Friday, 19 October 2012

Quotes of the Week: From scumbag celebrities to will the Guardian axe print editions of its papers?


(top) on Twitter: "Told UK's Cameron receiving scumbag celebrities pushing for even more privacy laws. Trust the toffs! Transparency under attack. Bad."

Women In Journalism analysis of UK national press , as reported by the Guardian: "Male journalists wrote 78% of all front-page articles and men accounted for 84% of those mentioned or quoted in lead pieces, according to analysis of nine national newspapers, Monday to Saturday, over the course of four weeks."

Newspaper Society director David Newell in a briefing paper:  "Greenslade’s little bit of statute would herald into UK law a special state regime for popular newspapers unprecedented in the free world. This shows that there is no such thing as a little bit of statute. And even more to the point it is inconceivable that a regime would be established which would be so selective in its scope. The 99.9 per cent of innocent newspapers and magazines would be dragged into funding and being shackled by the scheme from day one. The current battle is to preserve the freedom to publish from which freedom of expression flows."

Ken Clarke in a letter to Lord Justice Leveson, as reported by the Guardian:  "I am not convinced, though, that a statutory underpinning of some kind would amount to state control of the press."

Nick Cohen in Press Gazette: "The people who are cheering on the round-up of the despised tabloid hacks are the same people who want to scrutinise the state. They are about to learn that censorious power does not only target people the respectable despise. Once unleashed, it oozes across boundaries and suffocates stories that right-thinking people rightly believe the media must publish.
You cannot have it both ways. If you want to hold power to account, you ought to worry about the mass arrest of tabloid journalists and wonder who will be next."

Kevin Marsh on his blog: "Not even when Savile had died and the risk of libel had passed away with him was there any flicker of interest from the press. Were their safes not full of witness testimony waiting for their briefs' green lights? Apparently not. Instead, just as Newsnight was ramping up its investigation, the same tabloids that have been spitting outrage at the BBC in the last week were lionising Savile, much as they had during his lifetime, re-running the kind of uncritical profiles that had done as much as anything at the BBC to elevate him to the ‘national treasure’ status he used so effectively to enable and shield his abuse of young women."

Marc Reeves on the Re-thinking Regional Media blog: "In Trinity Mirror as in its peers such as Johnston Press and Northcliffe, you now see single MDs traversing the country running multiple regional businesses, trying to fill the shoes of dozens of now-redundant local bosses."

'Kendo Nagasaki' posting on HoldtheFrontPage about cover prices at Johnston Press: "People are more likely to compare the price of their local paper with the nationals. Sun = 40p, Boston Standard = 50p. To them, that’s a bit like being charged more to watch Boston United than Manchester United."

Tina Brown, editor-in-chief and founder of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, and ceo Baba Shetty in a statement on the move to scrap the print edition of Newsweek magazine: "Exiting print is an extremely difficult moment for all of us who love the romance of print and the unique weekly camaraderie of those hectic hours before the close on Friday night. But as we head for the 80th anniversary of Newsweek next year we must sustain the journalism that gives the magazine its purpose—and embrace the all-digital future."

The Daily Telegraph: "The publisher of the Guardian and Observer newspapers is close to axing the print editions of the newspapers, despite the hopes of its editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger to keep them running for a few more years."

Roy Greenslade responds to Telegraph story on his MediaGuardian blog"In Fleet Street parlance, this could be deemed a flyer - a story you run up the flagpole hoping someone will salute. But no-one will be lifting an arm. It's just wrong. Plain wrong."

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