Romanian oligarchs slow down their assault of the media market

According to the latest unofficial informations, ‘Adevărul’, a title recently taken over by the controversial Romanian oil mogul Dinu Patriciu, desisted its plans for a local editions expansion. The management of the new press holding also announced several weeks ago, at a meeting with the ‘Adevarul’ team, that Patriciu’s plans for a television would be put on hold.

It all could be interpreted as bad news for the market, but actually the opposite is true. Finally, one of the Romanian oligarchs started to resize his strategy according to the HR available on the market and to some coherent development plans, possibly due to the appointment of a professional print media manager as a GM of his holding, in the person of Razvan Corneţeanu, former executive director of the most important division at the successful Ringier Romania.

Patriciu’s strategy rethinking might be followed by Sorin Ovidiu Vîntu, the other big and controversial new investor on the market. Voiculescu and Sîrbu, the two other Romanian media moguls, might also slow down some of their very brisk and schematic development plans. And Ringier Romania, the ‘5th Big’ in Romanian media, might lose less of its employees in the future. | More…

The national daily newspapers market: 950.000 distributed copies

The total market of the Romanian national newspapers raises to roughly 950.000 copies, according to the latest figures from the Romanian ABC (BRAT). 4 of the 6 greatest circulation newspapers belong to Ringier România, while the other two are owned by Intact (Dan Voiculescu).

The leader of the market, Libertatea, a Ringier title, sells roughly 270.000 copies and has a market share of 28 %, including free, sports, business, hungarian, or 43 %, on the purely general interest, sold at newsstands dailies. This more restricted market raises to 631.632 copies.

According to their sold circulation and other characteristics, the newspapers on the Romanian market could be divided into three cathegories: sexy young-mature, mid-life crisis and agonizing dwarves. | More…

Romanian radio stations market shares

The public national radio stays the most popular in Romania, according to the latest Association for Radio Audience (ARA) figures, resulted from the autumn research (Sept. 4-Oct. 29, 2006). Radio 21 (Lagardere) takes the lead on the Bucharest market, while Europa FM (Lagardere), Kiss FM (SBS) and Pro FM (Sîrbu-MediaPro) are strong players on all the markets. The national market shares pie:

Bucharest and Urban shares; stations ownership: | More…

Romania, the virtual Kazahstan

Without knowing what they were getting into, the peasants in the Romanian village Glod became actors not in Borat – the movie, but in some kind of planetary snowball that is mixing the reality of newspaper headlines with the fiction of the movie, which in its turn was extracted from another reality. However, their argument that they didn’t know in what their images would be used for is not valid. How innocent one can be to accept one or two thousand Romanian old leu (ROL, roughly 3-5 euros) to take your pig inside your home, put a sword in the hand of a child or, in general, to take part into all the circus that can be seen in the movie? Pretending one didn’t know what he or she was doing is, under the circumstances, hypocrisy. | More…

Six titles with problems

The daily newspapers in Romania haven’t followed the audience’s taste to the same extent that markets such as women glossies have. The latest editorial content and team changes give the opportunity of a forecast for every title.

Top 3 Libertatea, Jurnalul National and Evenimentul zilei confirm the saying that on the developed media markets in Romania the first three players have a safe evolution. The massive exodus from Libertatea hasn’t yet affected the sold circulation of the newspaper, Jurnalul follows a stable trend after the Logans campaigns, as the second newspaper, and Evenimentul also keeps its position. | More…

Credibility and awareness of Romanian blogs have definitely risen. What next?

Romanian blogs have started to be used as information sources by the print media, and a discussion about blog credibility and info attribution is on-going in places such as Blog.HotNews.ro (RO) or Netoo.wordpress.com (RO).

Although there is no even response to the question ’should blogs be quoted as an information source?’, the polemics, which includes positions by journalists from print media, reveals newspapers as facing another provocation due to the technological superiority of blogs.
Niche domains, such as mass media, have a rather small group of dedicated readers that check blogs such as Blog.HotNews.ro (maintained by this author), Jurnalismonline.ro, Tolontan.ro, Orlando.ro, Manafu.ro or Gustiroman.ro (all: RO) frequently. Obviously, newspaper readers should not see the same news the next day in the print edition, so print media should adapt to the new situation with a new editorial policy. Or, otherwise, lose their readers, at least in narrow domains like the one discussed. | More…

Human resources crisis on the Romanian media market

Money can’t buy you happiness for sure on the Romanian media market. Three of the richest and most controversial Romanians, Dinu Patriciu, Sorin Ovidiu Vîntu and Dan Voiculescu, launched or disclosed plans for launching new titles on the print media market, TV stations or Internet sites this year. Their plans brought the market on the fringe of a human resources crisis.

Latest buzz: Patriciu went to Vîntu and Voiculescu to propose a mutual agreement, in order to avoid reciprocal HR damage… | More…