Epic Tabloid Fail

Oh dear- just as it was all going so swimmingly well for the UK Daily Mail & MailOnline newspapers as our stories below  indicate.                                         
Now the world's trashiest most widely read tabloid has had to apologise for 'lifting' an supposed interview with James Bond star Sir Roger Moore. The interview and excerts from it swept the world but alas- it was a phony and after Sir Roger complained, editors back pedaled like crazy
You can read the tale here in The New Statesmen.
But there are Aussie culprits in this saga : the media agency Australian Associated Press ( owned by Fairfax Media & News Ltd)  picked up the fake story and syndicated it around the world as an original article.
One thing you can be sure of : tales picked up by the Mail from the social shuttle ( as they regularly are) are accurate and genuine.

Doom & Gloom at Fairfax Media

The independent political website crikey brings disturbing news that Fairfax Media are planning to force redundancy on  up to 300 staff.
Fairfax publish two of the oldest and once most respected broadsheets in the world : The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne.

Just a ten days after Fairfax Managing Editor Greg Hywood gave an interview on the ABC's Media Watch defending the future of printed newspapers, he has told staff at Fairfax that if workers including 90 sub-editors do not accept redundancy, it will be "forced upon them".

Fairfax also own the Southern Cross Broadcasting chain of radio stations and made a profit in 2010 of over $282M

Originally owned by the Fairfax family from 1841, the publishing group has had a variety of owners since Warwick Fairfax's failed 1990 bid to completely privatise the company.

Journalists at Fairfax are not happy campers.

One beef is that editing is to be out-sourced to Pagemasters, a firm owned by AAP. Similar has happened throughout Britain where dozens of small independent news gathering agencies that supplied Fleet Street tabloids with local news have gone to the wall and standard s have declined alarmingly.

king of the world

Britain is still comes to grips with the fact the the giant News Corporation which claimed for years that the illegal hacking of mobile phones was an 'isolated incident' . Demands from politicians for a parliamentary enquiry may have temporarily delayed Rupert Murdoch's plans to snaffle up B Sky B giving him extraordinary control over UK broadcasting but he is expected to still get the go ahead.

And News Corp owns 45% of AAP. The world is shrinking.

Read the whole sorry saga here at crikey.com.au.