On the plane on the way back from Davos to New York, I caught up with The Bourne Ultimatum, the Paul Greengrass-directed action thriller, starring Matt Damon.

Like many Hollywood films these days, it was a travelogue of countries as well as a drama. Madrid, Tangiers, Manhattan, Waterloo Station . . . it went to all the most glamorous spots.

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One of the things I am getting used to, having moved from the UK to the US, is that magazines are free on this side of the Atlantic.

Well, perhaps not free, but certainly very cheap. Magazines offer subscriptions at cheap rates in order to build circulations that they can guarantee to advertisers as the so-called "rate base". Buying magazines on news stands is a very poor financial move because it is so much cheaper to subscribe.

As an example, among the latest magazine offers I have received at home is one to get a year’s supply of Newsweek magazine for $20. That compares with the cover price for a year’s supply of $267 - a handy saving of 92 per cent.

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Sometimes I sympathise with Rupert Murdoch.

Mr Murdoch has made little secret of the fact that he wants more hard news and fewer long features on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He would like it to be more immediate and less reflective.

This has generally gone down badly with US journalists and media types, who are schooled in the idea that reporting yesterday’s news must give way to forward-looking, original reporting and analysis. This piece by Jack Shafer, Slate’s entertaining media critic, advocates this idea.

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To watch the US primaries, as I have been doing this weekend, is to be bombarded with endless pledges of "change" as other candidates scramble to react to Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucus.

The mantra that most irritates me, however, is the banal insistence of Wolf Blitzer, the main politics presenter on Cable News Network on referring repeatedly to a (as far as I can discern, run-of-the-mill) bunch of talking heads in the CNN studios as "the best political team on television".

I swear that he must have uttered the phrase 20 times as I was listening to CNN on C-Span radio on Sunday afternoon. Apparently, CNN won an Emmy for its analysis and it has seized upon this as a branding opportunity.

Other media outlets, the FT included, are not shy about advertising their awards. But please, Mr Blitzer, could you cease this inane repetition? We are only at the start of the election year and I will not be able to stand it if you keep it up until November. Others also seem to be feeling the pain from CNN’s onslaught of boasting.

It is the voters who will decide the next president and it is the viewers who choose "the best political team on television". Not Wolf Blitzer.

What is the most powerful newspaper in the world? This weekend, it have been the Des Moines Register, which usually exists in relative obscurity but every four years has a big say in which candidates are nominated by the state of Iowa to be Democrat and Republican presidential candidates.

This year, as before, Iowa and New Hampshire have a disproportionate influence on who gets chosen as party candidates because they go first. The first vote this year is the Iowa caucus (the rules of which are too difficult to explain, or indeed for me to grasp), which will happen on February 3.

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Continuing my fascination with the Wall Street Journal and its takeover by Rupert Murdoch, I turned to the newspaper’s masthead this morning for a spot of Kremlinology.

The old US masthead, at the bottom of the second editorial page, featured Gordon Crovitz, the publisher, on the left side - the column reserved for editorial - and Peter McPherson and Richard Zannino, chairman and chief executive respectively of Dow Jones & Co, topping the business names on the right.

That was a clear enough division of church and state. So what would the post-takeover masthead look like, I wondered, after the fuss over whether Mr Murdoch will interfere in editorial matters?

The answer is: the masthead’s former strict division of left and right has been, ahem, superseded. Marcus Brauchli, the paper’s managing editor, is now at the top of the left-hand column with Clare Hart, executive vice-president of Dow Jones, at the top of the right-hand column.

But floating above both columns are now: Rupert Murdoch, chairman, Leslie Hinton, chief executive, and Robert Thomson, publisher. They are, by implication, the three kings of everything below. That answers that question.

Of course, none of this resolves the vexed issue of whether Dow Jones is the greatest brand in financial journalism.

Roy Greenslade is upset about a story in today’s New York Times about Rupert Murdoch’s impending takeover of the Wall Street Journal. Personally, I cannot see too much wrong with the article, although it might have made more of the fact that the NYT is directly in Mr Murdoch’s sights.

But I do wonder about one line in it, the statement that:

For The Journal’s editors and reporters, this is a time of both anxiety and anticipation about what will happen when more than a century of independent family ownership reaches its end.

Actually, Dow Jones & Co was not family-owned. It was a public company controlled by the Bancroft family through a two-tier share voting structure and it has been bought by News Corporation, a public company controlled by the Murdoch family through a two-tier share voting structure. I am not sure how much of a change in status this amounts to.

Granted, Dow Jones was a small company and News Corp is a big one. Granted also that the Bancrofts did not take a view on editorial content while Mr Murdoch has ink all over his fingers. I still find that bald assertion of the Journal losing its "independence" debatable.

This is particularly so when reported in The New York Times, a newspaper that presumably regards itself as "independent" but is owned by a public company controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a two-tier share voting structure.

Independence can be in the eye of the beholder.

My Financial Times column this week takes a look at the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike and the freelance walk-out at MTV Networks.

I argue that collective bargaining only has a limited role for professionals of this kind because the people who do best are those who negotiate their own contracts. But collective action has an emerging role outside the workplace - trade unions or mutual groups can organise health insurance and pension schemes both for employees and freelances.

You can read it here and post comments below.

On the principle that one is always most interested in news that is close to home, I have been watching with fascination the appointments of Robert Thomson, editor of The Times, as publisher of the Wall Street Journal and James Harding, The Times’ business editor, as his successor.

As noted by Roy Greenslade, this means that former Financial Times journalists are now in editorial charge of the Journal, The Times and the Telegraph (Will Lewis is editor-in-chief). The FT suddenly appears to have become a management school for editors.

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Making comparisons between the output of old media journalists (such as me) and bloggers (such as me, I suppose) is a risky business. Anyone who does so, from either side, is prone to get his head bitten off by people from the other.

But my eye has been caught by the coincidence of views on the topic between Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times and Nick Denton, proprietor of the blog outfit Gawker Media and my former Financial Times colleague and book co-author.

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