Weekend news roundup
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 March 2006 at 10:41
Tags: Aberdeen Press & Journal, Economist, Guardian, Independent on Sunday, International, Ireland, Johnston Press, Journalism, New Statesman, Northcliffe, Observer, Sportsman, Sunday Telegraph, TakeSport
We trawl the weekend papers and web sites so you don’t have to:
The Business identifies Andy Stewart, a founder of brokers Collins Stewart Tullets, as the final investor in the Sportsman. Spencer is thought to have invested £1m for less than a 10 per cent stake. The other shareholders in the sports and betting daily that is launching on 22 March include Michael Spencer, Ben and Zac Goldsmith, Ben Arbib and Max Aitken. Staff on the new paper will own a 10 percent share.
The Sportsman will face additional competition in the form of a 64-page free weekly sports betting magazine which launched on Friday. Backed by entrepeneur Chris Akers, TakeSport distributed 30,000 copies at rail and Underground stations in London, the Independent reports.
The wonderful blog Regret the Error, which carefully scrutinises the corrections columns, spots an interesting item that ran in the Guardian on Friday. Nothing to do with the “headline of the week” on Press Gazette’s Page 28 the previous day, I’m sure.
In Saturday’s Telegraph, Roy Greenslade speaks to outgoing Economist editor Bill Emmott, and serves up comments by former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby criticising the sober magazine newspaper as “almost stifling in its monotonal certainties and infuriating in the arrogance of its judgments”.
Emmott, on whose watch the Economist has doubled its circulation to upwards of 1 milion, gets his jabs in: “I guess a sniping response would be that if I wanted advice from someone who ran a failing magazine I’d ask for it. More seriously, it is a blinkered interpretation of why people read the magazine.”
Bookmakers Paddy Power consider Ed Carr a “dead cert” to replace Emmott in the editor’s chair, but that doesn’t stop the speculation in the diary columns. The media diary in the Independent on Sunday suggests former deputy Clive Crook, now at the Atlantic Monthly in America but still penning paeans to the Economist, is a leading external candidate at tomorrow’s interviews. “If successful, Crook would be the first person from without the ranks of the Economist to take the top job in its 160-year history,” the Sindy notes. Elsewhere in the paper, though, diarist Christopher Silvester reckons Economist US editor John Mickethwaith turned down the Spectator chair because he had been promised the top job at his own place.
The Sindy also goes after the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, asking “Have Middle England’s best-loved papers lost the plot?” Sources close to deposed Sunday Telegraph editor Sarah Sands say she’s furious for being “fired for carrying out the brief she had been given”, noting that under her leadership, circulation rose from 666,031 before she arrived last May to 683,741 last month.
As for Daily Mail and General Trust, the Sindy notes that its regional Northcliffe division made £102m on revenues of £520m. That 20 per cent margin compares unfavourably to the 34.5 per cent at regional rival Johnston Press and 35 per cent at Gannett. Plans for staff cuts at Northcliffe are expected to be unveilled this week.
According to the Sunday Times, meanwhile, reports that DMGT is considering selling off the Aberdeen Press & Journal for £120m. The Sunday Times says DGMT is negotiating with Johnston Press and at least one other potential buyer, a sale could happen “within the next few weeks”.
An advert for a highly-paid post as a Department of Health speechwriter that appeared in Press Gazette raised eyebrows at the Times. At £56,000 per annum for the part time post, the paper calculates, the right applicant could expect to trouser more than George W. Bush’s chief wordsmith, the paper calculates. Well, not quite:
However, the department said last night that an error had been made when drawing up the job details. It said that the actual salary would be a pro rata payment, and the speechwriter could expect to earn between £18,000 and £26,000 a year.
“[T]here probably isn’t enough money in the world to pay someone for the thankless task of defending Britain’s monumentally incompetent health system,” notes one former Republican speechwriter, Rodger Morrow. Still, British blogger Tim Worstall has already applied.
The Polski Herald is an eight-page Polish-language suppliment that is included in Dublin’s Evening Herald every Friday. The Observer quotes its news editor, Tom Galvin, urging British news papers to follow his paper’s example of reaching out to immigrant communities: “I would say to fellow journalists in Britain, especially in those areas where there are large new immigrant communities like the Poles, that this is the way to increase and build a new readership. There is a real and very new market out there.”
