Round up of the Media Press 11th June

Donald Trelford writing in the Indy this morning looks at what turned out to be a disaster for the Mail on Sunday over the John Snow affair

It is an editor's worst nightmare: an apparently copper-bottomed front-page scoop, confirmed on the record by one of the two people involved, that turns out to be completely false – a "stumer", as we used to call them in the trade.

A popular topic it seems as Vickram Dodd writes on the same topic in the Guardian

Media watchers have been baffled by what happened. How did the Mail on Sunday get it so wrong? And what are the implications for Snow, who says the episode has been the worst experience of his life; for the MoS, which prides itself on securing accurate and agenda-setting scoops; and for the general issue of tabloid excesses and trust in journalism? All sides in the story have differing recollections about how it surfaced. The one thing everyone agrees upon is that the woman, Precious Williams, did not approach the MoS - it came to her first.

In Access all ariels the same paper looks at the behind the scenes wrangles as the digital switchover looms ever closer.

After a week of more BB controversy,the Indy has an interview with Channel 4 executive Hamish Mykura who tells us

"You undoubtedly want the programmes to get noticed and to generate a stir, but what I don't want, and I don't think the channel wants, is controversy for its own sake.You never can tell how they are going to play out."

Raymond Shoddy comments that reaching younger viewers requires radical thinking from the BBC.in spite of cutbacks in the offing he argues that in

"many areas such as interactive and more personalised news, investment will actually increase. The ambitious aim is to retain the audience reach of BBC News at 80 per cent each week even though the number of viewers to the main bulletins such as the Ten O'Clock News will inevitably decline.
For that to happen BBC News has to pursue the young audience, in particular, via whatever devices they choose to use. Regional news in all its forms has a much older than average audience. "

Peter Wilby in the Guardian asks Should Sundays be put out to grass? Following the release of the ABC's on Friday he asks

'Why do I spend half of Sunday reading the papers?" asked Jimmy Porter in 1956 in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Nobody does now. In the half-century since Porter's rant against them it's been downhill all the way for the Sundays.
Since I started on Fleet Street in the late 1960s - on a Sunday paper, as it happens - their combined circulations have fallen by 50%, nearly twice the rate of the dailies' decline. As the traditional British Sunday gradually disappeared, and the Saturday papers started multi-section packages of their own, they struggled to find a role.

And concluding that

Over the next decade or so, I predict, the Sunday paper will go the same way as the rest of the British Sunday that Jimmy Porter so despised.

Finally to media Monkey which tells the story of the Mail and

Jaci Stephen's tale of how she got a little bit tipsy and bought a £7,263 Chloe dress. But exactly how much had the columnist drunk? "The fourth glass was a mistake. Finishing the fourth glass and going home via Chloe was an even bigger mistake." But Stephen's original copy told a rather different story: "The fourth bottle was a mistake. Finishing the fourth bottle and going home via Chloe ..." Clearly a subbing error, or perhaps the paper's executives thought the concept of a four-bottle lunch would be too much for some Mail readers to stomach. "I was sharing it with a friend," Stephen tells Monkey. But the paper edited that bit out as well.

Yes Why did they do it

An interesting piece from Martin Moore about the Mail on Sunday's apology to John Snow over the articles that it has printed over the alleged affair and smoking of cannabis.


Martin asks

"So why did they do it? Was it simply malice? Did Williams approach the paper with an invented story? Has she, as has been alleged, done paid work for the newspaper before - which would suggest a prior editorial relationship? If anyone knows please tell me because I'm baffled"