• Selecting and ranking London’s “most influential people” for last week’s Progress 1000 list, the Evening Standard (prop. E Lebedev) no doubt arrived in a typically disinterested and objective fashion at its No 1 in the journalism category – Evgeny Lebedev. And while it’s true that the London local paper and the Independent titles share their Kensington offices with the Mail group, and that editor Sarah Sands spent the mid-noughties as a Daily Mail consultant editor, neither fact will have had any role in the unarguable choices of Viscount Rothermere as No 2, Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre as No 7 and Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig as No 10; and nor is it remotely fishy that Lebedev’s other editors are well-placed too, even though that means the Indy’s Amol Rajan (14) and even Oliver Duff (15), editor of the i – which mostly just repackages Indy content – are above the Sunday Times’s Martin Ivens, and that they and the Sindy’s Lisa Markwell (22) are rated as far more potent than the Guardian’s Katharine Viner (40), let alone the hopelessly uninfluential editors of the Sun and Mirror who don’t even make the list. No, jibes about bias would be silly – except perhaps in relation to the complete absence of anyone from the Telegraph group, which swiftly ousted Sands as Sunday Telegraph editor (after she spent eight years toiling as dep ed at the daily) back in 2005.
• At last week’s RTS Cambridge pow-wow, the biggest laugh greeted ITV Studios chief Kevin Lygo’s characteristically engaging reaction when asked for his thoughts on the BBC’s plan to launch Studios of its own: “Oh … I was briefed on this and I’ve forgotten what they said to say”. More disconcerting were BBC Studios boss Peter Salmon’s efforts to conjure up a vision of the exciting possibilities of his copycat operation. Picturing BBC Production as a restless bunch of teenagers, Salmon enthused it was time to “move out” of their parents’ homes and have a lot more fun, to “take our shirts off at parties”, making the great project that could be the salvation of the BBC sound unenticingly like an extended version of The Inbetweeners Movie.
• Back from a trip to Japan where he was briefed on the plans of his new masters at Nikkei, FT editor Lionel Barber is said to have told senior colleagues that he now sees himself as “transitional editor” while new arrangements are worked out, a process talked of as taking around two years. Monkey was disappointed, however, that there was apparently no indication of whether the Pink ’Un will remain pink, or the variety of pink will alter, as Japanisation advances; it must be likely, after all, that Barber’s boss will want a subtle shift from the current salmon shade to cherry blossom.
• Showing no signs of distaste for red-top ways, new Sun editor Tony Gallagher began his reign last week with three consecutive, furious Corbyn-bashing front pages (whereas the Mail, Gallagher’s former paper, only went for the new Labour leader on its front on one of those days and did so less crudely). What may have made Gallagher really mad, though, is that the week’s best Corbyn story – of his 70s affair with Diane Abbott – really belonged to the Sun but instead was taken to be an exclusive by a News UK sister-paper. As Guido Fawkes explained on his blog, he broke it in his Sun on Sunday column during the party leadership campaign back in early August; six weeks later after Corbyn’s anointment, the story’s main details were repeated in the Times report that almost everyone else (including, gallingly, the Sun, even though it had it first) had to follow up.
• In a curious coincidence, last Monday both saw Monkey praising the new Sun editor-in-chief for sticking with his @gallaghereditor Twitter handle in the grim period when he wasn’t an editor (with a smidgen of irony, it must be admitted), and Gallagher himself dumping that handle a few hours later - he is now simply @tonygallagher - even though it had just become justified again. At least the renaming doesn’t signify that becoming a Murdoch red-top editor will put a stop to his distinctive veering between two roles normally seen as incompatible - rightwing headbanger and open-minded metropolitan epicure - as was shown by a tweet on day two plugging his appearance over the weekend at the Abergavenny Food Festival. There he interviewed Yotam Ottolenghi, who is not just a Guardian cook but a vegetarian one too. You wouldn’t have caught Kelvin MacKenzie visiting Wales, let alone agreeing to such a gig.
• Could a “curse of Murdoch” be emerging? There were the warm words for Alex Salmond before he lost the independence referendum, and for Nigel Farage before the general election when he failed to get elected as an MP and saw his party’s Commons army reduced from two to one. And last week Tony Abbott was dethroned as Australia’s PM, just three weeks after the incontinently tweeting tycoon (on the Oz leg of his World Tour 2015) posted his latest endorsement of “Tony Abbott, always the happy warrior. Win or lose, usually win, and clever fighter”. The US Republican presidential contenders who’ve so far received his mercurial praise, such as Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and the seemingly-already-cursed Jeb Bush, may wish to try to have the relevant tweets deleted.
• Back to Cambridge, where, happily, no shirts were removed at the convention’s ITN-sponsored karaoke contest, where former telly grandee Peter Bazalgette returned in the role of Simon Cowell figure and handed out the prize for worst effort (a packet of Alka-Seltzer apiece) to a rendition of Abba’s Dancing Queen by a male quartet including ITV news supremo Geoff Hill. More intriguing, however, was the choice of number by ITN boss John Hardie, who risked George Michael’s Faith. As this seems to be about a man seeking “something more”, and so ending a relationship and going solo (“Well it takes a strong man baby / But I’m showing you the door / Cause I gotta have faith”), it was hard to not to see parallels with ITV’s imminent news relaunch – with faith shown in Tom Bradby as the requisite strong man by making him lone anchor, and reduced roles – though not the exit door – for outgoing co-anchors Mark Austin and Julie Etchingham.
• A full eight days after Sarah Vine began the Daily Mail’s pummelling of Charlotte Proudman for tweeting about a sexist comment on LinkedIn (one issue dementedly devoted four pages to the row), her fellow-columnist Jan Moir could find nothing better to do in the longest item in her Friday column than treat Proudman to more verbal blows. There was one striking omission in this me-too diatribe, however: the “Feminazi” label, first attached to Proudman by Vine and then used of her on the paper’s front page and repeatedly inside, was nowhere to be seen. If you didn’t know her better, you could be forgiven for thinking that Moir had read the lawyer’s feminist defenders, and their understandable objections to anti-sexism being compared to nazism, and quietly agreed with them.
