Quotes of the Week

Barry Fitzpatrick, NUJ head of publishing, reacts on Journalism.co.uk to 70 redundancies at Express Newspapers: "It's inconceivable that they can continue to produce competitive newspapers with the level of staff that will remain if these cuts go through."

London-based journalist Heidi Kingstone on Huffington Post takes a critical look at the British media: "In a country of about 60 million people with endless newspapers, websites and magazines, you end up reading the same 50 people in all of them, dispiriting, monotonous and boring."

Tim Rutten in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece backs Rupert Murdoch's plan for a consortium of newspapers to start charging for online news: "Putting aside the irony of the man who probably has done more to undermine serious English-language news coverage than anybody else in our lifetimes now proposing to save it, Murdoch is right, and newspaper proprietors should elect his proposal or one of the others also being discussed -- and soon."

Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves blogs on why his paper should go weekly: "Cards on the table? I believe the weekly model is the best option for the Post. There's a lot of emotion connected to the supposed status of being a daily paper and many of my contacts in the city regularly state baldly to me that 'Birmingham simply must have a daily business paper'. But at what cost? Increasingly, our diet of daily and immediate news is fed by online services and broadcast media, and newspapers have a much reduced role in bringing news we didn't hear first somewhere else."

Brand Republic on the lusty lime sweet wrapper that prompted an angry dad to write to the Daily Mail: "It is a great silly season story about a parent's "heated exchange" with a store manager over the inappropriate pictures of a lemon and lime "being locked in a carnal encounter. However, it looks increasingly like a publicity stunt by Haribo, which is based in Pontefract, the address provided by the writer of the letter to the Daily Mail and which sparked a Sun story picked up by several websites, including us we admit."