Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 17 November. Here’s our daily round-up of media news.

🗞️Your quiz question for a Monday morning today is: Who owns the Telegraph?*

ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews won’t help you with this one because the answer is far from simple. The simple answer: it remains in limbo (I will give you the technical answer at the end of today’s email).

The title is now set to go up for auction again with all former bidders potentially back in play.

We round up the runners and riders here.

I suspect The Spectator and GB News owner Sir Paul Marshall might have the most to gain from buying the Telegraph – it would give him a formidable right-wing media empire. He also has cash himself and plenty of rich and similarly ideologically motivated friends and would be unlikely to encounter any competition hurdles (given he doesn’t own any other newspapers).

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📺The BBC hopes its apology to Donald Trump and retraction of a misleadingly edited Panorama documentary will draw a line under the dispute.

Trump, by contrast, has raised the stakes saying he will seek up to $5bn from the corporation (or around one full year of licence fee income).

There are strong legal reasons why the BBC should not pay Trump a dime (which we set out here).

My view is that it would be better for the long-term reputation of the BBC (and for press freedom worldwide) if the BBC robustly defends this spurious legal action.

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⚽ And we spoke to the CEO of Footballco about how the business is planning to cross the $100m revenue milestone this year despite taking a heavy hit to traffic from changes at Google.

Juan Delgado said Footballco has saved money by automating some of its content production (such as match previews) but that AI has not cost any journalists their jobs at the publisher. Video and e-commerce are growing sources of revenue for Footballco which has also benefited from growing interest in women’s football in the US.

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*QUIZ ANSWER: The Telegraph is currently effectively owned by the Abu Dhabi ruling family.

It was bought by Redbird IMI in late 2023 after the group provided a loan to the Barclay family to repay £1.2bn of Lloyds Bank debts. Redbird IMI’s main investor is the Abu Dhabi royal family, through Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

The deal valued the Telegraph and The Spectator at £600m. Having already sold The Spectator for £100m IMI Redbird has a further £500m to recoup.

Sheikh Mansour currently has no say in how the Telegraph is run because the governance of the title is split between the independent directors (appointed by Department for Culture, Media and Sport) and the board of the Telegraph Media Group.

🗞️News In Brief

News publishers have celebrated a victory in the first stage of