For the record: 25/01/2010

'Sky's appeal on competition issues is dismissed.' The satellite broadcaster is ordered to sell most of its 17.9 per cent stake in ITV

PD's encore?

Tomorrow night the final South Bank Show awards will take place at London's Dorchester Hotel and among the stars lined up to hand out the awards is the novelist PD James.

Fresh from her savaging of BBC director-general Mark Thompson on Today, will the great crime writer use this platform to give ITV bosses a pasting as they abandon the arts? I suspect that the audience, which will include Rachel Weisz, David Attenborough and Andrew Lloyd Webber, will very much be hoping so.

Core blimey

Four appears to be the magic number at Wapping right now. That's the percentage of the one million or so Sunday readers of Times Online who go deep into the site, devouring story after story, as if they were holding a print copy of The Sunday Times and generating most of the 4.6m Sunday page impressions. News International will now go after those 40,000 as the first "core conversions" who can be persuaded to shell out for access when the online papers "decouple" in the spring and The Sunday Times gets a bespoke paid-for site.

Digital reshuffle

On The Times, the responsibility for getting the site ship shape for paywall day has been handed to the paper's leader writer and blogger Daniel Finkelstein, who has been made Executive Editor. Colleagues worry, however, that Finkelstein, a former adviser to John Major and William Hague and once a prospective Tory MP, might soon be in line for better offers from David Cameron.

German lesson

Andrew Graham-Dixon has begun work on the next instalment of The Art of... project for BBC Four, and having covered the great artists of Spain, Italy and Russia we might reasonably expect him to turn his attentions to the land of Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse. But no. Graham-Dixon is heading to Germany, the country where the BBC Four controller Richard Klein grew up, on a farm breeding New Forest ponies. Expect to learn lots about Albrecht Durer.