Quotes of the Week: From online-only can mean death to Guardian headline spoilt my breakfast

Peter Preston in The Observer: "Newsweek used to sell 3.3m copies per edition. Even when it was sold for a dollar, then folded in with Tina Brown's Daily Beast in a digital merger last December, there were more than a million customers out there wanting their old print fix. So the story that Newsweek online was blazing a path into the future rather than lurching towards oblivion seemed to have some validity. But today? What's left is up for sale again: think 50 cents. The owners want to 'concentrate' on the Beast instead. Sometimes going online-only is the sensible thing to do; but more often than not, it can seem like euthanasia with a buoyant press release."

Janice Turner in The Times: "I’m not sure where it started to go wrong with Rhys Ifans. A truly awful interview can catch you like a cloudburst in August. How quickly his answers escalated through disdain to disgust then mad-eyed vibrating hostility until he announced 'I am bored with you' and stalked out, leaving his publicist hand-wringing and ashen."

MP Patrick Mercer asked by an undercover Panorama reporter to lobby on behalf of Fiji: "Guido Fawkes will be all over this like a dose of clap."

The Sun in a leader: "WHAT a bonanza the Leveson inquiry was for lucky lawyers David Sherborne and his doe-eyed lover Carine Patry Hoskins. Not only did they find each other — but they also pocketed £385,000 of taxpayers’ money." 

Acting editor John Witherow in a letter to readers of The Times [£]: "The Times is different from Britain’s other newspapers. Most are dominated by voices from the Left or Right. In contrast, readers of The Times can find a variety of opinions from across the political spectrum. That adds up to a more intellectually stimulating experience."

Daily Mail in a leader: "The politicians may have spent yesterday insisting they are committed to cleaning up the Westminster cesspit. But, disturbingly, their determination to try to silence the newspapers who continue to expose their wrong-doing suggests otherwise." 

Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch, on USA Today: "Murdoch, gruff, cold, unable to talk in any personal sense, has seemed like the most steely and hard-hearted of businessmen — that's the Murdoch myth. In fact, he has always been a besieged king, balancing a precarious empire, fighting each battle as it came, seeing his wins and losses as a wholly personal reflection of his strength and character. The hard man is all emotion."

Attorney General Dominic Grieve on ITV News: "Clearly, if the press [has] got to know who somebody is who has been arrested and are publicising that, then clearly it might be very sensible for the police to confirm that fact."

Felix Dennis in The Observer: "I can't even count the number of business failures I've had. Mags that never worked. Mags that worked at the start then failed. Mags that we poured money into and they tanked. No one else remembers them, but I remember them all. They are engraved on my soul."

Suzanne Moore in the Guardian: "Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for 'experience'."

Roy Greenslade's verdict on his MediaGuardian blog on Trinity Mirror's new Sunday Brands division for all its national and regional Sunday newspapers: "Sunday Brands is, quite simply, a giant mistake."

Tim Crook ‏@libertarianspir on Twitter: " 'Oral sex caused my cancer' What an awful headline for the Guardian. Put me off my muesli." 


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