Welcome to LA, Richard Johnson

Tabloid Baby pal Richard Johnson is leaving his job as editor of the New York Post's Page Six and moving to Los Angeles. Johnson has been at the helm of the most influential gossip column of our time for close to twenty five years, and a made a little gossip himself along the way while steering the column from the days of Sukhreet Gabel and Mark Gastineau. We'd have thought Johnson would have headed West fifteen years ago to become a television star, but he was to be respected as one of the last of the print guys. His skipping of the medium and move to a News Corp, "digital venture" signals the death of print gossip as far as we're concerned. Long live Jim Brady and Neal Travis.

Click here to read Richard Johnson's goodbye to New York. Last line:

In the words of J.J. Hunsecker, "I love this dirty town."

Everybody hates Roger (Ailes)

The New York Times reports in a front page profile that Fox News boss Roger Ailes is "at the pinnacle of power in three corridors of American life: business, media and politics... the best-paid person in the News Corporation last year..." and "the most successful news executive of the last 10 years."

That doesn't sit well with the new wife and adult children of Ailes' boss, Rupert Murdoch, as is stated clearly by Rupert's son-in law, the British pubic relations man Matthew Freud in paragraph 14 of the piece:

“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."

And that says a lot!

(We remember Roger's when corporate machinations and needling led Rupert's son Lachlan to bolt the company in 2005, leaving Roger to take his job in charge of Fox stations and cancel the competitive revival of A Current Affair. Sounds like the Time article is notice of the war ahead as Rupert nears his eighties.)

MURDOCHS SPLIT??!!

Crikey reports. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation outlets do not. Murdoch spokesmen will neither confirm nor deny. Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng have been married ten years (just like Tom and Nicole. Sorry, boss.).

UPDATE: We can't find the item on the Melbourne-based Crikey site, though others, including the Sydney Morning Herald, have referenced it.