Crikey

Editers difenately still relevent. Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. Union chief Maureen Dawson explained that “Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long…To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it.”

Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration:

Col Allan’s inappropriate penis. The New York Post editor fired after speaking out against a cartoon depicting the author of the president’s stimulus package as a dead chimpanzee has sued the paper. And as part of her complaint, Sandra Guzman levels some remarkable, embarrassing, and potentially damaging allegations, many starring NY Post editor in chief Col Allan. Here’s a highlight: “On another occasion, upon information and belief, Defendant Allan approached a female employee during a party at the Post, rubbed his penis up against her and made sexually suggestive comments about her body, including her breasts, causing that female employee to feel extremely uncomfortable and fearing to be alone with him.” — The Huffington Post

Witches to vanish. The ABC Network in the US has terminated its newish 2009-10 drama, The Witches of Eastwick, by announcing that it is not ordering any more episodes. Witches was picked up by the Nine Network. Witches, which is based on the book by the late John Updike is the third attempt to turn it into a TV series. The movie with Cher and Jack Nicholson worked, but not this version for TV. It was averaging five million a night. — Glenn Dyer

No Matt, back away from the shark! Don’t jump … over … the shark! The MasterChef juggernaut rolls on, and so too do the cash-ins. The latest tenuous link off the rank is Music From Another Platter, a two-disc compilation curated, if that is the right word, by Age writer turned MasterChef critic turned instantly recognisable celebrity Matt Preston. Disc one is for cooking, disc two for eating. — The Age

Reuters reports on its own antitrust suit. EU antitrust regulators launched an investigation on Tuesday into how Thomson Reuters codes its financial market data feeds, saying it might discourage customers from moving to rival firms. The European Commission, which polices competition in the 27-country European Union, said it had launched the investigation on its own initiative and it did not imply that it had proof that Thomson Reuters had broken the law.The Commission said it would examine whether Thomson Reuters could prevent clients from mapping Reuters Instrument Codes (RICs) to identification codes of other datafeed suppliers. - Reuters

Putting tweeps on the map. A new feature that Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — “geolocation” — holds the potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable. The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location. - New York Times

Google redefines privacy. The launch of Google Dashboard last week was subdued by Google standards. Lurking behind the convenience of Google Dashboard, which lets you control all your Google information and services in one place, is the basic, uncomfortable question: “What might Google do with all the information it has about me?” Our attachment to a definition of privacy that was born in a different time and place seems misaligned to the realities of today’s internet world. - Advertising Age

The strange case of Coca Cola and the spam texts. “Ideas agency” Tongue, which recently rebranded from Ikon spin-off New Dialogue, has been forced to pay $22,000 to the communications regulator and make a legally enforceable undertaking about its future conduct after arranging for spam mobile messages to be sent on behalf of client Coca Cola. - Mumbrella