Media

So it has come to this. The Washington Post, paper of Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein and all the rest, has been sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For $250m. That, apparently, is roughly the daily fluctuation in the value of Bezos’s Amazon shares. For a man worth more than $20bn, buying the Post is a bit like the rest of us buying a new bicycle. That’s how far – and how fast – the once mighty Post has fallen. Even so, it’s startling that the Grahams, who have owned the paper for 80 years, have decided to sell. As I write at Think Scotland today, the Graham family has ‘sunk their own flagship the better to save

The astonishing level of enthusiasm over the birth of the new prince goes far beyond the pleasure that people naturally feel for an attractive young couple who have had a healthy child. If there is any truth at all to these estimates in the North American media that trinkets and other bric-a-brac, and even increased numbers of tourists, will produce hundreds of millions of pounds for the British economy, the answer lies not just in normal goodwill and the effusions of the most strenuous monarchists. If my memory is accurate,  the last time there was so much public interest in a royal event, albeit of the exactly opposite nature, was

Some years ago, soon after he ploughed £30 million into the Independent titles, Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev proclaimed: ‘I’m taught to be more Marcus Aurelius than Caracalla if you know your Roman history.’ He said even nicer things about his new employees: ‘If we’re lucky to find somebody like Mark Twain, who used to be a reporter, or Ernest Hemingway or Anton Chekhov, then we have something completely new.’ Well, times have changed. There is uproar at Indy Towers, where staff members are reacting to the giant axe that has been taken to the arts and culture pages of the Independent on Sunday. Let’s hope any undiscovered literary giants, lurking

Congratulations to Kate and William, and Baby Cambridge, who has an extensive Wikipedia entry already but no name. The poor couple faced the cameras yesterday with good grace, which is the last thing you’d want in their situation; after my wife’s last labour was over I looked like one of the crew from Das Boot and I’d barely done anything. Not everyone is so keen to join in, which is why The Guardian has been offering readers the chance to switch off all coverage of royalty with a ‘republican’ button. It’s an interesting foretaste of newspapers tailoring news and comment towards an individual’s own interests. Facebook and Google already use filter

Prince Charles told it like it is when he was hijacked by the royal baby press pack this morning: ‘Absolutely nothing at the moment, we’re waiting’. Others, though, are not so patient. The BBC is excelling itself: this is a royal occasion so it must provide hours of vapid commentary, conveyed in hushed tones. It’s a thankless task, as newsanchor Simon McCoy made clear on air: ‘Plenty more to come from here, none of it news of course, but that won’t stop us… Let’s speculate, because that’s all we can do.’ Over on Sky News, Kay Burley is the real queen of days like this: ‘I asked how many centimetres…but

An email exchange with a Conservative-leaning friend this week left me feeling sheepish. But if shameful my behaviour be, I’m not alone in the shame. I thought it worth sharing the conversation. We were corresponding about Ed Miliband’s stand-off with the Unite trade union. In a message to my friend, I remarked: ‘It’s reaching the point where (paradoxically) EM’s tendency to take the line of least resistance may actually push him into confronting Unite.’ And that’s true: worms turn and it’s not always good politics to corner people. But it is the next part of the message that I’m hard-put to defend. If Miliband wimps out, I said, then ‘I

The Washington Post has had a crack at Mr Steerpike’s favourite game: trashing the Guardian. Full marks to them for a knock out job. The Post describes Britain’s most sanctimonious rag as ‘a newspaper that’s small and underweight even by British standards’. ZAP! Then the Groaner really gets it where it hurts: ‘… the Guardian has its own sacred cows. Unlike its American media cousins, which have traditionally sought neutrality in their news reporting, the Guardian hews to the British model of identifying with a political party. The paper has been liberal since its founding by Manchester mill owners and cotton merchants; in the last British elections it supported the minority Liberal Democrats. BOOM! And it gets

Not for the first time, grumpy actor and Obama fan-boy Alec Baldwin has lashed out at the press and left Twitter in a huff. Baldwin has let rip at the ‘toxic’ showbiz coverage of the Daily Mail, after they accused his pregnant wife, Hilaria, of tweeting during James Gandolfini’s funeral. Baldwin likes to have a go. In a recent edition of Spectator Life, he even called for a Leveson-style inquiry in the US: ‘There is no market that is bigger for media outlets in terms of the tabloids and generating trash than the US.’ Strong stuff. But no doubt he will be back once he’s calmed down. He usually does.