• Gillian Tett is the FT’s US managing editor, the position Lionel Barber occupied before becoming editor 10 years ago. And last week’s Nikkei deal for the paper looks to have significantly advanced her already strong chances of succeeding Barber as its first female editor: those predicting a “Tett offensive” that starts here point out that she had a previous job as Japanese bureau chief, wrote a book (Saving the Sun) “about Japan and how westerners need to behave there”, and speaks Japanese. Barber, in contrast, speaks German and so might have been better placed for survival had the underbidder Axel Springer been the successful suitor.
• As he had apparently been left out of the loop, Barber’s position looked especially wobbly on Thursday as he addressed staff on Thursday on the deal – after uncomfortably having to push his way through a scrum of journalists watching Sky News to find out what was really going on, one hack suggested on Twitter – and insisted “this was not, and is not, a shotgun marriage” (a mischievous underling who tweeted “did he say ‘shogun marriage’?” is wisely keeping his head down). If Barber’s cheeks were the same hue as his paper, he was not alone: about an hour before a triple-bylined FT story confirmed the Nikkei deal in mid-afternoon, the same three reporters had embarrassingly published “Pearson in talks with Axel Springer over sale of FT Group”, in which the business paper’s customary comedy troupe of unnamed informants (“several people familiar with the situation”) provided the trio’s basis for haplessly chorusing that “Nikkei has also had discussions with Pearson … but the talks with Springer are further advanced”.
• After the Nikkei deal was announced on Thursday, some FT journalists recalled that on Wednesday the paper had published an article offering tips on “strategies to soothe disrupted staff” in the anxious digital age - though without showing much sign of having learnt anything the following day. The piece duly gained fresh life on Twitter, attracting such suggestions as “You introduce them to the calming influence of Shintoism?”
• Support for Pearson’s decision, albeit of a slightly baffling form, came from Barber’s predecessor Andrew Gowers, who told Ian King that Nikkei was ideal as a company “solidly routed in media” (or at least that’s what Sky News’s subtitlers had him saying). Gowers speaks, of course, with the authority of someone with unrivalled expertise in routed companies, from his days covering them for the FT to his post-Pink ‘Un career as chief spinner for outfits such as BP and Lehman Brothers.
• While making its debut as a star chamber last week, Jesse Norman’s culture select committee toppled into farce immediately by announcing an inquiry into the BBC’s Charter Review – this just five months after the same committee (with different personnel) under John Whittingdale produced its report on the Future of the BBC, and while Whittingdale’s DCMS and the Lords communications committee will both be conducting inquiries into the same topic. The three exercises will inevitably take evidence from the same people and bodies as each other and the old Future of the BBC hearings, leading one weary veteran of such processes to wonder if the public accounts committee should launch an inquiry into the wasting of parliamentary time and resources by overlapping inquiries.
• While the Lords communications committee investigated gender inequality in current affairs output, and BAME representation in TV remains a hot topic, diversity in the media is one area “Storming” Norman’s committee may sheepishly feel they have to leave alone. When Ofcom boss Sharon White (who impressed observers) appeared before them last week, the all-new, 11-strong team who quizzed her were also all-white, all-male and all middle-aged. Future witnesses and spectators may wish to turn the calendars on their phones back several decades – or play pop hits from the pre-Beatles era, or watch a DVD of 1957’s 12 Angry Men and mentally delete one chap – to get in the right mood before they attend.
• If you happen to drive through an Oxfordshire town after dark and spot a dapper sexagenarian insomniac acting weirdly, the midnight rambler in question is highly likely to be BBC director general Tony Hall. In a diary in the latest Spectator, Hall confesses to being such a slave to the fitness tracker on his wrist (which demands “10,000 paces a day”) that “I’ve even done turns around the town I live in, late at night, to hit the magic number”. This obsession also usefully explains much that was mysterious about the DG’s behaviour when on-duty, such as his peculiar dance moves for photographers on his first day, and the speed off the mark after public appearances that prevents journalists asking questions – both now clearly the product of a horror of standing still and so failing to score “paces”. However, Monkey is concerned that this admission might seem an open invitation to paparazzi to stake out his local high street: snap one image of his solitary nocturnal pacing and bingo!, it’s a perfect illustration for a hostile paper’s “As Pressure Mounts, Friends Fear For Opera-Loving BBC Chief’s Sanity” story.
• Picking Laura Kuenssberg’s new job for the biggest item in her Friday two-page spread, Mail columnist Jan Moir approved the choice but tut-tutted about “certain newspapers crowing about the first female political editor of the BBC … To do so is demeaning to Laura Kuenssberg and the rest of us. Women are supposed to be equal, not singled out for special praise if we happen to do well, like the village idiot or the class clown.” It’s a point Monkey hopes she made directly and equally forcefully to the twin “prince regents” running the Mail in Paul Dacre’s absence, since her own paper must have been one of those she damned: the previous day’s issue had a photo of Kuenssberg on the front accompanied by the words “Glam new face of BBC politics”, and another inside (wearing a short skirt, photographed from floor level) beneath a profile headlined “Newsnight star is first lady of BBC politics”.
• Another political reporter was meanwhile on the move too, as, in another blow last week to poor Lionel Barber, his deputy pol ed Beth Rigby was prised away by the Times as its media editor – a job perhaps more accurately characterised, given how it was carried out by her predecessors, as the broadsheets’ Beeb-basher in chief. Searching for an explanation of why a lobby hack had been asked to switch to this particular beat, Monkey found no sign of past expertise in any of the dozen or so media in Rigby’s CV, though there are encouraging indications of both high achievement and remarkable stamina: according to her LinkedIn biog, she earned a first in social and political science at Cambridge, but it heroically if curiously took her 13 years, from “1984-1997”. Anyway, if most of your stories are going to be Beeb-bashing, ie devoted to a single broadcaster, as was the case with Alex Spence and Ben Webster, broader experience may not be a necessity.
• For Rigby, it’s possible that the after-life of a Times media editor is what proved the clincher, rather than the prospect of the daily grind of pursuing the Murdochian and Osbornian agendas towards the BBC. For it has only just emerged how exciting Webster’s new job on the paper really is. Although the official cover story bills him as environment editor, an apparent subeditor’s slip in bylining a recent report by him on cod stocks gave away the former media editor’s secret true role as “Oceans correspondent”, a post that must require him to patrol the high seas 24/7 in a sou’wester, covering a beat stretching from Sligo to Singapore, Valencia to Vladivostok. A distinct improvement on scowling at BBC press conferences.
