over the past 21 months. Click here to view the industry’s median multiples, as well as transaction data from the two-page PDF.

Using a database product from D&B they have also presented segment analyses:

Private Equity Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

The number of private equity acquisitions in the Information Industry increased 18 percent in third quarter 2013. Meanwhile, deal flow between private equity firms rebounded sharply. After falling 50 percent between first and second quarter 2013, secondary buyout volume increased almost fourfold over the past three months.

Click here to read the two-page PDF.

Media and Marketing Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

M&A volume in the Consumer Publishing segment increased 27 percent in third quarter 2013. There were several notable newspaper transactions during the quarter that were completed by individual billionaires. This included Jeffrey Bezos' acquisition of The Washington Post Company for $250 million and John Henry's acquisition of The Boston Globe from The New York Times for $70 million.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.

Online and Mobile Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

There were two high profile mobile advertising transactions during the quarter, each of which highlights the growing interest in real-time bidding solutions. Within this subset, Twitter acquired mobile ad serving platform MoPub for an estimated $350 million while Millennial Media acquired mobile ad network Jumptap for $239 million.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.
Software Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013
Deal value in the Infrastructure Software segment throughout the first three quarters of 2013 was driven in part by the cyber-security subset. Along these lines, three of the top five transactions by value in the segment year-to-date were related to cyber-security. The largest Infrastructure Software deal in third quarter 2013 was Cisco Systems’ acquisition of SourceFire for $2.7 billion.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.
Healthcare Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013
The Healthcare IT segment underwent a 56 percent volume increase on a quarterly basis. It also accounted for nearly half of the industry’s aggregate M&A volume, as opposed to 31 percent in the prior quarter. Deal volume in the Pharma IT segment also increased 33 percent year-to-date when compared to the corresponding period in 2012.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.
Education Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013
The industry’s largest transaction in third quarter 2013 was TPG Capital’s acquisition of TSL Education, a digital education publisher, for $549 million. Financial sponsors accounted for 23 percent of volume but 41 percent of transaction value year-to-date. In addition, six of the top ten highest value deals thus far in 2013 were backed by private equity firms.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.

Financial Technology and Information Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

As for the Payments segment, M&A volume experienced a 142 percent increase in the quarter, with a total of 29 deals. This came in the aftermath of a 50 percent decrease between first and second quarter 2013. Regarding strategic acquirers, the segment’s highest value transaction in third quarter 2013 was EBay’s acquisition of Braintree Payment Solutions for $800 million.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.

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MediaWeek (V7, N42): Writing for Free, Comic Sutra, Autobiographies + More

Why writing for free is wrong (The Atlantic):

But the fact that so many people write for free, all the time, sits uncomfortably with the fact that writing is also, occasionally, a profession. And we have, in this country, a fairly clear sense that work deserves compensation. This is, for example, why I consider unpaid internships morally repugnant, since we're essentially asking that entry-level jobs, for which there is a minimum wage, be performed for free because somebody replaced the word "job" with "internship."

So here is the rub. Unpaid writing is all over the place. But writing is also a job. And jobs should be paid. So is it immoral for a publication to ask for somebody to write for free?

Unfortunately, the "slavery" article in Sunday's Times by Tim Kreider buries the simplest argument—that it's good to pay writers, nobody should appreciate this more than *other writers*—under an avalanche of righteousness, like "nobody would ever ask my sister to perform dangerous surgeries for free." Well, no they wouldn't, and thank heavens, because freelance lobectomies sound like a horrible idea. On the other hand, asking smart people to write for free on their spare time creates an impressive intellectual surplus. I am immeasurably smarter about stuff (I think) because of other writers' willingness to "enslave" themselves to blog networks.

Comic Sutra: Big in Bombay (New Republic)

Savi, with her long hair and voluptuous body, invokes the sensual female protagonists of the ACK series—but with a sly, modern spin. “Arousing sexual excitement and moral anxiety with equal ease, Savita Bhabi straddles both continuity and change,” said Shohini Ghosh, professor of media at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi. India is a major consumer of porn. The international porn star, India-born Sunny Leone, has said that 60 percent of her revenue comes from India. And Savi is now firmly embedded as an icon in the landscape of sexual contradictions that define India today. Characters like Savi have helped to open up the conversation about freedom of sexual expression. When the government shut down Savi’s website in 2009 in the name of the IT Act, which outlaws “lascivious” electronic material, feminists, journalists, and other anti-censorship voices rallied around her in the press.

Autobiography as public relations (Guardian):

Morrissey has inspired a lot of hostility from the literary establishment for insisting on publication as a Penguin Classic. He wants that inevitable rendezvous with posterity and he wants it now. Closer to the ground, or at least the players' dressing-room – a society he's said to have betrayed –Ferguson has provoked bitter accusations and angry rebuttals across the world of sport, from the likes of Roy Keane and Wayne Rooney. If the style is the man, as the French would have it, neither Fergie nor Morrissey have done themselves many favours, though they must be better off at the bank. Possibly the most subtle commentary on the continuing boom in memoir and autobiography, and the trouble it can cause, comes from Jennifer Saunders, Ab Fab's "Eddie", whose own autobiography is Bonkers.

From twitter this week:
Broadchurch the book to be published in 2014 Telegraph
SUNY faculty and libraries innovate to solve problems of high-cost textbooks by producing high-quality open textbooks LISNews
Netflix Flirts with a New Idea: “Big” Movies at Your House, the Same Day They're in Theatres : AllthingsD

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I love you Suzanne

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NATO Base Reykjavik

Just finished scanning a small number of slides from my father in law's collection when he was stationed in Iceland in the mid 1950s.  Those bombs aren't for show.  The jets are F-100 Super Sabre.  The one on the right was shot down in 1968 and the one on the left crashed on landing in 1959.  My research may be unscientific however.

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MediaWeek (V7, N42): Open Access Myths, eBooks and Tablets, China's Fake Research Industry, Brit Trade Invasion, + More

Open Access expert Peter Suber writes in the Guardian:  Open access: six myths to put to rest

Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework.

Pew releases an update to its' tablet and ebook ownership report and there continues to be overlap between eBook and tablet buyers.  (Pew)

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There was a controversy this month regarding 'fake' articles being submitted to open access journals.  Seems that that issue may pale in comparison to what's going on in China (Economist)

As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth $150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier.  Chinese scientists are still rewarded for doing good research, and the number of high-quality researchers is increasing. Scientists all round the world also commit fraud. But the Chinese evaluation system is particularly susceptible to it.

Again, from The Economist: Why most published research is probably false.

Is there a Brit Invasion underway in publishing or is it just a PR excuse? (io9)

Why are so many British publishers coming to America right now? And why are there so many smaller imprints coming out of the U.K.?

I think it’s pure economics. The book industry in Britain is not great at the moment. We’re struggling through the recession with very poor sales. So obviously we’re looking to see where they can make money, and America is five times the size [of] the market in the UK. So it does seem to me that if you’re a small nimble company that you can do this much easier perhaps than the bigger boys. If you’re a big company setting up in America, it automatically becomes a much bigger thing.

 Professor wants to know what's going on with is book (Chronicle):

You can't push on a rope" is a bit of folk wisdom from my rural upbringing. The phrase is about feeling powerless over a process in which you think of yourself as an equal, indispensable partner. Your end of the rope is firmly in your grasp; the other end has gone slack.  It's an apt description of what it's like to have a manuscript accepted for publication, the contract offered and signed, a proper final edit completed, the final product delivered for typesetting, and then ... nothing.  For more than a year, I've been holding the rope and waiting for someone to tug back on the other end.

From Twitter:
News: Noel Gallagher Says Reading Fiction 'a Waste Of Fucking Time' http://dlvr.it/49DgRz
Charlie Hunnam quit Fifty Shades 'after being refused extensive creative input' http://gu.com/p/3jj8p/tw  Really?? What did he have in mind?

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Photo - Good Morning

Somewhere over southern England early in the morning.  Just passed 75,000 actual miles flown for 2013 and still going strong; most fun in years.

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Wiley(ie) Beyond Print

Last week at the Frankfurt bookfair sponsored Contec digital conference, John Wiley & Sons CEO Steve Smith made it clear that not only is Wiley moving aggressively into digital content but the company is also moving beyond traditional educational publishing into services and data products. Smith mentioned the recent Wiley acquisition of education services provider Daltek and, in the process, he displayed and discussed a much expanded value chain that describes the current Wiley business.


Following the model of industry leader Pearson, Wiley is in the process of transforming its' business and this change has fundamental implications for the company. As Smith stated, "The old model with students was rather ephemeral and quick: they came in, we sold them a book. Now we are developing ongoing relationships with students that will last four years or more." Not only is this changing Wiley's approach to its' market but their total market opportunity is also growing.  This business strategy is a model we have seen content companies like Pearson and Lexis Nexis follow very successfully over the past ten years. Smith admitted during his speech that the market growth expectations for their new value chain are 'explosive' and far above the financial limitations which their traditional library market imposes on them.


In describing the strategy behind how Wiley is reinventing themselves he admitted that while the company is now digitally based, if they exited this phase of their reinvention as "a 100% digital publishing company, that is still not enough. We need to develop products and services that go beyond digital.”


As he outlined his company's tactics they seemed to fall into three focus areas: process, network and corporate development.


From a process stand point the company will need to,

• go deeper into the communities served to gain a deep knowledge of workflows
• invest in new solutions to solve pain points
• evolve content to include semantic enrichment and other enhancements facilitated by the web and social networking
• include a broader community of researchers, scientists, teachers, etc. and enable solutions for more job and task functions and purposes
• a focus on outcomes that can be proven to work as a result of the Wiley products and services

Attributing the benefits of a network and community approach to their community the company will:

• establish a mechanism for finding researchers, experts, authors and other key participants
• develop more education solutions for teachers and students
• leverage strengths and assets - particularly their content strengths - that support collaboration and community
• expand knowledge and links with communities served and support the development of creativity and innovation in communities

From a corporate development perspective, Smith admitted that the company needed to acquire companies in order to support the value chain proposition he described.  Notably, he spoke about the Daltek acquisition and how that business had filled out his value chain beyond the capabilities of the traditional Wiley business.  Wiley he said, would always be looking for "companies that can accelerate our transformation".

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