Guardian editor-in-chief also raises concerns over use of royal charter, saying it is 'a mechanism controlled by ministers'

The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has urged the culture secretary, Maria Miller, to reopen talks on the future of press regulation and raised concerns about the use of a royal charter.

In a letter to Miller's consultation on press reform, Rusbridger said Guardian News & Media remains concerned that a royal charter was "effectively a mechanism controlled by ministers".

"It is difficult to think of any democracy where measures relating to press freedom should be organised in this way, subject to non-public conversations involving the government of the day and the head of state," he wrote.

Rusbridger said the government should convene immediately talks with the three main politicial parties, the newpaper industry and victims of press intrusion in a bid to resolve the standoff over regulatory reform.

Miller is holding a consultation on whether the press industry's royal charter should be considered first by the privy council instead of the the rival plan drawn up by the government and backed by Labour. Other groups, including prominent phone-hacking victims and influential MPs, have already made submissions to the consultation. Both groups separately oppose the charter.

Rusbridger said the industry's proposal contained "some improvements" on the one endorsed by the government, which he described as "overly directive" in areas such as the direction of apologies and its handling of group complaints.

On the merits of the industry plan, he wrote: "In particular, we support in principle the use of a triple-lock for amendments to the charter made up of the recognition panel, the regulator board, and the industry itself.

"The use of a triple-lock of this kind is a thoughtful response to the problem of potential meddling by government or parliament."

However, Rusbridger raised concerns that the present proposal does not appear to be sufficiently independent of the industry, and singled out the role of the Press Standards Board of Finance (Pressbof), which funds current regulator the Press Complaints Commission.

"In reality, it secures for the industry unnecessary control over key elements of the regulatory system. This includes Pressbof being granted the charter; the role of the commissioner for public appointments being reduced; Pressbof retaining potential control over code committee appointments; and insufficient protection against the industry using a body like Pressbof to exert an unwelcome degree of influence over the new regulator," he wrote.

The Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) will shortly consult its members, which include Guardian News & Media, on a proposed set of constitutional documents for the industry regulator.

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1. Press regulation: six select committee MPs oppose alternative for watchdog
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Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive, will head both News Corp and 21st Century Fox companies

News Corporation has announced that the separation of its publishing and entertainment businesses is likely to be finalised on June 28.

The company has confirmed the date for the separation into two companies, a publishing firm which will retain the News Corp brand, while the other will be renamed 21st Century Fox. Both will be headed by the current chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch.

The confirmation of the date follows last year's promise by News Corp to separate its entertainment and publishing businesses in the wake of the UK phone-hacking scandal in 2011 which led to the closure of the News of the World.

The publishing company will comprise the Times, Sunday Times and the Sun, plus the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Australian plus daily titles in the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. The book publisher HarperCollins will also be included. The TV and film business will include the US news channel Fox News and the 20th Century Fox film studio.

The split means that loss-making newspapers will no longer be cushioned by the company's more profitable entertainment interests and could lead to more cuts in the publishing companies.

Earlier this month the editor of Murdoch's New York Post, Col Allan, issued a memo offering staff the chance to volunteer for pay-off packages in order to reduce the paper's headcount by 10%.

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Theguardian.com will provide one destination for UK, mobile, US and Australian sites as monthly digital browsers hits 80m

The Guardian is to launch a new global web presence, theguardian.com, in recognition of the newspaper's increasingly international digital appeal.

The move will streamline access to Guardian content – amalgamating the main entry point Guardian.co.uk, mobile site m.guardian.co.uk, US homepage guardiannews.com and the soon-to-launch Australian digital edition – into one core web destination.

In the last five years, the number of monthly Guardian digital browsers has grown from 20 million to more than 80 million, with much of that growth coming from international markets.

"Every month, our online content is accessed from almost every country around the world," said Tanya Cordrey, chief digital officer at Guardian News & Media, in a blog post called Going global on our digitaljourney. "In fact, UK users now represent just a third of our total audience."

The home of the newspaper's content has been guardian.co.uk, which is the only non-"dot com" domain suffix in the top 10 Google News list of digital news outlets.

"This may be a small URL change, but it marks a big step for the Guardian and reflects our evolution from a much-respected national print newspaper based only in the UK … to a leading global news and media brand … and an ever-growing worldwide audience accessing Guardian journalism every minute of every day," said Cordrey.

Cordrey added that the move to theguardian.com will make for a simplified user experience, but will also be more appealing to major advertisers in international markets, who are perhaps not drawn to the idea of running campaigns on a UK-specific website, despite the reality of the Guardian's global digital readership.

The move, which will take place later this year, will involve the transition of millions of URLs attached to the Guardian's websites and about 15 years of archived content.

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'Abby Clancy poses in nothing but heels' story provides joint highest website traffic day for the Sun

The Boston marathon bombing on 16 April provided Mail Online with its biggest ever digital day, attracting more than 9.5 million unique users.

However, the bombing proved the 12th and 16th most popular web days in April for the Independent and Mirror websites respectively – while the Sun website network's joint highest traffic day last month coincided with a story headlined "Abby Clancy poses in nothing but heels".

Coverage of the terrorist attack on 16 April underlined Mail Online's seemingly inexorable global growth, particularly in North America, with just 39.8% of the 9,558,256 global unique browsers that day coming from the UK.

This was the lowest proportion of UK visitors in any day in April, according to the Mail Online's officially audited Audit Bureau of Circulations certificate published on Thursday.

A week later, Dzokhar Tsarnaev being charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in relation to the Boston marathon bombing provided Mail Online with its second biggest day on record, with 9,226,255 daily unique browsers.

While total digital records were being broken this was not the case on mobile devices – Mail Online's iPhone or Android apps barely registered an uplift in average usage on either of the Boston bombing news days.

April also highlighted the biggest online traffic drivers for the Sun, the biggest selling UK newspaper in print, which has failed to capture an equivalent digital audience.

The Sun's biggest online story in April was "Michelle Keegan in topless pic riddle", which included a picture of breasts posted on her Instagram page, on 5 April, and "Abby Clancy poses in nothing but heels" five days later.

The two days were almost neck-and-neck in terms of traffic, with Keegan narrowly shading it, at just over 2 million daily browsers. The Sun's daily average is just under 1.7 million.

Mirror Group Digital's barnstorming April, with total web traffic surging 30% month on month, was driven by a range of factors.

While the Boston bombing failed to register as a major traffic day, ranking 16th for the month as a whole, the charging of Tsarnaev proved the biggest traffic driver with 2,067,955 daily users across all devices.

It was also its biggest day of mobile browsers across Mirror Group Digital's website network, which includes Mirror.co.uk, 3am.co.uk and MirrorFootball.co.uk.

However, the other major events that fuelled Mirror Group Digital's traffic growth was an exclusive video from inside North Korea, which provided its second biggest day in April with 1,912,588 daily browsers.

The next biggest day of traffic was related to the Grand National, at about 1.6 million, while Margaret Thatcher's death drew 1.55 million.

The Boston bombing also provided the biggest traffic day in April for Telegraph.co.uk and guardian.co.uk (5.8 million and 4.55 million respectively). For Independent.co.uk, it only ranked 16th in April, with Thatcher's death coverage on 8 April the biggest at 1.55 million.

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Labour and Liberal Democrats have written to culture secretary about rival royal charter being put forward by Pressbof

Six MPs on the influential Commons culture, media and sport select committee have announced that they do not support the press industry's plan for a new regulator backed by a royal charter.

The six Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have written to the privy council and the culture secretary, Maria Miller, to say they reject the rival royal charter being put forward by the Press Board of Finance (Pressbof), which funds the Press Complaints Commission, to underpin a new regulator.

They said they are backing the original government charter, agreed by the three main parties in a late-night meeting in Ed Milliband's office in March during negotiations that also included members of the Hacked Off group campaigning for stricter press regulation.

The MPs have branded the rival charter "a last ditch attempt to repeat the mistakes of the past" by the press industry and said they are basing their decision on the extensive experience gained through culture select committee evidence hearings in 2011 when they helped exposed the phone-hacking scandal.

"At the end of the day, Pressbof, which is dominated by the big national newspapers, funded and oversaw a regime that failed because it was far too much controlled by the industry itself. This rival charter is a last ditch attempt to repeat the mistakes of the past and should be resisted, in the interests of effective, independent regulation and decent press standards," they have said in their submission.

The letter is signed by Labour's Ben Bradshaw, the former culture secretary, and former newspaper journalist and Labour MP Paul Farrelly. The other signatories are: Labour's Steve Rotheram, Jim Sheridan and Gerry Sutcliffe and Lib Dem MP John Leech.

Their position is at odds with that of the chairman of the committee, Tory MP John Whittingdale, who has said the press royal charter should be considered.

On Tuesday Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights campaigning organisation Liberty, came out against both royal charters saying the whole idea of using this archaic instrument was bizarre and unworkable.

"A royal charter is constitutionally inappropriate, undemocratic, opaque and in no way fit for this purpose," said Liberty.

Chakrabarti and the MPs were making their comments ahead of Thursday's deadline for submissions to the Department for Culture Media and Sport on the Presbof royal charter.

Pressure group Hacked Off is also opposed to the press charter. It is backed by the UK's biggest newspaper groups, including Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers and News International, owner of the Sun and the Times, in additional to the owners of more than 1,000 regional and local papers and major magazine publishers.

Publishers backing the press royal charter have warned that the government's plan could kill off local media by opening the floodgates to "claims farming lawyers" seeking compensation for minor errors relating to those featuring in newspapers already struggling to survive.

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Local newspaper publisher's first figures may produce a £18m payout for shareholders DGMT and Trinity Mirror

David Montgomery's Local World made more than £7m in profits in the first three months of 2013 and could make £30m this year, providing shareholders Daily Mail & General Trust and Trinity Mirror a potential payout of as much as £18m.

The first snapshot of the performance of the local newspaper publisher, a merger of more than 100 titles including the Nottingham Post and Cambridge News from DMGT's Northcliffe Media and Iliffe News & Media, which launched at the start of the year, shows that it made about £7.5m in operating profit in its first quarter.

Figures for Local World's performance came from a financial filing published on Thursday by DMGT, which owns a 38.7% stake in the venture, in its half year results.

DMGT said that it made £3m from its stake in Local World in the first three months of the year, which means that the business as a whole made about £7.5m.

Stephen Daintith, DMGT's finance director, said that if Local World maintains its current financial "run rate" it could make about £30m in profits for the year.

This means DMGT could pocket up to £12m from its stake this year. Daily Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror, which took a 20% stake in Local World for £14.2m, could make almost half that back, as much as £6m, this year.

"The profitability of the new business is already an improvement from day one when Northcliffe and Iliffe were put together," says Daintith. "Despite challenging revenue and market conditions integration has gone extremely well and efficiencies are continuing to be found and the margin is improving."

DMGT, which values its stake in Local World at £27.5m, reiterated this in its official filing: "Local World delivered a strong operating margin in its first quarter of trading to March".

Northcliffe Media's last full-year financial filing as part of DMGT shows that it made £26m in operating profit on revenues of £213m in the year to the end of September.

In the four years in the run up to the sale DMGT embarked on a brutal cost-cutting drive at Northcliffe, slashing the headcount by almost half from 4,200 to 2,200.

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The Financial Times is being subsumed into a new division by its parent company, Pearson.

As part of the organisation's restructure, the FT Group will disappear and the newspaper will become part of a unit called "professional". Its chief executive will be John Ridding, who is currently CEO of the FT group.

Professional will also include Pearson's global English learning business and its electronic testing business. It is hard to see what these three very different types of business have to do with each other.

However, it is suggested that the rationale for yoking the language-teaching with the publishing of the paper is that adults learning English in foreign countries are considered to be the kind of people likely to read the FT. Maybe.

The other intriguing aspect is whether the FT's financial results will be split out from the other parts of the new division. I understand that Pearson has yet to decide on that issue.

A spokesman explained that there were still many details to be worked out. The company is expected to make that clear before the restructure is implemented on 1 January 2014. Its first results will therefore be published the following July.

But he said that for 2013 - which will include the full-year 2013 results to be announced around the end of February 2014 - the report will be made under the existing structure, in which the FT Group is reported separately.

The appointment of Ridding as CEO, giving him greater responsibility for a larger business unit, is certainly a feather in his cap. He only took charge of the FT Group earlier this year after becoming chief executive of the Financial Times itself in 2006.

Prior to that, he had several senior editorial posts at the FT, with spells as its deputy editor and publisher of its Asian outlet.

Under the new Pearson structure, the company will be organised around three global lines of business - school, higher education and professional - and three geographic market categories - north America, growth and core.

Genevieve Shore, currently Pearson's chief technology officer, will take on a new role as chief product and marketing officer. Will Ethridge, CEO of Pearson North America, will step down from his role.

John Fallon, Pearson's chief executive, said: "This new organisation structure flows directly from the strategy that we set out earlier this year. It is designed to make Pearson more digital, more services-oriented, more focused on emerging economies and more accountable for learning outcomes.

"This is a significant change in the way we run the company that will take time and sustained commitment, but it is one we must make to be able to accelerate the execution of our global education strategy."

Comment: This move, as with any move involving the Financial Times, is bound to set off yet more rumours about the paper being sold. I think it does the opposite. It suggests that Pearson is as committed to the FT as it has been for many years past.

That won't stop the gossip of course. But really, isn't it about time that people realised the pink paper (salmon in the US) is not for sale?

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The radio stations were on early this morning - was it right and proper for newspapers to publish front pages pictures of a man they called a terrorist brandishing a meat cleaver?

Answer: yes. There are all sorts of arguments in favour. Practical and technological first - pictures and film clips of the incident were across social media within minutes. Newspapers (and TV) would have looked completely daft to ignore what was already in the public domain.

The man wasn't trying to hide from the spotlight. He was aware he was "speaking to camera" in order to deliver "a message" that attempted to justify his unjustifiable act.

It could be said that the media were playing into his hands by giving him the publicity he was seeking. But, given the situation, there was a need to explain. And the pictures lifted from the filmed footage were therefore essential to the exercise.

This was a highly unusual event that, by its very unusualness, warranted an unusual response from the media. It was barbaric, horrific, tragic, senseless… even a collective of adjectives is inadequate to describe what happened.

I agree that the image was appalling. The meat cleaver. The bloodied hands. The obvious rage of the perpetrator. It prompted my two elder grandsons, who mostly ignore the papers on the table in the mornings, to ask all sorts of questions.

On the way to school, the discussion continued. They were, of course, desperate to understand why two men had hacked another man to death in a London street on a spring afternoon.

After I had dropped them off I thought more about the problems all editors faced and, it should be noted, all but one (the counter intuitive Daily Express) took the same decision.

It is possible to argue against publication from two opposing directions: the image of a brazen killer will encourage others to follow suit, leading to more Islamic terrorist outrages; or the image will encourage anti-Muslim feeling and generate Islamophobia.

But media editors, while wishing to avoid provoking anti-social and criminal behaviour, cannot be responsible for far-fetched consequences of their decision to publish news stories. Editors cannot edit in order to ensure they protect us from the feeble-minded. It would make the job impossible and, taken to its logical conclusions, nothing would ever get published.

Editors also confronted a second problem in whether to carry pictures of the dead man's body, which also required them to pause for thought. Would it be regarded as an intrusion into the grief of his relatives? Would it be regarded as tasteless?

Again, on balance, I think the newspapers were correct because they needed to convey the brutality of a murder that appeared to have been carried out as an act of terrorism. It was shocking to see it but it was even more shocking that it happened at all.

There may be objections later that the pictured men cannot expect to get a "fair" trial. I somehow feel that a judge will laugh any such legal quibble out of court.

Newspaper editors, in trying to do their job - in company with television news editors - were confronted with a bizarre and barbarous act. They had to react as they did.

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Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, as well as two other journalists, win scoop of the year at London Press Club awards

Liz Mackean and Meirion Jones, who worked on Newsnight's spiked Jimmy Savile investigation, have won scoop of the year at the London Press Club awards, sharing the prize with two others involved in exposing the late Jim'll Fix It presenter's sexual abuse of children.

In an unusual move, the London Press Club awards judges gave the 2013 scoop of the year award jointly to Mackean, Jones, Miles Goslett – who eventually broke the Savile abuse story in the Oldie magazine – and Mark Williams-Thomas, the former policeman and child protection expert behind the ITV Exposure documentary that finally propelled it into a full-blown national scandal last autumn.

Bill Hagerty, chairman of the LPC judges, said that even though reporter Mackean and producer Jones' investigation never saw the light of day after being shelved by then Newsnight editor Peter Rippon in December 2011, subsequent events showed the story they uncovered was "dynamite".

After collecting the joint award at the LPC event in central London on Wednesday, Mackean, who recently took voluntary redundancy from the BBC, said: "BBC command and control would not be delighted by the award being given to Meirion and myself. It just goes to show you cannot keep a good story down."

She added that the BBC "failed to act and should have run the story".

Jones, who has now moved to Panorama, also praised Hannah Livingston, the Newsnight researcher who worked on the Savile investigation.

He said it amazed him that in 2013 there was still no UK law compelling anyone who witnessed child abuse, or heard of others abusing children, to report it to the police.

Both Goslett and Williams-Thomas paid tribute to Mackean and Jones. "These are two of the best journalists this country has," Williams-Thomas said.

Goslett took the story that Newsnight had dropped its Savile investigation to several national newspapers. It was eventually published in the Oldie magazine in February 2012.

Williams-Thomas had worked with Mackean and Jones on the Newsnight investigation in late 2011 and, after their film was spiked, took the story to ITV, where it was eventually broadcast as an Exposure documentary in early October 2012, with devastating consequences.

List of winners

Daily newspaper of the year

The Times

Sunday newspaper of the year

The Mail on Sunday

Scoop of the year – Jimmy Savile abuse scandal

Miles Goslett, the Oldie

Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, Newsnight, BBC2

Mark Williams-Thomas, Exposure, ITV

Business journalist of the year

Tom Bergin – Reuters

Blog of the year

Fleet Street Fox – Susie Boniface

Arts reviewer of the year

Chris Tookey – Daily Mail

Broadcast journalist of the year

John Humphrys – Today Programme, BBC Radio 4

Edgar Wallace award

Caitlin Moran – the Times

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Shami Chakrabarti blasts government and press proposals for watchdog, saying they have failed to follow Leveson blueprint

A key adviser to the Leveson report, the civil rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti, has hit out against politicians and newspaper barons, accusing them of letting down the public over promises to set up a new press watchdog.

One of six assessors on the Leveson inquiry and the director of Liberty, Chakrabarti branded plans to launch a watchdog backed by a royal charter as "bizarre" and said that all politicians and the newspaper industry has done is to create "confusion and resentment" by putting forward rival proposals.

"A royal charter is constitutionally inappropriate, undemocratic, opaque and in no way fit for this purpose," Liberty said in a submission to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Chakrabarti called on politicians and the press to stop prevaricating but warned that neither charter would work.

"Six months on and still no sign of any real progress – and current squabbling over bizarre royal charters has achieved nothing but confusion and resentment. The Leveson report contained an effective blueprint for a decent self-regulator so why hasn't it been set up?" said Chakrabarti.

She was making her comments ahead of Thursday's deadline for responses to the government on the industry's proposal to launch an independent self-regulator backed by its its own royal charter, instead of the version agreed between the three main political parties and Hacked Off in a late night deal in March.

Chakrabarti said that the victims of the press and ethical journalists "need protection" and that the "public needs confidence restored".

"Everyday politicians and press barons prevaricate is another letting everyone down," Chakrabarti added.

Liberty said it had fundamental issues with the concept of a royal charter, which was first hatched by David Cameron's policy tsar Oliver Letwin as a means to set up a regulator that was not backed by statute but had more checks in place than the current Press Complaints Commission.

In a statement, Liberty said: "The limitations inherent to a royal charter make it difficult to achieve a truly independent recognition body. As is obvious from both charters, it creates an overly complex and bureaucratic system – which reflects the interests of the creator. For example, the press model would have the body funded by the press, whereas the politicians' version would be funded from the exchequer."

In its a submission to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Liberty said the two competing royal charters also appear to be in breach of the privy council's own criteria for assessing whether such a document should be granted.

Liberty also has issues with the proposed recognition panel, which would audit the watchdog's performance, and with plans for punitive fines being imposed on publishers who chose not to sign up to the press regulator.

It says the role of recognition should be performed by the judiciary "to ensure independence from press and politicians".

The involvement of the courts would eliminate the need for a bureacratic appointments panel as currently envisaged by the government and the press, according to Liberty.

Liberty supports punitive damages being awarded in the high court for breaches of confidence or breaches of privacy but says "failure to join an effective regulatory body not lead automatically to an award of exemplary damages".

Exemplary damages were proposed in the Leveson report as part of the "carrot and stick" approach to self-regulation. Lord Justice Leveson believed the threat of huge fines in the high court would be an incentive to join the regulator but this has been challenged by the press and by several peers, including Lord Lester, who believes it would be a breach of European law.

Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers has also said it is implacably opposed to exemplary damages and has considered boycotting a regulation system that included. Other newspapers including the Guardian have also expressed opposition to punitive damages.

David Cameron has promised to consider the industry's royal charter proposal which emerged as a surprise development last month.

Hacked Off has called on Cameron to stick with the original royal charter plan, but behind the scenes every effort is being made to find a solution that will win the pressure group's support and that of newspapers including the Guardian and the Financial Times, which have some reservations about the industry's royal charter.

One source said: "A deal is being shaped, but what shape it will take is not known yet."

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