MassCom Magazine

An ad in BT's long-running "Adam and Jane" campaign was banned for misleading customers over the speed of the company's broadband, a watchdog announced today.

Channel 5 has rejoined Project Canvas just a month after walking away, as the broadcaster's new owner, Richard Desmond, said the venture would shape the future of TV.

Broadcaster Andy Kershaw is to return to BBC Radio 3 after three years off-air as a result of personal problems, it was announced today.

Eccentric X Factor hopeful Shirlena Johnson has been thrown out of this year's Miss Great Britain contest after organisers discovered her real age when they watched her TV audition.

Tom McNally, a Liberal Democrat minister in the Ministry of Justice, suggested last week that the Coalition Government might introduce a new privacy law rather than allow judges to develop one according to their interpretation of Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention. Lord McNally told The Daily Telegraph: "If we are going to have a privacy law, it should be openly debated and freely decided by Parliament."

Is Rod Liddle angling for Richard Littlejohn's job on the Mail? His predictably provocative column in the Sunday Times reached new levels of offensiveness last week when he fired off a bullying rant against air hostesses.

If the British property market resembles a shrivelling party balloon, in Ireland it looks more like the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster. The bubble that started growing in the 1990s and accelerated out of control after 2002, when Ireland joined the euro, eventually burst spectacularly in 2008, and has yet to show any signs of recovery. Since the crash, those who lost a fortune or who have been left with unsellable property have been looking for someone to blame.

Vanessa Perroncel, the model who shot to fame after being accused of having had an affair with the former England captain John Terry, has made a surprise attack on the use of injunctions by footballers, after two England players last week succeeded in keeping their sex lives out of the press.

When the film Minority Report was in cinemas in 2002, they called it science fiction. As Tom Cruise's character walks through a shopping mall, he is assailed by talking billboards that recognise him and target him with personalised advertisements. "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now," one calls out.

Wall to wall coverage of the World Cup boosted the number of hours people spent watching television in the first six months of this year, according to research published today.

Dr Laura doesn't do tea and sympathy. For 30 years, she has been dispensing tough love to tens of thousands of listeners who call her radio talk show each day, seeking blunt, provocative and unashamedly conservative advice on how to cope with their most pressing personal problems.

They may not be the sexiest people in media, it's true. The marketers, the planners, the directors of communications, the analysts, the venture capitalists, the brand specialists and the digital strategists tend to sit in the shadows, while the content creators – the presenters, actors, writers and directors – flutter in the limelight of public recognition.

He never mentioned executive pay. Maybe it was the austere beauty of his surroundings in Edinburgh, the city where John Knox spent his final years. Or maybe it was just that James Murdoch was conscious that he himself enjoys a pay package said to be worth nearly £6m a year.

The publishing world's headlong rush to Apple's iPad has hit a big hitch. More than a dozen of the photo agencies that supply celebrity snapshots from the paparazzi are banding together to withhold their prized product unless it can get additional compensation from People magazine, resulting in the postponement of its iPad app.

It was Oscar Wilde who described conversation about the weather as the last refuge of the unimaginative. But then he had never met Tomasz "Shufflepants" Schafernaker.

A new case confirms that a judge-made privacy law, largely developed by Mr Justice Eady, has transformed the way in which the tabloids in general and the News of the World in particular operate.

Mark Durden-Smith will swap bug-eating in the Australian jungle for a ratings war on the fields of Exeter and Stockport as the new presenter of ESPN's Aviva Premiership coverage. The US-owned pay sports channel are taking over from Sky as the dominant broadcaster of England's domestic league by showing 43 live matches next season including the play-off final at Twickenham in May.

In Inside Sport – The Princess Royal at 60 (BBC1, Thursday) John Inverdale said to Princess Anne that the monarchy had become much more open in recent years. But Princess Anne has long seemed to be the public – if ever so slightly equine – face of the Royals.

It may sound unthinkable to anybody who has grown up with wall-to-wall Premier League football, but 25 years ago this week a new season began with not a single kick accessible to armchair viewers.

Film director Chris Atkins appears to have a death wish – having already taken on the collective might of tabloid newspapers, PR guru Max Clifford and Bob Geldof.