✒On a whistle-stop tour of Europe last week – including "a great few hours in Berlin", he tweeted – Rupert Murdoch met the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Ankara. Murdoch-watchers believe he's still interested in the TV station ATV and the newspaper Sabah, having considered a bid when they went on sale five years ago; and Erdogan's son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, happens to be chief executive of Calik Holding, the conglomerate that bought them. (A potential stumbling-block, though, is Murdoch's existing papers' vigorous support for Israel). Disappointingly, reports failed to indicate if Rupert is already on "back door" terms with Erdogan, as with Brown and Cameron, or still humiliatingly forced to enter the PM's residence like a run-of-the-mill mogul.
✒ Marking International Women's Day grouchily in the Independent, columnist Laurie Penny argued the only way to tackle "the men who still run the world" was "to make them afraid", with "fewer business lunches, more throwing punches". Unless Monkey has missed significant advances in the in-house feminist struggle, the Indy's owner, editor, deputy editor, executive editor, news editor and foreign editor and the editors of i and the Sindy are all male. Unarmed combat training may be required before they next let Penny into the building.
✒ To the launch of Radio 4's The Listening Project, which this month will start broadcasting people's recordings – or will they be Towie-style recreations? – of their "conversations that really matter", initially in short bursts before news bulletins. It's a potentially appealing initiative and Fi Glover is presenting, but top BBC bods already sound a little desperate. "Is it a bit bland and boring?" one senior figure wondered aloud, and an even more senior figure could be heard glumly writing it off as "a slow burner" – understood to be the latest BBC code for "disaster".
✒ "Kirsty Wark is in the chair tomorrow night," Jeremy Paxman signed off on his final shift last week, before slyly adding "lucky old you". Naughty, but the Newsnight inquisitor did have a potential excuse for being even spikier than usual – perhaps he'd just seen the first ratings for his BBC1 series Empire, at 3.9 million, well behind those for "Sir" Andrew Marr's The Diamond Queen, which preceded it in the same slot.
✒Monkey's advice to BBC4 boss Richard Klein? Try to get your presenters' names right before bragging about them. Battling illness as he celebrated his channel's 10th birthday on senior staff blog About the BBC, the cuts-hit controller clearly had trouble differentiating between the historian Lucy Worsley ("Worseley") and celebrity-infested London eatery The Wolseley as he listed his faves since 2002 (with neither Curb Your Enthusiam nor Mad Men deemed worth mentioning). Kleinian eccentricity was evident too as he praised Andrew Graham-Dixon's series for being "effortlessly propositional" – which may suggest the art critic tossing out philosophical ideas, but more commonly involves "an invitation to engage in sexual intercourse".