To publish or not to publish? Mr Murdoch's papers have been getting it in the neck this weekend for their insensitivity. (So what's new?)
The Times carried this follow up to the sad news of Arthur Cave's death on page 19 on Friday. It is based on an interview with an Australian literary magazine called Kill Your Darlings in which he said:

The first thing to point out here is that the magazine's title is not about subjecting children to trauma. It's a vehicle for "feisty new writing" and it takes its name from the advice to aspiring writers variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg and others. Stephen King also used the phrase in his brilliant book On Writing: "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Next, let's consider what Cave is saying. That you have to let your children go, even though your heart may be in your mouth. And to do so, to watch them tackle a difficult situation, is a moving experience for a parent. That is not the same as encouraging them to be reckless or foolhardy. 
So many people took exception to this story that the Times has removed it from its website.  
But is it not relevant - and even in the public interest - to have Nick Cave's recent thoughts on this subject, since the interview was published only the week before his son's death? 
Where the story falls down is not in reporting his words about watching a child's terror, but in the bits that go round that quote; the assertion that Cave is known as the Prince of Darkness "because of his obsession with death and violence". 
Umm... I may be wrong here, but I believe Cave is known as the Prince of Darkness because his work often deals with death and violence (Murder Ballads is a brilliant album). That doesn't mean that he is personally obsessed with them. The aforementioned Stephen King has written at least two dozen terrifying books, does that make him personaly obsessed with horror?
Further suggestions of bad parenting come with the disclosure that a documentary showed him watching Scarface (hardly the most terrifying film) with Arthur and his twin brother Earl and that he had once said - we aren't told when - that he had watched "a lot of super-violent stuff with his teenage sons". 
Well, isn't that much better parenting - to sit alongside them and discuss - than to leave them in their bedrooms watching who knows what?
The story also points out that police were saying that they were not linking the boy's death with a photograph of teenagers sitting with their legs dangling over a 300ft cliff ten miles away - a link the Mail was swift to make in its initial report of Arthur's fall. (The paper had given over page 3 to the earlier photograph the previous day.)
The problem with the Times story was not in the fact that it was written, but in the way it was written, and I think it's a shame that the editorial team weren't brave enough to re-edit and leave it up online.
And so to the royal "Nazi salute". Should the Sun have published its still from an 80-year-old film? Of course it should. Why not? 
No one is going to think any better or worse of the Queen -  or any differently about her mother and uncle - because of this, but it is a valid piece of history. No, we don't know the context, but we can be pretty sure (a) that the little Princess wasn't being taught to show allegience to the new German Chancellor and (b) that she hadn't the faintest idea of the significance of the gesture.
So if Her Majesty (not HRH as the Mirror's tortuous head calls her) is livid, she is not the woman we've come to think of her as being. She may be dismayed, but she'll get over it.
What is far more disappointing is the Express's desperation in declaring "She was waving" and the Independent on Sunday's leader saying that it wouldn't have published. The Indie has since its inception avoided royal stories, so we'd have expected it not to have gone for the story. But not out of misplaced delicacy.
As journalists we should often be more sensitive than we are. But there is no reason to be censorious about either of these Murdoch stories. 
And the Sun's heading was inspired.

There are some vessels that you just shouldn't drink from. No matter how shiny and scrubbed that chalice might seem, no matter how reassuring the promises of the person holding it out to you, you can never be sure that every trace of poison has been removed. 
The media editorship of The Times is much the same. It's not easy for anyone to write about their own business, but to try to do so when your employer is News UK is well nigh impossible. Look at the stories of the past five years: the BSkyB bid, hacking, police investigations, Leveson, the News Corp split - and all the while the proprietor's hatred of the BBC ticking away. 
You can make your own luck, cultivate contacts and come up with good stories, but there will always be the suspicion among rivals that you are peddling the company line, that there's a sting in every tale.
Alex Spence made a good fist of this impossible task in his brief time in the job. He, with Press Gazette, was out in front with stories about the misuse of RIPA and press freedom issues not only in Britain, but also overseas.
Then someone offered him that chalice brimming with champagne: the Sun was going to kill off page three. He had no option but to take a big gulp. The natural reaction from other news organisations was "if it's in the Times it must be true". And of course it was. 

But the Sun just couldn't resist milking the moment and pulling that stunt with winking Nicole from Bournemouth. Hers were the last naked breasts to adorn page three, but the Sun's PR chief Dylan Sharpe was determined to keep everyone guessing, with hints that others may appear on other days.
As Gameoldgirl noted in January, this pointless tomfoolery left Spence unfairly looking an idiot. He protested in "a strongly worded email" to the editor, a week later he disappeared from the newsroom and he hasn't been seen there since. According to Private Eye's Street of Shame last week, he'd been put on a "PIP" - personal improvement programme - although that report has been described as inaccurate. One source said that he'd just been told "by a Witherow minion" to "buck up". 
Now he has resigned and is taking a holiday with his wife before considering what to do next.
None of this reflects well on the Times or the Sun.
Let's hope the next candidate for the job makes sure the chalice has been properly washed up before putting it to his or her lips.
Editor's blog: Gotcha
Gameoldgirl: Spare a thought for page 3 fella

There's an air of Midsomer about the death of Jagger the Irish setter 26 hours after he competed at Crufts.
To the outsider this is a jolly world of waggy tails and wobbly bottoms, cosy weekend television in the company of the dependable Clare Balding.
But behind the scenes of this British institution rivalries fester. Controversy and Crufts are regular bedfellows.
Now a dog has died.  A vet conducting a post-mortem has apparently found cubes of beef laced with three different types of poison. Two sheepdogs at the show are also reported to have been taken ill.
All this at the most prestigious event on the calendar of an elite and influential society that lays down laws for millions to follow, a society not renowned for its fondness of outside scrutiny.
No wonder that the story made most front pages today, but how to treat it?  It's a serious tale that will provoke a reaction from every reader; it's what everyone will talk about in the pub; it'll be a first-round question in Friday's News Quiz. But getting the tone right is tricky. 
"Murder at Crufts" shout the Mirror and Sun splash heads. But while the Mirror maintains its straight face, the Sun can't resist the subhead "Police are following all leads". For the Guardian and Independent, this was the "curious incident of the dog..." The Telegraph - Fleet Street's supposed expert on "country" matters - asks "Is a mystery poisoner hounding Crufts?" 
The lame pun is misjudged, but then The Times's "Crufts contender poisoned by jealous rivals, owner claims" is so straight that it sounds almost ridiculous. The Mail, always seeking a different angle, suggests that the wrong dog had been poisoned: Jagger's half-brother Pot Noodle is the more successful and the two had switched places on the competitors' benches. 
Wrong dog?  Oh dear, here we are back in the land of mid-evening ITV3 detective shows and their red herrings. The Sun also picked up on this in its inside coverage - under the heading "Murder in the first pedigree". It doesn't matter which dog was the target; what makes this news is the possibility that any dog was deliberately and fatally poisoned at Crufts. 
The owners and breeders haven't helped with their scattergun theories:


"It could have been Jagger was targeted by mistake. Pot Noodle had been achieving more glory and the two look very much alike."
"It could be someone with a vengeance trying to stop our success."
"I don't believe it had anything to do with other competitors."
"Strange things have been happening. At Richmond dog show somebody let Pot Noodle out of his cage and he went missing for an hour."
"There would only have been a tiny window of opportunity. That's when you rely on other competitors to look out for your dog."
"Whoever did this knew what they were doing, trying to get the right poison with a slow release."
"He has clearly been poisoned on purpose. Jagger loved people and he loved food. He would have trusted whoever gave it to him."
"The vet said there were two or three types of poison in his stomach. I think she identified one as a slug killer. I would guess the others would turn out to be a rat poison or industrial poison."
"We think this is the work of some random psychopathic dog hater who decided to visit Crufts with one thing in mind, rather than any sort of targeted attack."
"He could have been targeted for being a foreign dog. There's a lot of ill-feeling from some camps towards them."
"I don't want to believe a fellow competitor would do this. I think Jagger was the wrong dog in the wrong place and I'm hoping it was just some maniac who wanted to poison a dog."
"To think he may have been targeted by a rival at a dog show makes it even harder to take."
"It has been suggested that someone's really got it in for us. We're very proud of our record and maybe some people aren't happy."

Right, a random maniac or a jealous rival. A complete stranger or someone the dog would trust. All very emotional. All very Midsomer. Barnaby will have his work cut out here. 
He could, of course, look to Crufts for assistance. The show organisers have so far said only that they are sorry about the death - and emphasised that the dog died not at the NEC in Birmingham, but at home in Belgium the next day.
One report this morning says that the competitors' benches are open to the public - obvious when you think about it, given the number of pictures of peek-a-boo pooches we see in Crufts week. Perhaps someone might ask the Kennel Club about its security arrangements.
Jagger was reportedly worth £50,000. Breeding and showing is big business, a dog-eats-dog world. I have a niggling feeling about this story and some of the things that have been said. 
And I bet those sheepdogs have nothing to do with it.

Tuesday update: More controversy, this time over the owner of the supreme champion. She lifted it by its tail and neck. The Kennel Club says she's been warned about it before. She says "I didn't mean to. It's a habit." In other words "I do it all the time, but didn't mean to do it when anyone was looking." 
You do wonder about people sometimes.
Now at least two online petitions are demanding that she be stripped of the title; they have already attracted 135,000 signatures.
The Kennel Club says the owner is very caring and that it wouldn't be fair to the dog to take away its title because of something the owner did.
As to Jagger and other suspected poisonings - including a claim that another dog died after competing at the show - the club has posted this statement on its Facebook page:

Odd, isn't it, how television is becoming ever more important to newspapers, just as the internet is diminishing its influence in the real world?
We get our news from the web and social media;  we watch what we want, when we want, with or without ads, thanks to streaming, satellite, cable and clever recording machines.
Some programmes - Coronation Street is certainly one - remain a feature of millions of people's lives. So it's understandable that  tabloids use the shorthand "Corrie Kev, Corrie Ken, Corrie Rita" when writing about events in real life, even though most fans are likely as familiar with the actors' names as with the characters they play.  
It's partly about quick identification and partly about the count, which is why we get "Corrie Kym" (actress), rather than "Corrie Michelle" (character) and why Michael Le Vell was "Le Vell" in a Mirror heading one day last year and "Corrie Kev" the next.*
This habit of regarding real and fictional names as interchangeable does, however, grate when the story is about a court case or even an actor's death. 
Take a look at the first two splash headings below.  Are they appropriate?

The Sun's too-clever take on the death of Roger Lloyd Pack was so awful and so contrived that it even had to explain the joke. The self-referencing on the death of Anne Kirkbride was perhaps more forgiveable - and it is worth noting that almost everyone else used her real name - but the Sun got in a real muddle the next day with the real Bill and Bev in a bedside vigil for "Deirdre".

Tabloids, soaps: does it matter? Not really, though you have to feel sorry for Michelle Dockery, who must wonder if she will ever be free of Lady bloody Mary. No matter what she does in real life, her alter ego is there with her. Sometimes that woman played by Maggie Smith turns up, too, to wag a finger.
The Mail is besotted with her. When she's not on the front, she's in the feature pages:  "We've lost the art of chivalry, says Downton's Lady Mary"; 
"Donwnton's Lady Mary: corsets stop you slacking"
Downton, like Coronation Street, enjoys an audience of some seven or eight million, so let's cut the subs some slack there. 

But look at those two fronts from today at the top of this post. The Sun thinks that the fact Ant and Dec can't imagine Ed Miliband as Prime Minister is significant. It not only splashes on the remark, but also runs a leader to explain itself. This is the dilemma facing Labour voters, it says. There may be the germ of a valid point lurking somewhere, but the political opinions of a couple of cheeky chappie television presenters do not represent an "election bombshell". 
The Telegraph meanwhile has a photograph of the actor Mark Rylance at a film premiere under the headline "What's Thomas Cromwell plotting now?" Very little, I should imagine, since Cromwell was beheaded 475 years ago. 
There comes a point when it's time to grow up and rejoin the real world.

* From glam to glum: By the way, it's interesting to see how the Mirror's approach to this story developed between Barbara Knox's arrest in April last year and sentence after a belated guilty plea last month.

It was a shock to scroll through Roy Greenslade's blog the other day and discover that my former colleague Paul Davidson had died. 
Paul was military reporter at the Evening Gazette, Colchester, in the Seventies - an important post in an Army town in the Troubles era. He was also a nice bloke with an ability to get on with people in a way that gave him access to the heart of stories.
At weekends he would do reporting shifts with the People and he eventually moved there full-time - the staff job, if I recall correctly (and I may not) a reward for nearly losing an eye while covering the Brixton riots for the paper as a freelance.
Moving to the News of the World, he was reunited professionally with his friend and former Colchester oppo Dave Clark.  Paul and Nobby had made an imposing pair, broad-shouldered six-footers walking side by side in their navy trenchcoats with a reluctance to disabuse anyone who mistook them for rozzers.
Apart from his own abilities, Nobby had another journalistic claim to fame. His wife Patsy was a news sub on the Sun. In those days women weren't supposed to sit on Fleet Street news subbing desks, but not only was she there, she had a reputation for being rather good. So good, in fact, that she went on to become editor of the News of the World. Nobby moved to the Screws while Patsy was still at the Sun and moved up to the backbench. His wife, sadly, would have to retire through ill health, long before her time, in the mid-nineties.
Others in the Colchester newsroom all those decades ago included a trainee called Richard Kay, who became a Princess's confidant, and a joker called Bill Langley, who reverted to his full name of William and never looked back. Others in the pub in those days included a thirtysomething Labour councillor-cum-agency reporter who has since changed his colours, but not his loyalty to the town. He is now better known as LibDem MP Sir Bob Russell.
But I digress into a world of dodgy memories. The point of this note is not simply to mourn Paul Davidson's parting, but to commend the Sun's recognition of one of its own.
Paul, who had switched from reporting to subbing, died last week of a suspected heart attack on the train home to Colchester after work. His death was reported in Saturday's paper and in Greenslade's blog, which includes this paragraph:  

Now there's a thing. 
An editor may, of course, feel obliged to say something kind about a member of staff who drops dead after a shift. And the Sun is, of course, a "subs' paper". 
My old home The Times is, on the other hand, a "writers' paper". 
In the Eighties Charlie Wilson made it his business to know all of his journalists and was closely involved with all appointments - even the "lowest of the low", downtable subs. His several successors would be hard pushed to name all the top-table news subs, let alone those toiling at the end of the desk.
Someone with the physical and congenial presence of Paul Davidson would be noticed in any environment. But too many others who make a true contribution to their papers from the subbing bench remain anonymous and unsung.
Here's to them. And here's to Paul. A sad day, indeed.

So much for sisterly love. 
The Sun doesn't seem to have worried about collateral damage to its stablemate's reputation with its little Page Three game this week.
First it leaks the decision to drop topless women to the Times, securing prominent coverage without making any announcement.
Everyone trusts the Times and the story takes off into the stratosphere. The Sun's spokesman stonewalls as campaigners celebrate.
That should have been enough for anyone, but the Sun is greedy for everything but humble pie, so Nicole from Bournemouth appears braless on page 3 and PR chief Dylan Sharpe indulges in some gloating Twitter trollery.
What larks, Pip, what larks!
But what about The Times's Alex Spence, pictured, who has a day of people throwing custard at his face over a story he knows to be true?
Today's beauty has put her bra back on - the "There's More-anda on Page 3" puff on the front is a reference to the number rather than naughtiness of the inside pix. The Sun has traditionally eschewed the topless models in its "family" Saturday paper, and so come next week, the bare breasts will surely be but a memory.
The Sun,  which has had a spot of bother with the Met over the protection of sources, should be grateful that Spence has honourably declined to reveal where his story came from.
Let's hope there's a bottle or six of something good on the way to him in the lifts of the Baby Shard.

[That's enough Alex Spence in this Notebook - Ed]