From our London media correspondent
Gavin Haycock

Whether you love or loathe celebrity news stories, spare a thought for executives trying to figure out what sells best.

During a Q&A session with British law lords investigating media ownership issues, details about what News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch thinks about the volume of celebrity copy came from Rebekah Wade, editor of the Sun, Britain’s top-selling paper. (The Sun is published by News International, part of News Corp.)

Wade says Murdoch calls her regularly and often discusses her love of celebrity coverage that sometimes leaves him scratching his head and wondering what all the fuss is about.

“Mr Murdoch is often dismayed by the amount of celebrity coverage I put in the paper and particularly on ‘Big Brother‘ (the reality television show),” she says. “He can’t understand why I devote so much space to ‘Big Brother’.”

Murdoch is not alone. During his session with the British law lords, Pierre Lesourd, general manager for the UK and Ireland at AFP, which was founded in 1835, says that whether or not to pursue celebrity content is a divisive issue.

“Inside the AFP it is a big debate,” he says. Given France’s strict privacy rules and the possibility that the country’s president Nicolas Sarkozy may have married his new
girlfriend and former model Carla Bruni, it is not surprising that such dilemmas are in the spotlight. The trouble is, clients simply want more and more celebrity content, says Lesourd.

“Sometimes it is difficult to fix a limit of what is news and what is not news and that throws us back onto the PR’s turf,” he said.

To underscore his point, Lesourd said that although AFP generates millions of photographs, the most downloaded image for the agency in 2007 was …. you guessed it, one of Britain’s Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton.

(Reuters file photo)