Alexander Lebedev has moved a step closer to taking control of the Independent newspapers after the Office of Fair Trading said the takeover does not qualify for a competition investigation. To qualify for the OFT to launch an investigation the merged company’s UK turnover must be £70m or hold more than a 25% share of supply in the UK. The proposed Lebedev/INM deal did not reach either threshold. The Lebedev camp is keen to get an editor in place in time to stamp a mark on media coverage related to the general election. More in The Guardian HERE; Independent HERE; Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

Tech

A quarter of a million British jobs in the music, film, TV, software and other creative industries could be lost over the next five years if online piracy continues at its current rate, according to a study backed by European unions and the TUC. Across the EU, as many as 1.2 million jobs are in jeopardy as piracy looks set to strip more than €240bn (£218bn) in revenues from the creative industries by 2015, unless regulators can stem the flow. In 2008, the creative industries contributed €860bn to the EU’s GDP – almost 7% – and they employ 6.5% of the EU workforce, or 14 million people.

The survey, by independent Paris-based economics firm TERA Consultants, shows that Britain will be worst hit of the leading European countries not least because the creative industries account for more than 9% of GDP, a higher proportion than in other countries. More in The Guardian HERE.

Cultural Olympiad/ Edinburgh Festival

‘Festival 2012’ will run from Midsummer Day, 21 June, until the last day of the Paralympic games on 9 September, according to the announcement from the new artistic team. The experienced arts manager (former DCMS advisor and director of the Chichester festival) Ruth Mackenzie is now in charge, answering to a board containing the great and good of the arts world, chaired by Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House. The new artistic team has £75.5m at its disposal, including £15.6m from the national lottery and £3m from the British Council. Announcements on the Festival 2012 programme are expected to come in October. Hall, who was appointed chairman last summer, said:

‘There will be no political interference. If you look at the people on the board we’re not going to be told what to do. Artistic leadership, and this is really important, will be with Ruth.’ Ruth added ‘One might imagine that even the politicians have learned from the millennium dome that you need to have clear artistic leadership.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Mills, the director of the Edinburgh International Festival, has thrown down the gauntlet today to the organisers of the Cultural Olympiad, urging them to share the benefits of the London Olympics with Edinburgh. He stopped short of demanding a slice of the £80 million budget assigned to the UK-wide cultural celebration, but his intervention raises the possibility of a hugely increased budget for the 2012 festival, when the Edinburgh season coincides with the Games:

‘This will be the only time in our lifetimes that the largest sporting event by ticketing and the largest cultural event by ticketing occur in the same place at the same time, 400 kilometres apart… Let’s be bold — let’s ask people that when they are coming to the Olympic Games, to spend one more night in the UK. The Edinburgh festivals are the perfect answer to that challenge, “One more night, not in London”.’ More in The Times HERE, with more on this year’s festival in today’s Guardian HERE.

Publishing

When Lalie Walker set about using the Marché Saint Pierre as the setting for her latest crime thriller she thought she was paying a nostalgic tribute to a much-loved Parisian landmark. But, after reading her tale of a crazed killer who sews fear and loathing among the rolls of taffeta, the owners of the much-loved Montmartre fabric store have signalled that they do not appreciate her gesture; Arguing that certain passages in her fictional depiction of a business rocked by threats, voodoo and staff abductions are defamatory, they are taking her to court and demanding €2m (£1.8m) in damages. More in The Guardian HERE.

Auction

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s charitable foundation is to make a second attempt to sell one of its most valuable possessions; a Picasso blue period portrait which, Christie’s said yesterday, would have the largest pre-sale estimate of any work ever auctioned in Europe. The work, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto and the party-loving sitter’s languid expression may be explained by the painting’s other title; The Absinthe Drinker. It has been estimated at between £30m and £40m and all proceeds will benefit Lloyd Webber’s charitable foundation. Lloyd Webber bought it in 1995 for £18m and his foundation has been encouraged to sell by recent high amounts raised at auction, not least the record £65m paid for a Giacometti sculpture in February. More in The Guardian HERE.

BBC1 dominated the Royal Television Society 2010 programme awards last night with nine prizes, including best drama series for The Street and both the best actor and best actress awards for Small Island. BBC2 and BBC4 won four awards a piece; Channel 4 three (with another for E4); and ITV1 two. Simon Cowell’s two Saturday night ITV talent shows Britain’s Got Talent and the The X-Factor were beaten in the entertainment category by BBC4’s Newswipe With Charlie Brooker, prompting a huge cheer from the crowd. More in The Guardian HERE, with a full list of nominees and winners HERE; Independent HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

As part of ITV’s strategic review, Archie Norman is understood to be rethinking Michael Grade’s decision to withdraw from regional news, potentially throwing a further obstacle into the path of the government’s plan to contract this programming out to independent suppliers (on which more HERE).

ITV’s attitude is understood to be hardening against the plan to test independently financed news consortiums (IFNCs) in Wales, Scotland and the North East and Borders region, which would produce regional bulletins for ITV1. The decision to u-turn is not entirely at ITV’s gift; the DCMS is overseeing a process involving eight bidders for the three pilot schemes, with a decision due to be announced next Thursday. For the Conservatives however, Jeremy has consistently opposed the idea of IFNCs using a public subsidy to provide replacement news services for ITV and has promised to block the proposal’s passage through parliament as part of the digital economy bill (on which more HERE). More on today’s story in The Guardian HERE and Independent HERE.

Music

Michael Jackson’s estate has signed the biggest recording contract in history. The $250m (£164m) deal for up to 10 recordings by 2017 represents a huge bet on the singer’s continued popularity with a new generation of listeners who did not grow up at the peak of his stardom. It gives Sony the rights to sell Jackson’s back catalogue and previously unreleased tracks, and the soundtrack to This Is It, the concert movie Jackson was filming when he died. The arrangement also gives Sony the right to exploit his music in video games, amusement park rides, television adverts, memorabilia, a DVD compilation and elsewhere. More in The Guardian HERE; Independent HERE; Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

Poetry

Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy has written a poem about David Beckham, entitled Achilles. She said:

‘He is almost a mythical figure himself, in popular culture… People like Beckham in their public lives are stories the rest of us follow. The whole point of Greek myths is the combination of triumph and tragedy… the interesting thing about taking ordinary people with a particular talent and making them into heroes is when they are seen at their most human.’ More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE and Telegraph HERE.

Tech

US federal law enforcement agents have been using social networking sites ‑ including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter ‑ to search for evidence and witnesses in criminal cases, and in some instances, track suspects, according to a newly released US justice department memo. FBI agents have created fake personalities on Facebook et al ‑ in apparent contravention of some of the sites’ rules ‑ in order to befriend suspects and lure them into revealing clues or confessing, access private information and map social networks. More in The Guardian HERE.

All John Grisham’s works, including the bestselling legal thrillers The Firm and The Pelican Brief, are to be made available in ebook form, publishers announced yesterday. Sonny Mehta, chair and editor-in-chief at Knopf Doubleday, said in a statement: ‘This is one of our most exciting ebook initiatives to date, and is certain to usher in a new generation of Grisham readers and ebook adopters.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

New figures from the research firm Hitwise suggest social networking is continuing to gain in popularity on the web, and that the way users search the internet is changing. Facebook.com now accounts for 7.07 per cent of all American web traffic, while Google.com is the destination for 7.04 per cent of traffic. As Facebook continues to grow faster than Google.com, the social network’s lead is only likely to increase in coming months. The figures for Google.com, however, do not include national versions of the search engine, such as Google.co.uk, or figures for other Google services such as email, maps and YouTube. Of perhaps greater significance, however, is the fact that they do not include searches that come direct from browser search bars or from other websites. More in The Telegraph HERE.

Creatives’ immigration

Artists, authors and academics from overseas are regularly being refused permission to enter the UK under the government’s points-based visa system, according to a dossier of cases to be presented to Downing Street today. Writers have been prevented from attending their book launches, painters deported for carrying their own works and a Pakistani band banned from attending the World Pipe Band championship in Glasgow, according to the civil rights group, Manifesto Club.

A petition opposing the visa restrictions is to be handed into the prime minister’s office. It has been signed by prominent figures, such as the the director of the National theatre, Nicholas Hytner, the lawyer Lady Kennedy and the poet Blake Morrison, as well as 10,000 others. An accompanying dossier, naming those turned away over the past year, records their anger and disappointment. The petition reads ‘This is an account of talent stopped at our borders, which has left the country all the poorer.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

‘While we would encourage greater participation in theatres, I have a huge problem with this initiative. I believe it was rushed through to give Andy Burnham something to say at the Labour Party conference. The £2.5 million is obviously not enough money for it to be a meaningful initiative and the implementation of it is being designed on the hoof. The arts council has been left holding the baby, forced to devise how the scheme would work and try to raise private money to support the scheme.’

He said that he felt that the concept of free theatre was potentially a good one, but that he feared the government had ruined the scheme’s chances of success by rushing it through and that:

‘What really worries me is that if the initiative doesn’t go well, it will damage any attempt to do something similar in the future, because people will say “we tried that and it didn’t work”.. If they had spent another six months thinking it through they could have put in a long-term effective initiative.’

Ed’s fears now appear vindicated as Margaret Hodge has admitted that the Government had not planned adequately or consulted the theatre industry before launching the A Night Less Ordinary scheme.

Figures published by Arts Council England, which was left to roll out the project in February 2009, show that only 121,742 tickets have been taken up by young theatregoers so far – less than 20 per cent of its revised target of 618,000 tickets. They have now set an even lower new target of 500,000 tickets.

Critics of the scheme have argued that many theatres including the National Theatre, The Globe Theatre and the Young Vic in London already offer young people heavily discounted tickets and that drawing new young audiences to the theatre is not solely related to ticket prices. Speaking at an event last week held by the National Campaign for the Arts, Dame Joan Bakewell, the NCA’s chair, challenged Hodge on the project:

‘Shouldn’t you have consulted the theatres? They would have tipped you off that the scheme was ill-advised. Instead, they had the policy foisted on them.’

To which Hodge replied:

‘I would have liked to see it work better. I think we should have spent a bit more time devising the scheme before we implemented it… I think that is a justified criticism.’

Mhora Samuel, director of the Theatres Trust, said:

‘Providing opportunities for young people to access theatre experiences is not just related to the ticket price, but also about engaging young people’s interests in putting on work that attracts them into theatres… Any initiative like this always works better when done in consultation with the sector and that didn’t happen.’

Louise de Winter, director of the NCA, added:

‘Instead of sitting down with the theatre sector and talking through how to make it work, the scheme was thrust on everyone who had to scrabble around and make it fit… In the arts sector, £2.5 million is a significant amount of funding, which appears to have been wasted here.’

Ed has now called for the scheme to be scrapped:

‘We said from the outset this was a gimmick aimed at grabbing cheap headlines, and a significant amount of money has been spent on a hunch and a whim which has proven to be a spectacular failure… It should be scrapped before any more money is wasted. A Conservative government will work with theatres and the Arts Council in putting together a scheme that actually engages young audiences.’

You can read further coverage of this story in The Telegraph HERE and The Stage HERE.

‘Yesterday I took a call from Stephen Timms. To my surprise – and delight – he said that the government has decided to accept the substance of the amendment put forward by ourselves and the Lib Dems to tackle digital piracy. We are trying to find a policy that allows the blocking of websites set up to promote illegal downloading of copyrighted digital content – but does not impact on the vast majority of legitimate web users. We also want a structure that encourages people who create digital content to innovate with new business models (like Spotify does for the music industry) rather than look to legislation to protect their current business models. It is a delicate balance: if the law is too heavy-handed, it will stifle innovation; but if it does nothing at all to protect copyright people will simply not be prepared to invest in the creation of new digital content – something that would be very damaging for the UK’s creative industries.

I think we have found a solution. The key changes to the amendment that we put down earlier reverse the presumption that the costs of any court order will be carried by ISPs, who will now not have to pay costs unless they act unreasonably. It also strengthens the national security provisions to ensure that no site blocking policy hampers the work of the security services.

A rare example of opposition parties and government working together? Yes but it will still be nip and tuck to get the digital economy bill onto the statute book before the election so the battle is not won yet.’

The little-known 18th century play Double Falsehood was propelled into the literary limelight yesterday when it was claimed as a lost Shakespeare. Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University will publish compelling new evidence next week that the play, a romantic tragi-comedy by Lewis Theobald is – as the author always maintained it was – substantially based on a real Shakespeare play called Cardenio.

Hammond has been backed in his assertion by the Shakespeare publisher Arden and there are unconfirmed rumours that the play will open at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford when the venue reopens after its three-year closure. The claim represents 10 years of literary detective work by Hammond:

‘I don’t think you can ever be absolutely 100% but, yes, I am convinced that it is Shakespeare… It’s fair to say it’s been something of an obsession.’ More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE and HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

Tech

Google should obey Chinese government rules even if it decides to retreat from the country over hacking and censorship complaints, a Chinese government spokesman said today. In what appeared to be a reminder that China would not welcome any abrupt steps, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce said Google should follow rules even if it decides not to stay in the country:

‘On entering the Chinese market in 2007 [Google opened its Chinese search portal in 2006], it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law… We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations.’ The spokesman said those rules included one that a foreign company report to the Commerce Ministry about plans to pull out.

Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said last week he hoped to have an outcome soon from talks with Chinese officials on offering an uncensored search engine in that country of 384 million Internet users. Many experts doubt China’s ruling Communist Party would compromise on censorship. The Financial Times reported at the weekend the talks had reached an impasse and Google was ‘99.9 per cent’ certain to shut Google.cn. More in The Independent HERE

Meanwhile, Twitter is working on a way to allow Chinese users to sign up to the social networking site in their own language, a co-founder of the site said Monday night, in response to a question by Chinese avant garde artist Ai Weiwei. Ai has been an outspoken critic of Chinese authorities and their continuing efforts to impose censorship. Since it was founded in 2006, Twitter has emerged as a tool for digital activism in messages of no more than 140 characters. Ai has used it to demand answers about the number of young children who were killed in the Sichuan earthquake.

Access to Twitter remains blocked in China, and co-founder Jack Dorsey said he has no idea how Twitter would get around the firewall, admitting he didn’t even know the site was blocked in the country until three weeks ago. More in The Independent HERE and HERE.

The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has warned that Digital Economy Bill plans to expand Channel 4 would significantly increase its influence and will call for oversight over the state-owned broadcaster to be strengthened. Proposals will extend Channel 4’s PSB remit to platforms other than its main Channel 4; including E4, More4, Film4 and online services.

John Whittingdale, the committee’s chairman, has said he favours the creation of an external regulator to oversee both the BBC and the public service elements of other channels. The committee will also criticise Channel 4 for showing too little public PSB on its main channel, citing the prevelance of US shows. More in The Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

The row between Bob Geldof and the BBC escalated into a diplomatic dispute on Saturday as the Ethiopian ambassador called for an apology from the World Service after it reported claims that aid money meant for famine victims had been spent on weapons. Peter Horrocks, director of the World Service, has said he fully supports the report, which featured one former Ethiopian rebel saying 95% of the money that flowed into famine-hit Tigray in 1985 was spent by the TPLF militia on guns.

A second man claimed that the TPLF (Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, now the ruling party of prime minister Meles Zenawi) had made a fortune selling sand disguised as grain to the aid agencies. Live Aid founder Geldof and other leading charities have also demanded that the BBC retract the claims and have called for its reporter, Martin Plaut, to be fired. Ambassador Berhanu Kebede has said he expects a full apology from the BBC, which has ‘destroyed its credibility in Africa’:

‘To question the integrity of organisations like Band Aid, the Red Cross, Christian Aid, it is laughable. If the BBC want to investigate something from 25 years ago, they should have talked to a lot more people who were there… In Ethiopia, people on both sides laugh at this idea. They know it would have been a suicide mission to divert the aid money and let people starve; it makes no sense and it is unacceptable. For the BBC’s own credibility, it has to apologise for this disgrace.’ More in The Observer HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

The BBC has commissioned architects to build a lavish, pentagon-shaped glass studio in Cape Town for its World Cup coverage, at an estimated cost of £1m. The Sunday Times reports a BBC source saying they had chosen to position the studio in Cape Town – 1,000 miles away from the logistical centre of the World Cup – because it found the Johannesburg skyline ‘a bit ugly’. More in The Sunday Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

John Simpson, the BBC’S world affairs editor, has expressed his fears that the critics of the BBC are winning:

‘I’m very pessimistic about the future of the BBC… This is something I really disagree about with Mark Thompson… He’s very upbeat about the future of the BBC, not just for public consumption but also in private, but I’m not because I think it’s an anomaly in today’s world and the licence fee is under such an intense amount of pressure… It all seems quite childish to me, but nevertheless those voices are louder than they’ve ever been in my life, and I’ve watched these things for 44 years.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Meanwhile, BBC1 controller, Jay Hunt, talks about the career prospects for women in television HERE.

Tech

Facebook has more than 400 million members and industry predictions have it that revenues for 2010 will exceed a billion dollars. The Observer asks whether it could become ‘too big to fail’, pointing out it’s one of the paradoxes of networking technology that the aggregation of billions of free choices made by millions of free agents can lead inexorably to the emergence of a single, monopolistic behemoth. We saw that with Microsoft’s dominance in the operating systems and office software markets; we saw it again with Google’s dominance of the market for search and query-based advertising. Are we now seeing it with Facebook in the social networking sphere? More HERE.

Meanwhile, Jason Hirsch-horn and Mike Jones, MySpace’s newly elected co-presidents, say ‘Myspace is not dead’; together they have spent months plotting how to reverse the site’s fortunes and make it relevant again over the coming months:

‘We have a huge audience, which is fantastic – there are over 100 million users on MySpace,’ says Mike Jones, a serial entrepreneur and a former vice president at AOL, who became the company’s chief operating officer last spring. ‘But it’s at a precipice where it needs to jump to the next level of evolution.’ Hirsch-horn points to other companies that have come back from the brink – and reports ‘Focus is everything… When I look at Apple, when I look at Nintendo – when I look at the great companies that have turned themselves around and re- defined themselves – it’s because they have focused on a specific market, a specific set of things and partnered for the rest.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Guardian Media Group is preparing to take a £150m loss on the value of its investment in Emap, the publisher and events organiser. The talks with auditors to write off part of the £300m that it spent on Emap is expected to send GMG heavily into the red this year. More in The Sunday Times HERE.

Music

The British music industry enjoyed good news yesterday when it was revealed that the growth in digital music royalties had outpaced falling CD sales for the first time last year. Royalties generated by online music sales grew by 72.7 per cent last year to £30.4 million, as increasing numbers of consumers downloaded music from sites such as Apple’s iTunes. About 16.1 million albums were downloaded in 2009, up 56.1 per cent on the previous year. PRS for Music, which collects royalties for 65,000 British songwriters, said that the £12.8 million growth in digital music revenue had more than compensated for the £8.7 million loss in royalties from falling CD sales. It announced an overall 2.6 per cent rise in annual revenue in 2009 to £623 million. Robert Ashcroft, chief executive of PRS, said:

‘2009 was the first year in which the growth in revenues from the legal digital market compensated for the decline in revenues from traditional CDs and DVDs, though we remain cautious as to whether this represents a true turning point… The next decade does, however, promise further growth in earnings from the legal digital market as well as the use of British music overseas.’ More in The Times HERE.

Pink Floyd have secured a legal victory for the much-maligned genre of the concept album against the apparently inexorable march of the instant pop download. In yesterday’s high court ruling it was ruled that EMI can no longer sell the songs from any Pink Floyd albums as single downloads or mobile phone ringtones; in adherence to a clause in its contract with the group intended to ‘preserve the artistic integrity of the albums’.

The verdict means the band’s music may now have to be taken down from the iTunes online music store which requires that album tracks are for sale individually. It could mean a further loss of revenue for EMI. More in The Guardian HERE; Independent HERE; Times HERE; Telegraph HERE; and FT HERE.

Cinema

Cineworld, Britain’s second-biggest cinema operator has reported results that were comfortably ahead of City expectations: earnings per share rose 11 per cent in 2009 on underlying revenues up 9 per cent to £333 million. The dividend was raised 11 per cent and net debt continued to move in the right direction: down £13.1 million to £104.3 million. Where Cineworld has been able to outperform its peers is through its early investment in 3-D, the format in which 13 films were released in 2009, against only four in 2008. With 3-D films commanding a premium price — an average £5.90 a ticket, compared to £4.54 for normal 2-D screenings — a 7 per cent rise in Cineworld’s admissions brought a 15 per cent rise in box office receipts. The current year has started well, too, with most of Avatar’s sales falling into 2010 and Alice in Wonderland, which opened last weekend, raking in nearly £15 million to date. More in The Times HERE whilst the Telegraph questions whether Cineworld’s 3D success will fade away HERE.

Media

Facebook is today considering legal action against the Daily Mail, after the newspaper published false claims that a criminologist who had posed on the site as a teenage girl had found himself immediately inundated with sexual messages from adult men. Facebook last night issued an unprecedented statement expressing its ‘extreme concern’ at the damage caused to the company’s image. The Mail yesterday published an apology for the article which, attributed to former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas, carried the headline ‘I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What follows will sicken you.’ In issuing its own statement last night, Facebook said it was still weighing up the damage caused by the article and considering whether to sue the paper for damages:

‘We are extremely concerned by the behaviour of the Daily Mail, who have since corrected the story somewhat and made some clarifying statements…We are in discussions with them and have not ruled out legal action.’ More in The Guardian HERE and Independent HERE.

Capital of Culture

Academics have found Liverpool’s year as European capital of culture earned the city bumper visitor numbers and a multimillion-pound boost to its economy. A five-year research programme published today analysed the social, economic and cultural impact of the 2008 title and found that the festival year saw 9.7m visitors to the city, an increase of 34%, and generated £753.8m for the economy. Media coverage of Liverpool’s cultural attractions doubled and for the first time in decades, positive stories outweighed negative ones focusing on social issues. It found 85% of Liverpool residents agreed that it was a better place to live than before. Dr Beatriz Garcia, director of the research programme, Impacts 08, said:

‘We found that general opinion of Liverpool was informed by very dated images of the city, which ranged from positive but fixed associations with the Beatles in the 1960s to more negative views of social deprivation in the 1980s.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Former ITV boss, Charles Allen, is taking control of EMI’s music business, after the surprise departure of chief executive Elio Leoni-Sceti. Leoni-Sceti will be leaving at the end of March after just 18 months with the firm. Allen’s previous experience at ITV, which he created by merging Granada with Carlton Communications, is likely to increase speculation that EMI is being lined up for a merger with Warner Music.

EMI has run into severe problems, with key acts defecting and profits crashing. The company has suffered turbulent relations with some of its top acts, most recently ending up in court with Pink Floyd (on which more HERE) and plunged £1.75bn into the red last year (more HERE). Allen says he has been closely involved in the creation of the company’s new business plan:

‘Elio and I have worked together for the last 14 months and he has decided that he has done what he came to do… what you have now got is a real focus on how do we drive new music, a focus on hits. These things do not happen overnight, you have to nurture new talent but the early signs are pretty positive.’ More in The Guardian HERE and HERE; Independent HERE; Times HERE and HERE; Telegraph HERE; and FT HERE.

Tech

Microsoft has raised the stakes in the battle to win over those who watch television on the internet by introducing the first serious rival to BBC’s iPlayer. The MSN Video Player went online today and will feature a thousand hours of television programming aimed at young people, young families and professionals. Rather than providing a ‘catch-up’ service similar to the iPlayer, on which people can see programmes for only a few days after they are shown, Microsoft says its service will let viewers to watch a full series.

The service is free, but viewers will be shown single 30-second advertisements before, during and after programmes. The player is available only in Britain. Ashley Highfield, now Microsoft’s UK consumer and online MD was previously one of the key figures behind the development of the iPlayer, which regularly processes more than 40 million programme requests a month. But Highfield now says that Microsoft’s product is superior to the internet offerings of other broadcasters:

‘Not all video players are equal… we’re doing more than slapping on any programme for people to watch. Our content is aimed at those who are tech-savvy and young. We want to feature content that goes down well with young couples and families who want to watch together.’ More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

Google is to scan up to a million old books from national libraries in Rome and Florence in what it says is its first such partnership with a government. Flooding in Florence in 1966 destroyed thousands of books in the Tuscan city’s library. Mario Resca, from Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, said that the deal would help to preserve for ever the contents of books, including works by the 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Digitising the books would also help to spread Italian culture throughout the world, said Mr Resca. Google will cover the cost of scanning the books, all of them out-of-copyright Italian works, including 19th-century literature and 18th-century scientific volumes. More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE; Telegraph HERE.

India is to embark on an ambitious scheme to provide all its 630,000 villages, no matter how remote, with broadband internet access. The plan is to use the internet to improve education and health services in areas blighted by poverty and to help to bridge the cultural chasms that still separate India’s regions and castes. It would also enable the country’s outsourcing businesses, clustered in cities such as Bangalore, to serve Western clients from the most isolated hamlets.

The government-run scheme will focus initially on the northeast, an area in the grip of several insurgent battles, as well as the poorest tribal and border regions, which often lack reliable mobile telephone coverage, let alone the internet. A spokesman for Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Communications and IT, confirmed the plans yesterday. A deadline of May 2012 has been set for giving broadband access to every village with a population of more than 300 people. Analysts say that the target is extremely ambitious. According to official figures, there are a mere 7.2 million broadband subscribers in India, a country with a population of 1.2 billion. Across the world about a quarter of the population is using the internet, according to a recent UN report. More in The Times HERE.

Theatre

Eleven-year-olds are to learn Shakespeare using techniques employed by Royal Shakespeare Company actors, and English teachers will be encouraged to let pupils walk around the classroom rather than reading the plays while sitting at their desks; exercises devised by the RSC and the Globe theatre will see children aged 11 to 14 mirror the methods of professional actors at rehearsal. RSC director of education, Jacqui O’Hanlon, says focusing on how actors came to understand the playwright’s language has been a vital inspiration:

‘Actors have the same nervousness around Shakespeare’s language as young people in schools do. We looked at how they get from that to a place of utter conviction, confidence and eloquence in six to eight weeks… Within the English curriculum you tend to look at a play text as a piece of literature rather than performance. But you can’t possibly understand Shakespeare’s words if you’re just reading it in your head. He wrote these plays to be spoken and performed. Shakespeare is difficult; it’s not a 21st-century text. You’ve got to use different mechanisms to access it.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

The Crafts Council yesterday celebrated the near 6,000 people who have so far signed up to its Craft Matters initiative with an event at the House of Lords hosted by Professor the Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey OBE.  The event launched the website www.craftmatters.org.uk, which provides a visual representation of Crafts Matters signatories to date with a ‘heat map’ of the UK showing signatories’ locations and a regularly updated ‘word cloud’ reflecting why people are saying that Craft Matters to them.

According to a Taking Part survey, 11% of the UK population visits a craft exhibition and 17% participating in a craft activity in 2008/09. Craft Matters was launched in October 2009 to encourage people to stand up and be counted as supporters of contemporary craft and to report why it is important to them.

Signatories include well-known names like long-term supporter Sir Terence Conran, choreographer Siobhan Davies CBE, who is currently collaborating with the 60Ι40 group of contemporary makers, and collector Sir John Tusa, alongside people who have been helped through illness by participating in craft activity.  Recurring themes include the human instinct to make things, craft as a connection between people and cultures, and as an antidote to an increasingly fragmented and fast-paced society; confirmation that people find craft to be a valuable contributor to the UK’s social, economic and cultural life.

Joanna Foster, CBE. Chair, Crafts Council

‘Craft is a feisty, independent-minded, sparky, polished gem…  it demands the maker’s time and skill and… repays through the pleasure of the objects themselves and the knowledge of the time and skill that has produced them… it is true ethical production.’

Craft Matters

Vaizey told delegates at a Westminster Media Forum event in London that Tory policy on the BBC, in particular, has been “wilfully misrepresented”.

He singled out a column in the Guardian last week by Jonathan Freedland [HERE], which argued that the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, had decided to axe services in an attempt to prevent the Tories from making more swingeing cuts if they form the next government. Freedland also said Thompson was right to fear the Conservatives would do this because of “two words: Rupert Murdoch”.

Vaizey responded today: “If a Conservative has any kind of critique of the BBC then somehow this a ‘Sky agenda’. I noticed that in Monday’s Media Guardian James Purnell, a former BBC employee, said BBC2 should only broadcast in the evenings. Nobody has written that to understand where James Purnell is coming from you just have to understand two words: Rupert Murdoch.”

He added: “There is a legitimate debate to be had about the [size] of the BBC.” The culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, had conceded as much, Vaizey argued.

Conservative opposition to the BBC Trust’s decision to close educational service BBC Jam demonstrated that the party did not have the corporation in its sights, he said.

“You shouldn’t lose sight of the fact the BBC has massive public support,” Vaizey said. “The idea that somehow there is any agenda to do down the BBC is completely laughable.”

Tory policy on the BBC was straightforward, he added. A Conservative government would replace the BBC Trust with an independent regulator and force it to be “more transparent about its finances”.

He said news organisations need to know how much the corporation spends on its news website in order to make judgments on how best to run their own online businesses.

Vaizey reiterated that Tory media policy is dictated by a “de-regulatory approach” but insisted he “liked Ofcom”.

The Conservative leader, David Cameron, last year set out plans to reduce Ofcom’s size and strip it of its policy-making powers.

“We felt there was a leadership vacuum from DCMS [the department of culture, media and sport] so Ofcom was driving policy. With a new and energetic Conservative government you would get leadership on media policy and Ofcom would return to its regulatory role,” Vaizey said.

He also said the Conservatives have no plans to privatise Channel 4 and defended the party’s proposals to fund rollout of high-speed broadband to rural areas with licence-fee money currently earmarked to meet the cost of digital switchover as “a perfectly sensible and intellectually coherent proposal”.

Vaizey added that the principle of using licence-fee money to fund other projects was now well-established.’

Original article HERE.