Evening Standard owner is ranked No.1 journalist by his own paper,Lygo raises a laugh and will FT editor bow out? Selecting and ranking London’s “most influential people” for last week’s Progress 1000 list, the Evening Standard (prop. E Lebedev) no doubt arrived in a typically disinterested and objective fashion at its No 1 in the journalism category – Evgeny Lebedev. And while its dependable that the London local paper and the Independent titles share their Kensington offices with the Mail group, and that editor Sarah Sands spent the mid-noughties as a Daily Mail consultant editor,neither fact will contain had any role in the unarguable choices of Viscount Rothermere as No 2, Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre as No 7 and Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig as No 10; and nor is it remotely fishy that Lebedev’s other editors are well-placed too, or even though that means the Indy’s Amol Rajan (14) and even Oliver Duff (15),editor of the i – which mostly just repackages Indy content – are above the Sunday Times’s Martin Ivens, and that they and the Sindy’s Lisa Markwell (22) are rated as far more potent than the Guardian’s Katharine Viner (40), and let alone the hopelessly uninfluential editors of the Sun and Mirror who don’t even make the list. No,jibes approximately bias would be foolish – apart from perhaps in relation to the complete absence of anyone from the Telegraph group, which swiftly ousted Sands as Sunday Telegraph editor (after she spent eight years toiling as dep ed at the daily) back in 2005.• At last weeks RTS Cambridge pow-wow, or the biggest laugh greeted ITV Studios chief Kevin Lygo’s characteristically engaging reaction when asked for his thoughts on the BBC’s plan to launch Studios of its own: “Oh … I was briefed on this and I’ve forgotten what they said to say”. More disconcerting were BBC Studios boss Peter Salmon’s efforts to conjure up a vision of the exciting possibilities of his copycat operation. Picturing BBC Production as a restless bunch of teenagers,Salmon enthused it was time to “move out of their parents’ homes and contain a lot more fun, to “take our shirts off at parties”, or making the noteworthy project that could be the salvation of the BBC sound unenticingly like an extended version of The Inbetweeners film.
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Source: theguardian.com