Sunday Times prepares itself for eye-strain class action as James Harding is airbrushed from history

Axegrinder fears that just as the legal fallout from the hacking scandal is beginning to clear News UK could be facing a new class action for eye strain following the Sunday Times redesign at the weekend.

According to editorial director Eleanor Mills the new design manages to increase the number of words on a page while also increasing the amount of white space, making the paper easier and clearer to read. Axegrinder begs to differ, but I did at least managing to make out – through squinted eyes – the runners and riders in the journalism section of the new-look paper’s list of the 500 most influential people in the UK.

Guardian and BBC contributor Steve Hewlett chaired the panel which put together the media list for the Sunday Times, assisted by Sunday Times journalists and Debretts.

No argument with him putting Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre at the top of the tree. But next up we have Times editor John Witherow, who for some reason outranks the editor of Britain’s best selling daily Sun editor David Dinsmore – who doesn’t figure at all in the list of 20 journalists ranked for “influence, achievement and the capacity to inspire”.

Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens is also on there, naturally, as is Times columnist Caitlin Moran and Times reporter Andrew Norfolk. In fact Times Newspapers managed to have more names on the list than any other organisation.

But one rather glaring omission is the man in charge of news output across the UK’s most popular journalism outlet by a country mile – BBC head of news James Harding.

Could his omission have anything to do with the fact that he was sacked as Times editor in December 2012?