The Breakfast Meeting: Managing Campaign Coverage, and Elisabeth Murdoch Steps Out

By NOAM COHEN

The Romney campaign is planning to change the order of events at the Republican National Convention to maximize media coverage, Jeff Zeleny writes. Noting that the television networks won't be covering the convention on Monday - the first of its four days - the campaign said it would hold the more tedious nomination roll call then, instead of in its traditional spot two days later. The plan is to have Mitt Romney go “over the top” and become the nominee in time for the networks' nightly news.

• Some things, however, including the possible arrival of Tropical Storm Isaac at Tampa next week along with the conventioneers, defy even the most tidy of plans. Organizers are keeping their fingers crossed, thinking that storm either is likely to take a path away from the city or will break up before getting there, Lizette Alvarez writes.

• The tightly controlled message of the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan ticket means tha t atmosphere on the plane carrying Mr. Ryan and the press corps is friendly but with a chill, Trip Gabriel writes. Mr. Ryan is inclined to make kind gestures to reporters who cover his campaign, while not answering their questions. Mr. Gabriel writes: “When Mr. Ryan walked to the back of his plane Thursday night, on a flight between Missouri and Michigan, he was set upon by reporters so hungry for access that video cameras and tape recorders were thrust in his face.”

• Mr. Romney was called out by a television reporter, Shaun Boyd, of the CBS-owned station in Denver, who was among four local reporters who were given five minutes each with the candidate, Brian Stelter reported. There was a condition for getting the interview, Ms. Boyd told viewers: “The one stipulation to the interview was that I not ask him about abortion or Todd Akin,” the Republican Senate candidate who has stirred controversy for his comments about “legitimate rape.” A Romney ca mpaign spokeswoman said, “This is not how we operate. The matter is being addressed.”

Facebook is transforming itself into a “mobile first” company, Brian X. Chen writes after visiting the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., a shift that is being felt in how engineers are assigned and what gets priority in development. On Thursday, the company replaced the sluggish apps for the iPhone and iPad with ones that work much quicker because they were programmed specifically for Apple. Becoming better at mobile won't solve the riddle of how best to sell advertising on the smaller screens of mobile devices, but the company is optimistic about using “sponsored stories” that distribute a user's endorsements to Facebook friends as ads.

The Sun, the tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, on Friday became the first British newspaper to ignore warnings by royal officials and publish photographs of a naked Prince Harry taken at a Las Vega s hotel suite. The images, which were originally published by the gossip Web site TMZ, have traveled around the world but had remained off of British news sites. The Sun used its own front page to downplay the significance of the decision, running a subheadline (under the main headline of Heir It Is) that is the opposite of the typical Exclusive!: “Pic of naked Harry you've already seen on the Internet.”

The timing forced Elisabeth Murdoch, a daughter of Rupert's, to defend the tabloid's decision on the same day she gave a high-minded lecture on the duties of media companies â€" or, as she put it, “We would all do well to remember Voltaire's - or even Spider-man's - caution that ‘With great power comes great responsibility.' ” As for The Sun's decision, she said she “felt bad” for the prince, according to The Telegraph, but added, “It would be very sad if we lived in a world where you can't publish that.”

• Ms. Murdoch's talk, the James MacTa ggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television festival, was widely seen as staking out a different vision for News Corporation, which bought her TV production company, Shine, for $674 million in 2011. The lecture was notable for taking on her brother James directly, noting that his MacTaggart lecture three years earlier had presented a skewed vision of media and society by only looking at market considerations: “James was right that if you remove profit, then independence is massively challenged but I think that he left something out: the reason his statement sat so uncomfortably is that profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”

• Media writers in Britain described the speech, which included a brief discussion of the failing corporate culture that led to phone-hacking, as an attempt by Ms. Murdoch to play a prominent role in News Corporation.