In Media Res: Kate Middleton hacked?; supermarket tabloid gets real

Joe Pompeo
·Media Reporter

So this is still going on

: The list of suspected victims in the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World continues to grow. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Kate Middleton, who you may remember from a certain subdued marriage ceremony this spring, are among the latest prominent Britons who could have been spied upon in the scandal. The culprit would have been private investigator Jonathan Rees, who the U.K. tabloid had hired to access the voicemails and other private accounts of UK celebrities.
But as The Guardian notes: "None of these cases has been officially confirmed or even investigated. With many of them, it is not yet clear precisely what form of surveillance Rees and his agency, Southern Investigations, were using."

A media Arab Spring?: Press freedoms appear to be improving in the two countries first touched by the Arab Spring uprisings earlier this year. In Egypt, the nation's largest independent newspaper is thriving. And native bloggers, in response to the recent arrest of one of their own, have taken to the web in a coordinated effort to lodge unified criticism against the military, which has so far not interfered. Meanwhile, a "new breed" of journalist has risen in Tunisia, where, according to an opinion piece in the Africa Review, the press has become "Daring, nosier, and a little more liberated than what was there before the revolution that ousted Ben Ali from power ... With better treatment of the media plus more tolerance to criticism, Tunisia's annual ranking in media freedom in the Arab world has improved greatly."

Crowd sourcing: How many reporters does it take to sift through 24,000 of Sarah Palin's emails? Many more than the number that two of the nation's top newspapers can detail to the task. So the New York Times and Washington Post are crowd-sourcing the project to their readers, which will be released Friday through a Freedom of Information Act request. "The Post is limiting this to 100 spots for people who will work collaboratively in small teams to surface the most important information from the emails," according to its help wanted ad. As for the Times: "Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit."

Tabloid tales: Reality shows about journalism haven't exactly been conducive to hit-making TV. Bravo's 2006 series, "Tabloid Wars," which chronicled the hard-nosed, pavement-pounding ethos of the New York Daily News, was pretty much a flop. And the desperate young wanna-be rock writers who made up the cast of MTV's "I'm From Rolling Stone" that same year didn't exactly bolster the masses' enthusiasm for the profession.

But perhaps viewers would be more interested in the seedy underbelly of tabloid reporting? At least that's what the National Enquirer is banking on, according to fellow gossip-mongers over at Page Six. The New York Post gossip shop hears that the supermarket rag, whose mainstream credibility was elevated by its accurate reporting of the John Edwards sex scandal, "is pitching a reality show for CBS's Eye Too Productions about the paper's reporters unearthing scandals. CBS vet Hal Gessner is producing the weekly series, 'Breaking It: Behind the Scenes of the National Enquirer,' with the tabloid's executive editor Barry Levine and American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker." The show's "sizzle reel" reportedly includes footage shot during the course of the Edwards affair, which certainly couldn't be bad for ratings.

(Alastair Grant/AP)