[murdoch] Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama … Profiling Rupert Murdoch’s later years. ‘COVID was only the most recent medical emergency that sent Murdoch to the hospital. In recent years, Murdoch has suffered a broken back, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, and a torn Achilles tendon, a source close to the mogul told me. Many of these episodes went unreported in the press, which was just how Murdoch liked it. Murdoch assiduously avoids any discussion of a future in which he isn’t in command of his media empire. “I’m now convinced of my own immortality,” he famously declared after beating prostate cancer in 1999 at the age of 69. He reminds people that his mother, Dame Elisabeth, lived until 103 (“I’m sure he’ll never retire,” she told me when I interviewed her in 2010, a day after her 101st birthday). But unlike the politicians Murdoch has bullied into submission with his tabloids, human biology is immovable. “There’s been a joke in the family for a long time that 40 may be the new 30, but 80 is 80,” a source close to Murdoch said. On March 11, he turned 92.’

[media] Hmm… remember this? … great blog post highlighting the hypocrisy of the tabloid press over Griffin, the BNP and the BBC.

[weird] Take A Weird Break Blog … a blog collecting weird headlines from Take A Break style magazines. [via qwghlm.co.uk]

[media] Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch … ‘Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase-before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology-I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business”.’

[cards] Marshall McLuhan Designed Playing Cards … known as the Distant Early Warning Card Set … [via MetaFilter]

[press] Daily Express: Migrants Take All New Jobs In Britain … (more…)

[maddy] Maddy: TV torture for the ADD generation — The Register on the media storm around the McCann Case …

‘Consider the pace at which the story unfolds. Nobody is in control of it, which means it occasionally gets quite dull. We can’t fast forward or time-switch. We’re not invited to phone in and vote for which suspect we would like to see arrested. Key scenes and pieces of information are kept from us in a way that would defeat the point of a show like Big Brother. But we find this all the more compelling. The one nod to conventional broadcasting principles is that the ratings have mattered right from the beginning. When there was a risk that they might slump, David Beckham was drafted in to speak on the matter, thus giving the story a new boost. Most grippingly of all, we have no idea what genre of story we are watching, so have no idea how or when it might end.’

[search] Chipwrapper — a search engine for UK newspapers (and BBC and Sky News). [via Pete Ashton]

[london] An A to Z of the Evening Standard …

A is for Attack, B is for Bastards, C is for Chaos, D is for Death, E is for Evil, F is for Funeral, G is for Go, H is for Horror, I is for Iraq, J is for John Prescott, K is for Killer, L is for Legend, M is for Murder, N is for Nightmare, O is for Olympics, P is for Pictures, Q is for Quit, R is for Raid, S is for Sex, T is for Terror, U is for U.S., V is for Victim, W is for War, X is for X-Rated, Y is for Younger, Z… there seems to be no Z in the Evening Standard Alphabet!

[radio] Speechification … ‘A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded.’

[blogs] What Would A Group Blog by Daily Telegraph Readers be Like? — a collection of Links and Quotes from Blah Blah Flowers … ‘So the UK entry for Eurovision was saved the ignominy of nil point by its few European friends left in Ireland & Malta… Cast Terry Wogan and the dead hands at the BBC aside and let another public broadcaster like Channel 4, or even Sky (yes Sky) be given the reigns to enhance the image of the UK in Europe.’

[media] Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Past 40 Years — from the American Society of Magazine Editors …

[web] Hot Gossip — a profile of Popbitch from the Guardian… ‘[Popbitch] did introduce advertising on the site after three years and the annual revenue is now roughly £100,000, just about covering the costs of the server, technical support staff, legal fees and Camilla Wright’s salary.’

[flash] Daily Mail Picnic — flash fun … ‘Everybody who’s on the web is certain to be a crook… And you’ll turn into a paedophile if ever you take a look…’

[papers] Guardian Resizes Ahead of Schedule — the trend for smaller formats in newspapers continues … ‘The “Berliner” format is already used by a number of European newspapers, including Le Monde, and is slightly larger than a tabloid but smaller than a broadsheet. The move to a smaller format is part of a wider newspaper industry trend and follows the change by the Independent and Times to tabloid.’ [via Feeling Listless]

[war] Why we must show the dead — Media Guardian on publishing pictures of war victims … ‘Sometimes you publish a picture to prove that something has happened. The saddest, most powerful picture I ever helped to get into the paper was of a dead woman hanging from a tree in Bosnia. There she was in everyday clothing, as though she had stepped straight out of Marks & Spencer, hanging from a branch. What struck me most was how normal she looked.’

[bins] Benji The Binman — British newspapers hire an obsessive-compulsive to hunt through the rubbish bins of the rich and powerful. ‘As well as filling the family home with papers, his daily routine involves repeated checks of doors, locks, lights and other possessions. The illness is thought to have started in his early teens after an older brother died in a car crash. Around the age of 14 he became known as the “bag boy”, carrying around half a dozen bags stuffed with papers and books.’

[entertainment] BBC News reports on a reporter who faked interviews with celebs such as Courtney Love for a German magazine. “… An unrepentant Kummer maintained he had done nothing wrong, describing his work as “montage reporting” – pooling information from other sources – which has also been christened “borderline journalism”. “