Media Week

With the appointments of Nichola Browne as editor of Bauer's rock weekly Kerrang! and Krissi Murison to the helm of IPC's NME, the reins of the most influential new music magazines to maintain a meaningful, if diminishing, presence on the UK news-stand are now firmly in grip of women.

As the noughties draw to a close, should this eventuality be worth more than a passing mention? Hell, yes. While Browne is the second female editor of only eight to lead Kerrang!, Murison is NME's first female editor in its 57-year history.

And for the male-dominated music industry, often accused of being an institution in needing an attitude update, in which Murison and Browne's titles reside, the significance is multiplied.

As one successful female artist manager put it to me today: "The music industry is totally sexist. There is, even within my generation, a definite ‘boys club' among a large proportion of A&R men and senior executives."

The magazine sector, in general, may have long had its fair share of female editors and executives, putting it in a healthier place than the music business, but hearing a former NME staffer talk about her experiences shows being a woman who chooses to write about music throws up its own unique challenges.

"Female music journalists have been subjected to sexism, whether intentional or not, in the work place and out in the field for years. And not just the nudgenudgewinkwink idea that your chosen career was a thinly-veiled excuse for being a groupie," she told me.

"When I first started at the NME, I was asked in all seriousness who I'd given a blow job to to get the job. The situation, thankfully, has vastly improved from the days I was at the title and it is also a lot better in the industry as a whole.

"But there's still some way to go to stamp out sexism in the music industry and magazines completely. Having female eds of both Kerrang! and NME can only help."

The ultimate cynic might suggest a certain token gesture nature to the appointments, IPC and Bauer handing over two titles in terminal decline, with neither editor having a real chance of turning around the decline in sales.

As one industry source put it: "It was pretty obvious that NME would go for a female editor this time round as they are desperate for an angle to invigorate interest in the title, or at very least, get some publicity on the back of it."

Overall figures for the sector add weight to this argument, suggesting perhaps that the music magazine business may not be long for this world, (down almost 10% year on year for the first half of 2009), stuck in a long-term downward spiral that will see the majority of titles partying at the great after-show in the sky sooner rather than later.

Bauer's monthly Q still tops the ABC figures in the music sector, just, recording a January to June 2009 figure of 100,172, while the weeklies of NME, with a circulation of 40,948, and Kerrang, with 43,253, are down about 27% each - a far cry from their glory days.

Take a more optimistic view, however, and the new hires take on a greater significance. Alongside Rolling Stone, NME is up there as one of the most influential music brands in the world.

The weekly paper may not have the impact it has previously enjoyed, but as the flagship of a brand which extends across TV, radio, mobile and the internet, both the magazine and its editor maintain an enviable position of power. Ditto Kerrang.

Having had the good fortune to work with numerous female music journalists, rock photographers, designers et al, at various points during the last decade, my experience has always been that they could convey the bigger picture importance of music without falling into the trap of many drippy indie boys, obsessing about time signatures and production techniques.

Add to that lead-lined stomachs that could out after-show the next man, though the next man was usually me, and the nous, not to mention the ferocity in some cases, to head-off any inappropriate behaviour directed their way, and the decision to finally put leading music magazines under their charge is a long overdue one.

Can Murison and Browne make their respective titles the media properties they once were? No, sadly. Halting the rate of decline and maintaining relevancy and influence, with consumers and advertisers, if not actual copy sales, is probably the most they can hope for.

But should either end up presiding over the eventual demise of the NME or Kerrang, and despite the continuing slump in sales this eventuality remains, thankfully, unlikely, the question should not be ‘Why did they put a woman in charge?' but ‘Why didn't they do it sooner?'

Is Chris Anderson's new book a complete load of codswallop, or are we too afraid of the consequences to accept the truth?

Having finished reading the Long Tail author's new book ‘Free, The Future of a Radical Price' this morning - the full £18.99 version rather than the free abridged edition - this is the question now vexing me.

There is much to disagree with in the Wired editor's new book-of-big-ideas, and Anderson has had his fair share of criticism since its publication, not least from fellow big idea toting author Malcolm ‘Tipping Point' Gladwell.

Indeed Anderson's own thesis - "making money around free will be the future of business" - appears at times to be contradicted in the book.

It seems to me having now read it, that Anderson doesn't suggest that free is the way forward at all. In fact Anderson says himself, though it takes until page 240, that "free may be the best price, but it can't be the only one".

For all its talk of business models that embrace free, from freemium, to time-limited, feature-limited, seat-limited and customer-type limited strategies, along with the book's exploration of non-monetary attention and reputation economics, at some point the only business model that works, unsurprisingly perhaps, involves someone putting their hand in their pocket and handing over a bit of hard-earned.

What the book lays on the line, and this is the bit media owners know only too well and are currently tackling to lesser or greater degrees of success (predominantly lesser it has to be said) - is that the current ad-funded model isn't working, and getting people to pay for content online is a challenge that may prove insurmountable.

As a journalist, who has a career and mortgage invested in the paid-for model, I'll happily admit that I have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

If Anderson is right and the natural price point of bits is dragged inexorably toward zero, and the digital age consigns my chosen career to the dustbin - as the machine-age did for manual labour - it will  not do so now, nor did it then, without the equally natural human instinct to fight against it.

Whether that fight is won or lost, one thing the media industry must do well if it is to survive is adhere to an irrefutable Anderson maxim: "Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or compete with Free, one way or another." Let battle commence.

In response to the Digital Britain report, BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons - the man charged with ensuring the BBC provides ‘good value for all UK citizens' - was forthright in his defence of Auntie hanging on to its cash in the face of diverting licence fee money to commercial organisations to help pay for regional news services.

At the time, one could have been left feeling quietly confident that our dues were safe in the hands of a well-regulated body. After all, umpty billion quid to save the banking system aside, why should tax-payers bail out commercial organisations just because profits have hit the buffers?

The release of the BBC's top executives' salaries and expenses has cast a rather large shadow over the idea our money is indeed in safe hands, however. A shadow made larger still by reports over this weekend's excessive spend on coverage of Glastonbury.

407 BBC staff managed to make it along to the festival, said the Sunday Times, including a clutch of senior executives, at a cost to the licence fee payer of an estimated £1.5m.

Sir Michael also attended Glastonbury, at our expense naturally, though I'm certain he was to busy checking we were getting value for money to enjoy himself too much.

The BBC has argued the case for its staffing levels, but excesses in coverage were plain to see. There was no need for Gaby Logan's Sunday morning Five Live show to be broadcast from the event, for one. Her Dizzee Rascal interview proving just why she should be kept as far away from music and its nefarious propagators as is humanly possible.

Meanwhile, the person(s) employed to protect the BBC's output by vetoing what artists The Guardian could and couldn't film from its Lounge stage would have been better employed keeping an eye on how much booze the presenters appeared to be imbibing between broadcasts.

I happen to think coverage of Glastonbury is important, and given its niche attraction is best served by the Beeb. Why shouldn't we celebrate something uniquely British and world renowned?

As for the expenses 'scandal', while one could be forgiven for wondering why internal meetings warranted quite so much in the way of refreshments, I don't begrudge top executives the odd business lunch or Brucey his Champagne.

But if it wishes to hang on to any shred of credibility in the argument against top-slicing, and maintain its largely agreeable relationship with the fee-paying public, decisions regarding what in the current climate constitutes excess, with regard to coverage and general expenditure, are going to need much closer scrutiny.

And if Sir Michael and senior BBC execs, very well-paid from the public purse, want to be seen as whiter than white, they would be well-advised to steer clear of muddy fields.

497 days is a long time in politics. An exceedingly long time based on Harold Wilson's time scale. But it is the length of time it has taken for the media industry to lose not one Secretary of State, but two.

James Purnell was parachuted out of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and in to the work and pensions brief to take over from the disgraced Peter Hain on 24 January, 2008.

As it happened, within the time it took Media Week to interview the then secretary of state and subsequently publish the article. Thank you Harold.

But while our timing issue was merely annoying, the current decision to flip Andy Burnham over to health and drop Ben Bradshaw into the media hot seat just ten days before the Digital Britain report is due to be published seems extraordinary. But then, we are living through extraordinary times.

Political pundits suggest if the Prime Minister survives the week, he will most likely survive until Spring next year, by which time a general election must be called. Sadly, many media companies looking to the Digital Britain report to provide a few crumbs of comfort may not be so fortunate in the survival stakes.

When Media Week interviewed communications minister Lord Stephen Carter, who is leading the Digital Britain consultation and will deliver the final report some time around 16 June, it garnered industry opinion on the interim results put out at the time.

Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey noted "the crushing lack of understanding of the urgency required for changes to merger regulations in the local and regional media sector".

Andrew Harrison, chief executive of RadioCentre emphasised the need for "legislative reform from government as an urgent priority".

And Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, stated she was pleased the pressures faced by regional media operations had "rightly moved up the Government's agenda".

But realistically, how high up the Government's agenda can Digital Britain now be?

Ben Bradshaw will no doubt be being briefed to within an inch of his life, and Carter, as an excellent operator and with his media background, is widely viewed as the right choice to deliver the plan - though how much more appealing the ITV job must look right now to him, one can only speculate.

But when your bosses are fighting for their own and the Government's future, while desperately putting together emergency legislative reform of Parliament itself, dealing with regulations surrounding media ownership and advertising would understandably take second place.

While Gordon Brown's future is looking as shaky as a number of media operations, the fact he has outlived many thousands of unfortunate commercial, creative and editorial staff who have already lost their jobs underlines the need to make good the early promise of the Digital Britain report.

In his speech at the release of the Digital Britain interim results, Brown described the event at the British Library as "what I believe is one of the most important conferences we will hold this year".

While one can only hope he meant what he said - and securing the future of the country's commercial and creative media industries is more important than who happens to be pushing through the paperwork - it is difficult to see how any reform will take place before a general election is fought and, likely, a new set of hands gets its chance to meddle.

In technology, the only constant is exponential change. It is remarkable, therefore, to consider that one of its key sectors, search, has changed little during the past 10 years.

While it has evolved to cope with multimedia content and improved as algorithms have become more powerful, the presentation of a list of links to relevant web pages against a keyword search has been the de facto setting since market-leader Google came to public prominence at the turn of the Millennium. Perhaps the main reason comes down to the old adage: "If it ain't broke..."

In its short history, Google has become a powerhouse, with an 85% UK market share and a market cap of $132bn. Meanwhile, Microsoft, arguably the most successful technology company ever incorporated, lies a distant third in the search market (4% UK share) and has consistently failed to dent Google's ubiquitous dominance. But it is from this also-ran position that Microsoft has reinvented its offering with Bing, what it terms a "decision engine".

A quicker route to the information required to make the right choice sounds compelling and market reaction has been relatively positive. But, paradoxically for a search engine, its appearance asks as many questions as it answers.

If it succeeds in giving consumers the right information from more generic search terms, will this drive up the cost of keywords? Microsoft currently says only that it will be monitoring the situation.

Does its approach of categorising information mean the well-honed SEO and analysis skills within agencies will also need to adapt? And can anyone really hope to gain meaningful share from Google through innovation alone? Let's not forget it has become so big because it's so good.

To have an overly dominant player in any market is not desirable. It is widely hoped, therefore, that the talent Microsoft undoubtedly possesses has finally been put to good use in the search market. But will we soon be Binging rather than Googling?

Microsoft will count on the $100m marketing campaign giving Bing a good start and a few extra points this year would be viewed as a success. But history suggests, to achieve its stated aim of being a strong second, a $20bn deal with Yahoo may yet prove more cost effective.

May 1977. The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen reached number 2 in the charts, Liverpool were crowned league champions for the second successive season and Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill were still considered hip young gun-slingers.

Fast forward three decades or so and Johnny Rotten is doing ads for Country Life butter, the last time Liverpool won successive titles Steven Gerrard was barely out of nappies, Parsons pens novels about family life and Burchill was, until relatively recently, a broadsheet columnist.

The world has moved on, you might say. But not so far that anyone looking to endow a product with instant attitude doesn't still use punk as a touchstone. And so it is with the latest "irreverent, attitudinal, edgy" magazine, Football Punk, due to hit the news-stand this week.

"In true punk tradition," begins Richard Lenton's ed's letter in the Football Punk sampler. Really?

At 36, I'm a little too young to remember the "punk wars" - by all accounts a bit like the Napoleonic wars only snottier - but I'm pretty sure whatever ideology the Bromley contingent et al believed they were fighting for, it didn't involve Danielle Bux getting her kit off...again.

All that said, at first glance, the launch seems to make sense for publisher JF Media - part-owned by former footballer Phil Babb and already in the sports magazine sector with recently relaunched sister title Golf Punk International.

However, a quick check on the numbers and one struggles to find the logic. Last year, Golf Punk had an ABC of 14,928, Jan-Dec, with just less than 10,000 copies being full-price news-stand sales. At that level, especially in the current climate, you can't imagine it's generating an overly lucrative page yield.

A healthy cross-sell also looks unlikely. Out of about 30 pages of ads in the latest 184-page issue of Golf Punk, including classifieds, just five were not specifically golf-related. And of those, only the single page for sportswear brand Fila would seem an obvious fit for a football spin-off.

With an ABC of 105,531, Four Four Two shows if you get the product right, there is an appetite for a monthly football glossy, despite the wider media, from tabloids to dedicated radio stations, being awash with football coverage.

And if just a tiny proportion of the billions generated by the Premier League gets used to help support creative, independent publishing, that has to be a good thing.

But, while applauding their endeavour, to launch a monthly sports mag, with the ad market in possibly its worst slump ever, in the bizarre words of Steve McClaren, they are "not jusht underdogsh, but mashive underdogsh".

I was randomly searching for interesting media types to follow on Twitter, but thought I'd just throw it out there and see if anyone wants to ‘out' themselves.

You can follow us @MediaWeek for breaking news and if you want to know who I happened to be behind in the queue at Stansted airport last week (it was Skin from Skunk Anansie flying RyanAir to Ibiza...how the mighty fall) and other randomness, you can follow me @RichSutcliffe.

And from my quick scan of the great and good Greg Grimmer makes an appearance, though his posts are blocked (what have you got to hide Greg?), Tess Alps runs a tidy ship, Richard Eyre keeps us all up to date on his listening habits, and who'd have thought he had such good taste, and though I did find a Martin Sorrell I can't be sure it's the real Mr Sorrell because there aren't actually any posts.

Emin, Unerman and Barrett, meanwhile, are conspicuous by their absence.

Watching the Andrew Marr show yesterday, a ritual as much a part of Sunday mornings as a double hit of Paracetamol was in former years, I couldn't help noticing, when Marr was going through the papers, how many back pages were dominated by iPhone ads. A quick spot check at the office this morning verified it was at least The Telegraph, Times, Indy and Observer.

Having recently taken delivery, finally, of my own Apple smart phone, it may be I am just more aware, but more likely it is Apple attempting to stamp some authority on a market that is becoming ever more crowded, not least following the World Mobile Congress last week where a multitude of handsets and software was unveiled.

This is not ‘the year of mobile' - this is not going to be the year of anything much. But within days I am already using my iPhone to make purchasing decisions and spending more time Facebooking, Twittering and generally fiddling with it than I am with any other medium.

The novelty may wear off, but if your brand is not currently reaching out to me through the few square inches of screen demanding my unbridled attention, you don't exist.

Oscar night is almost upon us and with it will come the grandest display of opulent product placement the might of Hollywood can muster. And we won't care, in fact we won't be able to get enough of it.

The blanket coverage of the world's biggest stars, plucked and preened for their red carpet appearance, will not be a low key affair. It will be brighter than the sun, with egos visible from space and bling to match.

And the one question each and every starlet will be asked as they glide by equally dolled presenters and omnipresent TV cameras will not have anything to do with the films for which they merit their appearance at the Academy Awards. It will be the cringeworthy, Americanised, not-even-a-proper-question, question, "Who are you wearing?" Shudder.

The leading designers in the fashion world will be rubbing their perfectly manicured hands together as they receive the biggest endorsement the modern age has to offer. The greatest products placed on some the greatest, ahem, places, played out in front of untold millions watching around the world.

Do we get upset at blatant commercialisation of The Oscars? Do we think the stars ‘just threw something together'? No.

The British public would be gutted if it didn't play out like giant fashion ad, knowing full well that scores of designers will have been wooing the A-Listers for months, perhaps years - and likely with more than the offer of a free ‘creation' for the night - just to get them to don a particularly revealing backless feather number.

So why, when TV watchers from Oscar aficionados to film buffs are able to understand that product placement happens within much of the programming they consume, from news - yes news, just wait for the wall-to-wall coverage of ‘that dress' - to sitcoms and movies, and not let it spoil their viewing, are UK broadcasters unable to join in the fun?

Does the Secretary of State think he knows what the British public are prepared to accept better than the producers of the Street or, more to the point, the British public? Does he think producers would do anything to tarnish the valuable reputations of hit shows for the sake of a misplaced pair of Nike trainers?

The global product placement market was reportedly worth $3.36 billion in 2006 and was forecast to grow 30.3% to $4.38 billion in 2007. Even bringing that down to likely UK levels, it's a pot of cash that would do more than a little to help broadcasters struggling to make ends meet.

But tempting as it might be to "contaminate programming", as Andy Burnham put it, there's too much at stake for creatives, producers and advertisers for a show to fall foul of the public for over-egging the product placement pudding. The remote control and multichannel TV make short shrift of anything even remotely annoying on the box.

So, do the industry a favour and let them try to make a bit of cash, and maybe help improve their programming, by throwing a few cans of Coke Frank Gallagher's way. We won't mind. In fact, (sorry brands), we probably won't even notice.

Wired magazine's US editor-in-chief has some forthright, and well-judged, views on life and, more specifically, the changing business landscape in the digital age.

His best-selling book, The Long Tail - which espoused the value to be tapped in the multitude of niches within the market - is soon to be followed by his next foray (Free - an exploration of the ‘radical price point of zero').

Speaking on Friday, at a Conde Nast-organised Wired seminar, Anderson, interviewed by UK Wired editor David Rowan, talked, among other things, about what "free" means for businesses - and in the crudest terms, it seemed to boil down to getting people hooked on a free, possibly inferior version of your product, then charging them for the good stuff. Sound familiar? It's a model much loved by drug dealers on many of our less-salubrious estates.

Explaining in more detail, "free", in this instance, can't mean you give everything away for free. While the nature of the internet is driving the price point to nothing - falling storage, server and bandwidth charges - a purely ad-funded model is still not a good idea in the current market. Companies, said Anderson, are shifting their model to direct payment - they want to be cashflow positive now

What he suggested is that businesses need multiple versions of their products, in order to give away free to the majority, but get about 5-10% of people to pay for the same content or a premium version of it.

In Wired terms, Anderson explained, this means giving the content away online for free, but getting people to buy the magazine. Sounds easy enough, although this week's ABCs will show the last bit is a little trickier in reality.

The "freemium" model - some free content with premium services paid for - is already operated by a few major publishers, The FT being the obvious UK example, and is how Anderson sees the future of content provision being funded. The Wired model, free online content but a paid-for print version, is pretty much what every remaining publisher adheres to. But at the moment, for many, this latter iteration of the "free" model is not working.

Removing the ‘walled garden' and offering total open access, relying solely on ads for revenue has been the rallying cry of the majority of traditional publishers as they charge headlong into the digital age.

The fact they are all are finding it tough to replace the lost print advertising and circulation revenues by generating cash from even huge online audiences makes either of Anderson's suggestions (free online and pay for print, or some free online and some paid for) a little hard to square for everyone in media who's currently struggling.

"Getting someone to pay for something they love is a nice problem to have," said Anderson on Friday. Unfortunately, driving prices higher at any time, let alone in a recession, and let alone from free to paid for, is not an easy task.

Anderson has a well-deserved reputation as a deep, solid thinker and it would be unfair, and a mistake, to prejudge his Free book on the basis of a half hour interview, in which it wasn't even the main topic.

But, it does feel as though free is just how it is. There is no going back for publishers. There is no chance that people will start to pay for something they've enjoyed for free for so long. And there's not much, if anything, in terms of information, that an average consumer is now, or will be in future, willing to pay for.

Which only begs the question, if the ad-funded model doesn't start working, and people aren't prepared to pay for information, how are media businesses ever going to fill the revenue void?

Having written about the good times Sky execs are enjoying in my last post, today's news that they have landed a fifth (of the six) live football TV rights packages in the latest Premier League auction tops off the week quite nicely, thank you very much.

Murdoch's pay-TV powerhouse has paid a princely £1.6bn for the rights, but to secure the driving force behind the company's solid performance this year (and for the last 17 years) it's a price worth paying.

The cost will no doubt grate with the subsequent victims of BSkyB major shareholder News Corp's rigirous cost-cutting, but it's those at rival pay-TV operator Setanta who must now be shifting most uneasily on the bench.

The lost package may only be 23 games, but it amounts to half Setanta's live Premier League output. Yes, it has lower league, Scottish football and some exclusive internationals, and when its full sports offering is taken into consideration, the broadcaster still has a decent roster. But when it comes to football, it's not the Blue Square Premier League that gets punters parting with their cash - just ask any chairman of a Blue Square Premier League club.

How Setanta deals with its loss will be interesting. No doubt it will come out fighting, whether through reduced package deals or a revised business plan that offsets lower subscription revenue against the cost-savings of paying for and producing fewer live matches. Or it may use the cash saved to ramp up its other sports output.

Whatever happens in the long run, today's loss to rival Sky will not have Setanta execs reaching for the Champagne. Meanwhile, Sky is proving that it will not easily be parted from the crown jewels of its Pay-TV offering.

Sky execs will no doubt be whistling their way to work this morning - if it's possible to be cheery when travelling to the Osterley campus (it's not exactly Googleplex) - flushed with the news that not only have they landed the prized Premier League rights for another three years, but Project Kangaroo, the high-profile VoD venture backed by BBC, ITV and Channel 4 has been binned by the Competition Commission.

As far as the football is concerned, thank God. As an early complainer that we suddenly had to pay to watch football on TV, I am now a true convert to the church of Keys, Stelling and Rednapp.

What Sky has done for football coverage in the last decade cannot be over-estimated. See ITV's appalling intro for its FA Cup coverage - strangely reminiscent of When Saturday Comes if only in its misjudged sentiment - for how rival broadcasters can still get it utterly wrong.

And if ITV producers think Robbie Earl, (nice, but hardly compelling), and that Irish bloke who used to do the Holiday programme can anchor the main highlights show with any kind of credibility, they are forever to remain lower league.

As for Kangaroo. It's another pot of cash down the digital drain, but I'm not really sure it makes that much difference. They're not going to put all the old content into a single player so I'll have to click an extra time to switch websites. Is that such a chore?

It may be a marginally less attractive offering for the consumer, but does it diminish the online value of Dad's Army-on-demand, because it no longer sits in the same VoD player as Wife Swap? I would have thought the opposite.

And surely the CC decision doesn't prevent the original backers using the platform, jointly developed - and already showcased to agencies - just individually rather than collectively.

As they were planning on selling their own ad inventory anyway, what the individual broadcasters are losing due to the CC decision is surely marginal. It's a blow, and a missed opportunity, but will hardly spell the end of VoD ambitions for any of the UK's main broadcasters.

And it certainly opens the door for online commercial independents to aggregate video content rather than it being the sole domain of the big three. Watch this space for the rise of numerous operations filling the Kangaroo void.

In light of the news that Manchester United and England footballer Rio Ferdinand is going to launch his own digital magazine, I've decided to launch Rich, an uncensored insight into the exciting world of, well, me.

Jamie Oliver's Jamie concentrates on food, natch, and Rio, according to the press release, "aims to give a snapshot of the world that Rio inhabits and will be a reflection of his interests", with features including celebrity interviews - 50 Cent and Mickey Rourke in the first issue - plus icons of sport, music, fashion, film and TV, technology, cars and travel.

Rich will feature an equally impressive array of essential content for 35+ once aspirational males, including ‘A night down the pub' where I transcribe occasionally amusing conversations between me and my nefarious friends in the boozer, and cutting edge fashion spreads from world-renowned stylists and fashion photographers including my wife and maybe even my mother-in-law who did buy me a new jumper for Christmas.

Media buyers looking to tap into the potential goldmine demographic Rich will no doubt attract can contact me at Media Week.

The COI announced this week that Joe public is now able to track crime trends in their area through online maps across the 43 websites of all police forces across the country.

It's a bit like using Google maps, only instead of finding your nearest frappuccino supplier, you get to see just what a crime hotspot, in my case, you actually have the misfortune to live in.

I was delighted to find out that Hackney Borough has an "average" crime rate according to the Met figures, but if you go right down to my sub ward, effectively mine and a couple of other apparently mean streets, the figures rocket, even by Hackney's standards.

I now fear for the safety of the organic fruit sellers and mother's clubs of Stoke Newington, I really do.

Quite what opportunities this presents to media organisations, one can only imagine. In my particular little slice of heaven I'm expecting a flurry of door drops for everything from secure windows suppliers to personal minders.

If you're a Londoner, check for yourself at the Met's map, only be prepared for a few restless nights depending on the results.

1. The BBC will take a fresh look at its digital ambitions and scale back expansion "just to cut commercial operations a break".
2. The number of media jollies will be drastically cut in favour of fruit baskets.
3. Dawn Airey will not have lunch at The Ivy.
4. There will be more people working in media by the end of 2009, compared with 2008.
5. Channel 4 will revitalise its plans to move into radio.
6. National newspapers will see a resurgence in copy sales and report buoyant ABC figures.
7. Google will crash as advertisers decide online display is the future.
8. The cinema sector will do something, anything news worthy.
9. No individual media sector will publish a report that suggests it is the best placed to weather the economic storm.
10. Jamie magazine will still exist - seriously...overkill.