Is Digital Britain turning into a dog's breakfast?

After some confusion as to whether Sion Simon or Stephen Timms would be taking over the Digital Britain brief from the now-departed Lord Carter, Downing Street has now ruled in favour of Mr Timms.

But anyone expecting any degree of clarity from the government over which Whitehall department will be ultimately responsible for implementing the plans will have been sorely disappointed.

The story so far is that Timms will remain in his current role as financial secretary to the Treasury, but with additional ministerial responsibilties at Lord Mandelson's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

In terms of his Digital Britain responsibilities, he will report to the Business Secretary, rather than the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Ben Bradshaw, whose department has hitherto led on the Digital Britain report and who personally delivered it in an oral statement to the Commmons back in June.

Meanwhile Mr Simon, as creative industries minister, is to undertake some ill-defined supporting-role in relation to those aspects of Digital Britain which are still the responsibility of the DCMS.

The upshot of all this appears to be that Mr Bradshaw, a former Exeter Express and Echo reporter who has recently made some welcome comments about the threat to regional newspapers posed by council propaganda sheets, has been well and truly sidelined.

A cynical interpretation of this would suggest that Bradshaw, who is also a former BBC reporter, was deemed insufficiently impartial to rule on the vexed issue of whether the BBC licence fee should be top-sliced to fund new regional TV news consortia in which the local press is expected to play a part.

Either way, with so many departments and ministers now apparently involved, the words "too many cooks," "dog's breakfast" and "camel designed by committee" all spring to mind.

Are the Tories trying to spin their way into the regional press's good books?

Earlier this week the Tories made a bit of a splash in some quarters by announcing plans to allow newspaper groups to provide regional TV news using funding top-sliced from the BBC licence fee.

It was of course good to see David Cameron and co taking such an interest in the future of the industry, but I couldn't help thinking it was slightly opportunistic on their part, given that the creation of new regional news consortia was a key aspect of the Digital Britain report published by the government last month.

Shadow Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt berated Digital Britain for what he called its "lack of radicalism," but although it failed to spell out a role for local newspaper companies in TV news provision in words of one syllable, this was implicit in the proposal and was widely reported as such in the trade media.

As HTFP reported at the time, "newspaper groups, TV broadcasters and other news media organisations are expected to benefit" from the top-slicing proposal. Indeed the Press Assocation has already launched a local news pilot that seems to be putting down an early marker for a share of the funding.

Fair play to the Tories for getting a few headlines - that is their job after all - but essentially what they have done here is taken someone else's idea and given it a fresh angle.

And I thought it was just journalists who were supposed to do that sort of thing.....

Cards on the table time for would-be merger kings

So, what to make of the government's Digital Britain report published yesterday, and in particular its recommendations about whether the current newspaper merger regime should be relaxed?

Well, at first glance, the government appears to have managed the considerable feat of pleasing both Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey, who had argued for relaxation of the rules in order to allow greater industry consolidation, and NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear, who had argued precisely the opposite.

Mr Dear sees the government's refusal to change the existing law as evidence that it is not going to allow what he calls "media plurality" to be undermined.

But Ms Bailey on the other hand says that legislation is not really the issue, and that the decision to allow communications watchdog Ofcom a bigger role in assessing merger proposals is a "step in the right direction."

So who's right in their interpretation? Well, as our main report on HTFP yesterday may have indicated, we're going with Bailey on this one.

Like many government reports - and as an ex-lobby hack I've read a fair few in my time - this is one where you really have to read the small print rather than simply reading the headline.

By ruling out a change in the law, the government is not saying no to further regional press consolidation, it is merely saying that the existing merger regime is sufficiently flexible to deal with any such proposals.

The clue was in the paragraph that read "there may be some lessons that could be learned from a detailed inquiry into a specific merger or transaction involving the local and regional press." This seemed to me to be tantamount to an invitation to publishers to bring forward a specific proposal which could then be used as a test-case.

There has been intense speculation, mainly in Sunday newspapers, that the big regional press publishers are set to engage in a round of asset-swapping to enable them to achieve greater geographical consolidation.

Without going into details, some of the scenarios that have been outlined seem literally incredible to me, but stranger things have happened.

I think what the government is effectively saying to the regional press in this report is: bring forward your merger proposals, and we'll show you that we're quite capable of dealing with them in a way that recognises present-day market realities.

In other words, the ball is now firmly in the industry's court.