Film
Disney targets Asia
An enchanted vegetable may not be your typical Disney character - but the American company is hoping that it could be an Asian equivalent of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The Magic Gourd, Disney's first film made specifically for China, has raked in a healthy $3m at the box office, and is soon to be followed by its next mainland production, Touch of a Panda. It joins Disney's other Asian localisation efforts, which include three Indian TV shows that blend local mythology with high-end production values.

This month, Disney will launch Roadside Romeo - its first animated feature produced outside the US - in conjunction with a host of big Bollywood names; in Japan, the company has relocated its popular alien, Stitch, from Hawaii to Okinawa for a new TV series that will be airing this month.

Andy Bird, Disney's international chairman, admits that Disney's iconic characters such as Mickey and Donald are less familiar in countries such as China and India, where "consumers haven't had the infrastructure or the ability to be exposed to the Disney brand".

In China, for instance, Mao Zedong's decision to ban Disney characters was not lifted until 1986. Following this, Disney's efforts have been stymied by legal restrictions that bar foreign TV channels from airing to the country's 300 million under-15s. "Steamboat Willie happened 82 years ago," says David Wolf, founder and CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based media consultancy. "It's going to take that time for 'Disneyana' to percolate into local cultures in Asia."

In India, Disney has had to hone its appeal for an audience that often prefers live-action programming to animation. "They have to really understand where these kids are coming from - they are still influenced by a local mindset," says Mona Jain, managing director of the media buying and planning group Indian Media Exchange.

Disney's 2006 purchase of the Indian children's TV market leader, Hungama TV, points to a wider strategy - CEO and president Robert Iger wants non-US revenue to account for more than its current 23%. China and India are battlegrounds that must be tamed before competitors carve out a bigger slice.

"I think Disney will break the ground," says Wolf. "But Time Warner and Viacom won't be far behind."
Malik Fareed

Internet
Beastly business
By the end of its launch week, Tina Brown's new online news project, The Daily Beast, had made its mark on the teeming US media landscape - but the publicity was not all positive.

After a Philadelphia Daily News columnist wrote that the Beast's logo was "um, 'borrowing'" that of the News, which also uses white type inside a red square, the print publication's lawyers fired off a cease-and-desist letter. And it wasn't the only legal hiccup for the Beast - which also heard from representatives of Jennifer Lopez after Brown published a spiked magazine profile in which the film star spoke of suffering a nervous breakdown. (Although the piece also set tongues wagging and competitors linking to the Beast, making it an undeniable coup.)

Media analysts were intrigued by and sceptical about Brown's venture. Bill Mitchell, online director at the Poynter Institute for journalism, was impressed by the Cheat Sheet, which flags and ranks recommended daily reading from a variety of sources. "Ultimately, sites will rise and fall based on how interesting or useful they are," Mitchell said. "This approach has potential in both categories." The Chicago Tribune was equally optimistic: the Beast "demonstrates enough intelligent design to have won a place, provisionally, in most good lists of daily Web checks," it said.

The newcomer was initially compared to the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, the two titans of online news aggregation, but pundits now see it as closer to magazines than blogs - which is hardly surprising, given its founder - and are worried about its apolitical tone.

"The Daily Beast wants to be down the middle politically, which is not going to inspire the kind of visceral responses HuffPo and Drudge depend on," wrote Maria Russo of the Los Angeles Times.

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, meanwhile, was more dismissive, calling Brown the "ex-queen of the newsstands" and grading the Beast's content with a C. (Its design got an A-.)

Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff, himself behind media-aggregation sight Newser, likened the Beast to online magazines Slate and Salon. "It's essentially Talk magazine reconstituted," he said. "It has this time-warp feeling."

Brown, who left the New Yorker 10 years ago, put it more stylishly in an online Q&A that asked why readers should choose the Beast: "Sensibility, darling."
Elana Schor