overview
ABC, SBS, BBC
Advance
Annenberg
AOL
APN
Astors
Aust Networks
Beaverbrook
Bertelsmann
Black
Cox
Disney
DMG
Elsevier
Fairfax
Financial Press
Fleet Street
Hearst
Liberty
Maxwell
News & Murdoch
New Yorker
NY Times
Packer
Sony
Thomson
Time Warner
Tribune
US Networks
Viacom
Vivendi
W Post
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AOL
The current merger
between America Online and Time-Warner (itself the product
of the merger between the Time-Life publishing empire and
the Warner music, film, publishing and theme parks
conglomerate) has been praised by some analysts as an
ideal marriage of content with carriage. The new group,
based of course in the US, will operate in all continents
except Antarctica and have sales of around US$40 billion.
Time-Life + Warner
We've provided a
separate profile of the Time-Life
empire, Warner and Turner.
AOL
The standard profile of AOL is the adoring aol.com:
How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and
made millions in the War for the Web ( New York, Times
98) by Kara Swisher. Oooh, those awful netheads!
A more realistic view of
AOL and Case is provided by Michael Wolff in the
entertaining Burn Rate ( London, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson 98) and two Wired profiles from 1995
and 1996.
Christopher Byron's The
Fanciest Dive: What Happened When The Media Empire of
Time/Life Leaped Without Looking Into The Age of High Tech
(New York, Norton 86) is overly anecdotal but suggests
that the suits at AOLTW are going to rediscover - the hard
way - that 'it ain't as easy as it looks'. Digital
Babylon (New York, Arcade 99) by John Geirland &
Eva Sonesh-Kedar is a similar account of Hollywood meets
the intermnet.
For perspectives on the
evolving cable television industry we recommend Stephen
Keating's Cutthroat:
High Stakes and Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier
(Boulder, Johnson 99) and L J Davis' The Billionaire
Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted
Corporate Titans Invented A Future Nobody Wanted (New
York, Doubleday 98).
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