The Silly Season must have started: Media Guardian publishes its Media 100 list of the people who wield the most power in the British media industry. Not only have the old lists been torn up to give the judges a fresh start, but there are 99 people in the list. The hundredth place is given to Facebook in a poke at being trendy by including a fashionable fad.

As a parlour game, underlined by almost half of those on the list being included for the first time, it is fun. But it really tells us more about the judges than it does about media power.

Now why didn’t they include…? No, I am not going to play.

Pressure on Pearson to sell the Financial Times is mounting following the failure of their scheme to bid for Dow Jones in conjunction with General Electric.

With Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones, parent of the Wall Street Journal, looking increasingly likely to succeed, Pearson shareholders fear the prospect of FT facing stiffer competition. Many of them were already feeling that the FT should be sold to allow Pearson to concentrate on its huge educational publishing business.

The prospect of global competition between the two heavyweight business papers is worrying them. Media Analyst Lordna Tilbian told the Observer:

The way I see things, it was double or quits for Pearson. They had a chance to buy a principal competitor, but it hasn’t come off. Now they should sell the FT at a time when the financial advertising market is strong and the paper is doing well.
There is a danger that Murdoch will do to the FT what his newspapers in Britain have done to their competitors. Look at what the Times has done to the Telegraph or the Sun to the Mirror. The competition has been harsh. Does Pearson want that?

Without the enthusiastic support shareholders, it would certainly be harder for the FT to mount a counter-offensive against whatever Murdoch is planning. And there would be a lot of people out there who would like to own the FT and some may relish a fight with News Corp.

I have always liked research which confirms what I have always believed. So I am delighted that a study by the University of Missouri-Columbia finds: “Newspapers are under spending in the newsroom and over spending in circulation and advertising.”

The full report is to be published in the spring (with convincing methodology, I trust) but one of the academics behind the research, Esther Thorson, has said: “If you invest more in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes. If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money.”

Another researcher said: “By looking at the data, investing in news quality does pay off. It improves circulation and advertising revenues, which are the bulk of a newspaper’s revenues. Better news quality drives circulation and circulation drives advertising revenues.”

The research covers US newspapers with circulations of under 85,000 where editorial spending has seemed generous compared with the UK. Lucas Grindley who led me to this research feels the conclusion is too simple in the face of the development of online news.

I have argued running online alongside print requires greater investment in editorial rather than redundancies. The bosses of the UK regional papers should read this report when it is published in April.

A proposal to incorporate the rights and duties of editors and their editorial freedom into Norwegian law to protect them from meddlesome owners is said to be a response to David Montgomery’s acquisition of Orkla Media last year. While denying that it was a direct precedent for the new law, the culture minister, Trond Giske cited a dramatic change in the nature of the country’s media ownership as one of the triggers, according to Kristine Lowe.

Norway has had a voluntary agreement on editors’ rights and duties for more than 50 years, signed by the editors and owners  associations.

Montgomery’s Mecom business’s trail of acquisitions across northern Europe is taking him into very different territory to that he experienced in the UK when he ran the Mirror group and established a reputation for ruthless management. Germany and the Scandinavian countries have a more consensual tradition than the UK.

But the sudden replacement of the Berliner Zeitung’s editor last year suggests he he has lost none of his old style. The journalists were extremely disgruntled about the lack of consultation but there was little they could do about it.

It is difficult to see how a law could make much difference unless owners’ sole rights to appoint editors were taken away. His record suggests that Monty is not easily tamed.

Stephen Glover in the Independent thinks Rupert Murdoch may be losing his touch. He cites a string of problems for the News International empire, and writes: “We have got so used to the idea that Mr Murdoch is invincible that we forget that he is made of flesh and blood like the rest of us, and that the flesh is ageing and the blood thinning.”

The knife with which Paul Dacre, the Mail’s editor-in-chief, attacked the “subsidariat” — loss-making media — is neatly turned against him by Peter Preston in today’s Observer.

In his Cudlipp lecture Dacre attacked the BBC, the Guardian, The Times and the Independent, saying: “Subsidised papers are, by definition, unable to survive in the free market”

Preston writes:

But pause! Is that a shiver of apprehension running down Kensington High Street? He couldn’t really have been talking about the Evening Standard he edits-in-chief, could he? Losses, when last disclosed: £18m - though the resourceful (departing) MD has taken £14m and then £12m swings at its cost base over the past couple of years, which might have produced a smile if circulation, down 18.1 per cent in a year (and only 209,000 of it paid for) hadn’t kept falling along with those costs; a familiar litany of decline.

He is writing in the context of the London free evenings battle between Dacre’s Associated and News International. One set of questions is about Associated’s subsidy of the Standard and the other is for News International. He asks:

What’s the strategy here? Is it to tear into Daily Mail cash reserves (on behalf of the Sun) and do Associated damage? Is it to slug out a victory that kills the Standard and London Lite, leaving thelondonpaper as a monopoly asset with a possibly golden future? Is it to start a paid-for London evening of Murdoch’s own, or broker some kind of merger? Or just to swamp Westminster in waste paper?

With neither free paper producing anything like enough advertising to turn a profit, it looks like an increasingly futile and damaging battle.

Having revisited The Times blogs (see previous post), I felt it was time to take a look at the Telegraph’s, another of my targets last October when I asked what was the purpose of newspaper blogs. There I found editor Will Lewis busy at the Davos Diary.

He was tired of talking about blogging. He had gone to one of the high-powered meetings to talk about how traditional media has to adapt their business models to meet the challenges of the web and broader digital changes.

But he found it all got bogged down by colleagues, Americans in particular, who wanted to talk about the “meaning of blogging” and whether old media journalists should do it.

In his mind there was no debate to be had. “Blogging and enabling readers to interact and comment on our thoughts is part of what we do at the Telegraph,” he writes.

I still have not looked at changes in the paper’s blogs but I did find the editor leading from the front.

Is Les Hinton about to step down from his role as supremo of Rupert Murdoch’s News International business in the UK?

I suspect that Roy Greenslade must have had a better source than the “rumour-mongers” he mentions before suggesting that Hiton will stand down soon. The replacement suggested is John Witherow, currently editor of the Sunday Times.

David Montgomery, and his Mecom investment vehicle which has been collecting newspapers across Europe, seems to be gaining new friends among london’s institutional investors.

Remember that back in July when he acquired Orkla Media in Norway there were rumours that he could not raise enough money in the City. In the even the Orkla group, keen to get rid of their media arm, took £73 million in Mecom shares and made a loan of £93 million.

Now Orkla has sold its 20% share in Mecom to various new and existing shareholders following a series of presentations to institutional investors. And the price of 68p a share gives the Norwegian group a nice £25 million profit.

Kristine Lowe who, as ever, is on top of this story, quotes an employee representative as saying: “I think they realised they would have attracted a lot of criticism for some of the unpopular decisions Mecom makes.”

As a result of the sale, Orkla’s Roar Engeland leaves the Mecom board. In the Mecom announcement Montgomery said: “We are delighted to have widened our shareholder base as a consequence of the placing.”

Only last week employee representatives from Mecom businesses in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany and Poland met in Oslo to set up a formal network. They fear that the 713 job losses announced for 2007/8 will not be the last and that the high demands for profitability will need more extensive cost cutting.

I have neglected David Montgomery and his investment vehicle Mecom’s activites in Europe since the purchase of the Norwegian Orkla group last year, but Kristine Lowe has been following events. Her latest post is here.

She writes:

Fundamentally, this is a story of globalisation and the democratisation of finance: what happens when a venture capitalist or a big corporation from abroad comes to a small country and make big acquisitions with borrowed money? It often creates fear and uncertainty about distance to the decision-making, the extent of restructuring called for with dramatically higher demands to profitability, and fear that the new owner will challenge established practices and force the acquired businesses to abide by foreign ideas and foreign principles.

Employee representatives from Mecom businesses in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany and Poland met in Oslo a week ago to set up a formal network. They fear that the 713 job losses announced for 2007/8 will not be the last and that the high demands for profitability will need more extensive cost cutting.

Olav Skjegstad, an employee representative and board member of Mecom Europe, was one of those at the meeting and he told Lowe:

We expect very turbulent times ahead; new situations may develop as a result of new acquisitions and similar, and we need to be prepared for that. The network is no guerilla group, we want a correct relationship to our new owner, but we also feel the need to keep up to date on what’s happening throughout the media group: what happens in one country might happen in others.

And if all that looks as if it is happening a long way from the UK, remember there has long been speculation that Montgomery, former chief executive of the Mirror, would like to get back into British newspapers.