MediaGuardian briefing

Media briefing Monday 16 Feb 2015 g Top stories on MediaGuardian More » BBC spends £7m on consultants in year ending March 2014 Finance, future media and technology departments grab lion’s share of corporation’s external advisor bill  Zai Bennett: ‘Fortitude is a brilliant statement of ambition’ Sky Atlantic’s boss on axing BBC3, the return of The Tunnel, and making more women watch Game of Thrones  Zane Lowe to leave BBC Radio 1 for Apple Presenter of weekday evening new music show to move to the US, with Annie Mac set to take over the slot  David Carr obituary: must-read newsman with a burning belief in the importance of truth New York Times columnist, who collapsed suddenly in the newsroom, was a fierce defender of good journalism, old or new  Shortlist for 2014 Paul Foot award announced Award celebrates investigative and campaigning journalism which former Private Eye and Guardian writer championed  HSBC files: Rona Fairhead declines to answer queries about activities at Swiss bank Chair of BBC Trust has been a director of HSBC since 2004 and headed its audit and risk committee from May 2007, covering some of the period detailed in files  Daily Mirror prints apology to phone-hacking victims Paper’s parent company Trinity Mirror does not rule out further allegations and triples compensation fund to £12m  Four candidates for Guardian editor to take part in staff hustings and ballot Guardian News & Media’s NUJ chapel announces details of hustings and ballot of staff members as part of recruitment process to replace editor Alan Rusbridger  Virgin Media focusing on infrastructure over content with £3bn investment Chief executive Tom Mockridge says first infrastructure expansion in 15 years is overdue as company reveals it has passed the 5 million cable customer mark  Huffington Post UK appoints Paul Waugh to lead political coverage Politics Home editor will take up new role after May’s general election as part HuffPost’s expansion of its political staff  Today's newspaper headlines More » Today's media stories from the papers Our roundup of the day's media stories, including BBC spends £7m on consultants in year ending March 2014  Media Monkey's pick of the day More » Media Monkey: Benefits Street, David Tennant and Jack Whitehall • Channel 4’s Immigration Street may have been derailed by protesters (it’s down to a single film) but the second run of Benefits Street is still very much on track – six episodes will be aired about an estate in Stockton-on-Tees after the general election. It seems the new series will also cover the media kerfuffle the show has created: Love Productions’ Benefits Street crew has filmed the crews sent by other broadcasters including the BBC, who in turn were sent to film them filming the residents. Has TV eaten itself, Monkey wonders? • He symbolises Labour-supporting years that the paper now views with shame, but the Times treated one of its old boys, Ed Miliband’s chief spinner Tom Baldwin, remarkably protectively when last week’s row blew up over what he said about his boss’s attack on David Cameron for hiring Stephen Green. Nick Robinson blogged that someone in the Labour leader’s camp had said Miliband’s offensive over HSBC was potentially comparable in impact to the moment in his campaign against press misdemeanours when it emerged that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked. The Mail and Telegraph showed no hesitation in identifying Baldwin as responsible for the “Milly Dowler moment” comparison; but the Times, for which he previously sniffed out stories avidly as deputy political editor, pulled off the bizarre feat of running a lengthy Friday page lead all about him (Storm over Labour aide who compared tax scandal to Milly Dowler’s murder) without naming him once. • There’s still work to do on internal communication at BBC2, judging by one awkward 10.30pm segue last week when Jack Whitehall’s Backchat concluded its run. After Michael Whitehall gave his son a list of “upmarket” guests to book when the show returns, Jack sneered at the first name, Antony Beevor, as a boring historian whom “no one has heard of”. This was immediately followed by Newsnight, where the star pundit leading a discussion on appeasement was none other than … Antony Beevor. Hopefully something much more serious than Backchat was on the TV in the Newsnight green room before Evan Davis and his guests went on air. • It’s the ingenuity of the nugs (plugs posing as news) on Radio 4’s Today programme that’s now almost as impressive as the sheer number of them. With maximum promotion clearly having been demanded for David Tennant’s debut on Just A Minute - a mixture of trails and announcer puffs in the preceding days had left few listeners unaware ahead of the series’ return last Monday that he would be hailed as a hero for achieving a perfect round – Today’s audience on Tuesday morning had already heard Tennant’s performance the previous evening repeated once when another pretext was found for airing part of his monologue. Pointing out that the actor had repeated a word, a listener provided his own re-edit of the show, cut up so instead of being allowed to continue Tennant was halted for “repetition” before reaching the end of his minute. What other Today listeners heard, then, was a counter factual alternative version of another BBC programme, designed to plug the availability of the real, broadcast version on (all together now) the Radio 4 website – conceivably news, Jim and John, but not as we know it. • Ever since award-winning reporter Lucy Manning was controversially “Munro-bagged” last year by Jonathan Munro – who had worked with her at ITV before joining the BBC as head of newsgathering and then recruiting her – Monkey has been waiting for her to doorstep a top BBC executive just as implacably as she once doorstepped her then ITV boss Peter “Pinch ‘em” Fincham (over an almighty gaffe on This Morning by Philip Schofield). And last week an ideal opportunity presented itself, when it was pointed out that Rona Fairhead, the newish chairwoman of the BBC Trust, has been a director of HSBC for more than a decade; yet no footage appeared of Manning even trying to track Fairhead down, let alone accosting her to demand answers. Still, as she now works for the almost permanently scandal-hit BBC, there’ll be plenty more opportunities for her to prove she hasn’t lost her edge or her nerve.

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