On 29 November, the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press finally issued its report. Its verdicts on the conduct of the press, politicians and police were less severe than expected.

The three main political parties have accepted most of the report’s recommendations, but have disagreed over the use of statute. As expected, the Conservatives are against, while Labour and the Lib Dems are in favour.

Subsequent cross-party talks and negotiations between editors have so far failed to produce agreement, with the process only becoming more opaque as time goes on. The shape of the future regulatory system remains uncertain.

The third of our four reports on specialist advertising focuses on the automotive sector and AutoTrader's role at the heart of the dealer ecosystem

The used car market has been remarkably resilient in recent years, but as with many classified categories the core trend in digital is diversification to a suite of services from a core listings model

AutoTrader's owners Apax Partners and Guardian Media Group will of course be considering their options in terms of an exit from their investment

News Corp will split publishing out of its business by creating a company to include newspapers in the US, UK and Australia as well as book publisher HarperCollins News Corp revenue growth has for some time been driven by explosive growth in cable network programming revenues, with slower revenue growth in film, TV, satellite TV and publishing The structural decline of print-based businesses is the main reason cited for the split. However, the Dow Jones and WSJ, both serving a B2B market, will be at the heart of the new publishing company’s value

Sky Deutschland has renewed its broadcast rights contract with the Bundesliga until 2017, removing the most important source of uncertainty for investors and consumers, albeit at the cost of a 77% jump in the fee from 2013/14

Combined with Sky’s new exclusive channels, high definition offer and on-demand services, the contract will sustain subscriber growth, but ARPU will only rise slowly

Although we forecast Sky to meet its EBITDA breakeven target in 2013, cash flow should stay negative until 2015 due to rising spend on receivers

We forecast print media advertising will be down by about 4% in 2012, with national newspaper display roughly flat, performances we envisage will be seen as a temporary reprieve once the substantially tougher 2013 that we expect to follow is underway

Print media is not out of the structural woods, and even relatively small revenue contraction will amplify pain as the opportunities for further streamlining fixed-cost physical distribution operations are realistically diminishing

Digital is a greater challenge for paper than for screen media, as consumer and advertiser demand continues to weaken, yet publishers struggle to generate the killer service solution to stimulate scale revenue online