The plates have been cast, the presses are whirring and the July edition of Press Gazette will be with subscribers early next week.
A year’s subscription to Press Gazette now costs £90 (old price £115) and you also get a free 2gb USB stick – call 01858 438872.
Here’s a selection of the highlights from the next issue:
Digital Britain
Communications minister Stephen Carter was pretty cross with the dismissive way many journalists covered his long-awaited report.
“I think 90 per cent of the people that are writing these articles have not read the report,” he said.
(Press Gazette notes that if he had really wanted journalists to publish considered responses on 16 June he would have given them more than a 90-minute headstart on the embargo in which to read all 238 pages and then file their online stories).
But any ho, Press Gazette has read Digital Britain – and we think its proposals to siphon off up to £130m a year from the BBC licence fee into the independent sector could be the salvation of regional news.
We find out how it could pay for more than 350 new ultra-local TV stations and speak to potential players in future regional news consortia: MEN editor Paul Horrocks, video news guru Michael Rosenblum, PA editor-in-chief Tony Watson and chief executive of Ten Alps Alex Connock.
Describing the current regional TV news structure, Connock tells us: ‘It’s as relevant a structure for delivering information to the average 20-year-old today as York Minster is a suitable venue for staging premiership football.”
Regional press mergers
Meanwhile our media money watcher Peter Kirwan has studied the Office of Fair Trading report on regional newspaper mergers, released in tandem with Digital Britain, and believes it may have given the giants of the industry carte blanche to trample over smaller competitors.
MPs’ expenses
The inside story of the Telegraph’s historic scoop.
Scoop search
We publish part one of our search for the top fifty British journalism scoops of the modern era – taking us from The Times and Tutenkhamen in 1922 to World in Action and Jonathan of Arabia in 1995.
Future of news
Ciar Byrne has bagged an exclusive preview of Value Added News, the new technology project backed by internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee which could transform online news.
The rise and rise of Rebekah
Author of ‘Stick it up your punter’Chris Horrie reflects on Rebekah Wade’s six-year editorship of The Sun as she is promoted to become chief executive of News International.
Print is king
Editor of the Aberdeen-based Press and Journal, Derek Tucker, explains how the Regional Press Awards newspaper of the year has protected its print circulation and avoided job cuts with a strategy that has seen it invest almost no editorial resources in online.
Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt
An exclusive interview with the man who is odds-on to take over the Culture, Media and Sport brief if the Conservatives take power next summer.
Jeremy Hunt tells Press Gazette: ‘If we do nothing the local newspaper industry is just going to die on its feet.”
Also in the July issue: Grey Cardigan, Axegrinder, Simon Singh, Ben Brown, Camilla Wright, David Banks, Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh, David Hooper on media law, Ian Reeves on new ways of funding journalism…and much more.
To subscribe, that number again is 01858 438872.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
