Cleo Clanger

Feel for the staff of Cleo Magazine who probably read today via the Daily Telegraph that they would lose their jobs as the magazine closes. Cleo came as part of the package when the James Packer sold out his publishing interests to the giant German Bauer Media Group in 2012.

First published 44 years ago with the venerable Packer favorite Ita Buttrose as editor (a shout-out to Ita who Whispers found themselves with in a Surry Hills post office queue just a few days ago), Cleo was aimed at an older female audience. Recently their Bachelor Of The Year awards have received plenty of publicity (aided by some self-important publicists who seemed oblivious to the rapidly changing world of media). Circulation has hovered around 53000 a year with a claimed readership of 173000 and a claimed 300,000 online readers.
But just look at Whispers'(thesocialshuttle.com) online readership (left : Google's figures) . Daily views are around 2300 with monthly views around 72000 which is not dissimilar to a monthly magazine or a local newspaper (and a shout out to our daily 300 approx readers who are in Russia). Of course it's very hard to compare and many factors influence readership but compared to a blog run by 1.5 (part timer) and a dyslexic cat who claims to be the sub-editor, something must give in these print publications and the large staff needed to run them.

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Meanwhile as the Happy Couple, Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall announce their engagement, Don Rupioni's beloved Sun Newspaper is under investigation for claims it was also involved in phone hacking. We couldn't help but notice a recent cover. As one irreverent wag from that august publication put it : "how dare they, that's our job"

Arrivals #2

Having fled back to his native Geelong leaving behind a broke Big Picture Agency in the UK, the unfashionable haired Darryn Lyons who labels himself Mr Paparazzi has announced his candidacy for Mayor of the illustrious Victorian city.

Lyon's Agency went bankrupt in the UK last year with photographers claiming they were owed unpaid royalties.  In 2008 Lyons was ordered to pay actress Sienna Miller $40,000 in damages for harassment and he lost an appeal against Harry Potter author J.K.Rowling who won a court case against his agency,
Virgin Atlantic also launched an inquiry after it discovered employees were feeding Big Pictures confidential celebrity travel details. Last year Lyons left his garish London flat with it's Warhol prints ( although how Andy managed to paint Lyons when he died in 1987 is a mystery) by co-incidence just as the Leveson Inquiry was getting underway.
Now settled in Geelong Lyons has joined the Liberal Party (have they no shame ?) and a few days ago announced that he would " call upon ideas from overseas, particularly London, and use my high-profile contacts to benefit Geelong. "My ideas from worldly knowledge and travel knowledge about looking at other cities and how it works and looking at the concept for success is my key platform for the future,". Yes dear. Whatever.
Alas the voters of Geelong may have other ideas if comments in the local newspaper are an indication: these are some of the nicer ones.."No way", "Good grief, please get us a leader with business smarts and a personality. Blue hair belongs at Bingo sessions". "Ratepayer funded cosmetic six packs for all council members as the first priority."

Geelong

 " craves attention, delusions of grandeur and no style what so ever"..."Geelong must be the laughing stock of Australia over this farce"....."People were stupid enough to vote for Tony Abbott so anything is possible."...."It's not often you see mutton dressed up as mutton."

Big Picture Fail

 The woes mount for pink haired self promoter Darryn Lyons, boss of  Big Pictures " the world's biggest and best celebrity picture agency", now residing in Australia (although it's probably safe for him to return to the UK now the Leveson Inquiry has concluded).

Questionable deals seem to have been arranged between Lyons and celebrities like Lara Bingle with reports of set-up "paparazzi" style photo shoots being offered to publications for big bucks.
The Australian media  have been strangely silent with the Shuttle  the only outlet reporting that Big Pictures has gone into administration. Surely it would have nothing to do with the fact they were eager buyers of celebrity snaps from the agency, some obtained by bribing Virgin Airline employees to reveal confidential travel arrangement of famous faces ?.
21 Big Picture staff have been made redundant without pay and freelance photographers are queuing up to demand monies owed. There are claims Lyons has re-located his office to a nearby building along with photographs and files and the snappers say they have asked the Old Bill to investigate.
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Peter Tory (Daily Express)

On the subject of 'high' society, the Shuttle is saddened to hear of the passing of a Fleet Street great that we once worked with.
 Peter Tory was a columnist and editor of the legendary William Hickey Column in the Daily Express and a regular figure on the London social circuit . Described as a 'debonair raconteur', renowned for his humour and quick wit and excellent manners plus an ability to produce a saucy tale for a newspaper devoid of nastiness.

Peter has passed away at the age of 74 after retiring before the 'new celebrity' that now features the likes of Essex girls made good, Jordon and Peter Andre's exploits and other such mind  numbing inanities.                                                
Sydneysiders would have seen him 3 weeks ago on SBS TV in the film Tabloid in which he played himself in the delicious true tale about Joyce McKinney. See it if you missed it.

Brangelina, Wills & Kate: No Idea

The fierce rivalry between Australia's top selling tabloid magazines- New Idea and Woman's Day has stepped up a notch with WD blindsiding NI with their scoop on the royal honeymoon snaps that have been on offer around the world for over a year and have now caused so much confected anguish in the UK media. British newspapers in the midst of the Leveson Inquiry had all turned down the pics.

Poor old New Idea (some wags in the industry unkindly refer to it as No Idea) really had no hint of what their rival was about to publish.
Both keep in touch of each other's up-coming stories by monitoring agency photo sales and thereby have a pretty good idea of what each other will publish in the next issue : come Monday morning the similarities between each is almost mirror -like.


 Now the tattle amongst the industry is that the knives are out at Pacific Publications, publishers of New Idea and a full on industry war is about to be declared. Pacific had turned down purchase of the beach wandering royal snaps on the understanding that rivals had done likewise.

Particularly as New Idea was forced to run a fairly tragic tale titled "SECRET WEDDING PHOTOS..you were never meant to see".. a concocted tale with"intimate"snaps of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt that "proved " the couple had been up to hanky panky before their affair became public knowledge.

Alas, the pics have all been published before and are just a set of publicity stills from their 2005 film Mr & Mrs Smith and have lain on photo desks around the world for the last 6 years. Better luck next time folks.

Something in Common : Dracula & Rupert Murdoch

Russell Crowe may be in the frame to play Count Dracula in the 37th film about the legendary Transylvania but he is also tipped to play Rupert Murdoch in a planned film based on the memoirs of journalist Sir Harold Evans.

Harold Evans

Evans was the editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981 when Rupert Murdoch purchased Times Newspapers after a secret meeting with then PM Margaret Thacher, a fact just revealed in the Leveson Inquiry. He was appointed editor of The Times by Murdoch after extracting an agreement that Rupert would have no editorial input. That feel apart within a year and  Evans resigned, writing his auto-biography Good Times Bad Times in 1984.
He now lives in New York with his wife Tina Brown the former Vanity Fair editor and their 2 children.

Playing Evans will be the thinking woman's heart throb Colin Firth. This will be the second time an Aussie actor has played the Citizen Kane of the Antipodes. In the excellent TV  series Selling Hitler based on the phony Hitler Diaries and broadcast in 1991, Dame Edna Everage's manager Barry Humphries was cast as Murdoch. Rupert agreed to the purchase of the diaries after they were endorsed by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who later expressed reservations before publication. Despite being informed that the diaries were fakes, Murdoch famously said "publish them anyway, after all we're in show business".

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Memorable Freudian Slips at Leveson # 1

Under questioning from Robert Jay QC at the Leveson Inquiry : famed Australian/American media mogul Rupert Murdoch who promised editorial independence to Margaret Thatcher's government during his 1981 successful bid to takeover  the Times Newspapers and thus avoided the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, responds to Jay's inference that he may influence politicians:

 

“If any politician wanted to know what I think, they only had to read the editorials”

The Only Gay Is In The Village

exclusive : We can reveal that Little Britain star Matt Lucas has quietly slipped into town and will be a guest at this Saturday's Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras.

And plans are afoot to get Matt to join George Michael, (living in a  Potts Point apartment and not the Northern Beach's house he didn't buy last year as reported by a major daily newspaper) on the beloved Kylie Minogue's  own Mardi Gras float on which she will travel from Whitlam Square to Fox Studios via Oxford Street during the parade.

Rev Fred

The Shuttle has also had a confirmation from the Reverend Fred Nile that he will pray for rain this Saturday and reading the weather report, Fred's prayers sound like they will be answered.
 Sadly for Fred whenever they are it simply means more clothes are taken off as the Mardi Gras participants love nothing more than cavorting and dancing in the rain.
Still, it's the thought that counts.

Clover

There are also major rumblings over the Mardi Gras committee's insistence that the media pay a $200 fee per person for covering the event. This fee which it's claimed 'covers expenses' has long outraged much of the media particularly as the parade takes place on a public street with large injections of money from the NSW state government.

The Shuttle's round of inquiries have produced little response apart from Lord Mayor Clover Moore's office where a representative expressed "shock" at the fee. Wake up folks, it's been there for 15 years now. As for the Media Alliance, they ignored our request for a comment but that's the usual way for them.
This is the same union which purportedly looks after the affairs of professionally employed and freelance journalists and photographers who are union members. Yet they famously went into battle for the non-union paparazzi when police claimed they had found bugging devices outside Nicole Kidman's Darling Point house in 2005. Note to Media Alliance-you can find the Leveson Inquiry here.

Below is Kylie's Mardi Gras message:


Feature: Kylie Sydney Mardi Gras 2012 Announcement from mardigras on Vimeo.

Sharon Sargeant Vs The Middletons

Britney Spears attacks paparazzi

Lord Justice Leveson

At the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking in the UK, the picture editor of The Daily Mail-the newspaper that receives more web hits than any other publication on the planet-Paul Silva gave evidence that Pippa Middleton the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, typically has eight or nine photographers camped outside her door and estimated that they produce between "300 to 400 pictures" of her daily. Silva says these photographs arrive on his desk and most are literally, snaps of Pippa either entering or exiting her front door and are of no value.

It's an example of the nature of today's so-called 'papparazi that has seen thousands of young kids armed with an inexpensive digital camera swell the ranks of the 'media' section of show-biz events.

For old-timers (like the Shuttle) they're a pain in the neck. Most of them are arrogant and seem to have no connection to the celebrities they snap. They show little interest in the subject matter. It's like big game hunting with a lens and as long as a 'kill' is made that's all that matters.

Frank Monte

Pippa Middleton

The Shuttle dates back to the days when they were just three photographers at any event in London. Richard Young was one and he was a welcome addition to any show biz shin dig or high society party. Likewise New York's Patrick McMullan. Both are still going strong and the difference is they are welcome at any event because not only do they have a personality, they know how to play the game.

In Los Angeles the paparazzi are even worse. Agencies are hiring illegal immigrants at around 6 a time to stake out a movie star's home. They have strict instructions. Two will have cameras, two will be 'spotters' and they other two 'agitators'. Their role is to annoy, cajole, flirt or otherwise to get a reaction from the star. A smile is as good as a scowl from their prey.

And so it leads us to Sydney party girl Sharon Sargeant who as we reported last week, was  photographed at an exclusive Fijian resort while her partner, private investigator Frank Monte held secret discussions with Fijian government officials. The snaps came from an unlikely source-a well known American show business star who had spotted Ms Sargeant bathing topless at the beach.

What the Shuttle wasn't expecting was the roasting we got when we finally got in touch with the girl known as Shazza who made her displeasure known in a 5 minute tirade down the phone.  Surely she would be happy to know an American star- and we do mean a top movie star who was quite taken with Sargeant's charms-thought enough of her to pass on the pics?. Sadly we cannot reveal his name despite Ms Sargeant's threat to take legal action.

However-just to show there are no hard feelings, we decided to publish two more from the set !