Britain's main national newspapers on Wednesday agreed to the establishment of an independent newspaper regulator with far greater powers than the current, much-criticized regulation system, John F. Burns reports. The agreement came after pressure from Prime Minister David Cameron, who has agreed with the publishers that any change in regulation should be voluntary, and not be written into law, as was recommended by the Leveson inquiry, which investigated press abuses in Britain. Mr. Burns writes:
The new regulator would have a much larger budget, a strong investigative staff, and the power to order errant newspapers to publish prominent apologies and pay fines up to £1 million, or $1.6 million, or 1 percent of a publication's annual revenue, whichever is less.
The Grammy nominati ons were announced on Wednesday, with a several artists collecting six nominations each, including fun., Mumford & Sons, Frank Ocean, Jay-Z and Kanye West, James C. McKinley Jr. writes. The rock trio fun. was nominated in all four of the most prestigious categories - album, song and record (that is, single) of the year, as well as for best new artist; Frank Ocean was not far behind, with nominations in best new artist, record of the year and album of the year for his critically acclaimed debut “Channel Orange.â€
Dave Brubeck, the pianist and composer whose “Time Out†- with the hit single “Take Five†- was the first jazz album to sell a million copies, died on Wednesday. He would have turned 92 on Thursday. Ben Ratliff writes in an obituary: “In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck brought a distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility that won over listeners who had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single.â€
Dave Brubeck could win his FIRST Grammy this year.
-mdash; Ben Sisario (@sisario) December 6, 2012
Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the mother of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and one of Australia's most noted philanthropists, died on Wednesday at her estate near Melbourne, Robert D. McFadden writes. She was 103, and accor ding to a Murdoch-owned paper, The Courier-Mail of Brisbane, said she is survived by 77 direct descendants. Mr. McFadden writes of her child-raising philosophy:
She reared them with what she called ‘loving discipline,' to discourage materialism, especially in the headstrong Rupert. She sent him for eight years to Geelong Grammar, a boarding school near Melbourne that imposed a military regimen and canings. He was bullied and teased and became decidedly unhappy, but his mother was firm.
Nickelodeon is remaking Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit books as an animated series, Amy Chozick writes, offering an intriguing challenge for a modern, American TV channel. The death of Peter's father in a hot pie - something that Potter's publisher considered too gruesome to illustrate - will not be shown to Nickelodeon's audiences, either. But the predicament it left Peter's family in is something that resonates today: “Here's a single mom raising four bunnies,†said Teri Weiss, executive vice president of production and development for Nickelodeon preschool. “That's an important element we thought kids could connect with.â€
Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.
