After a particularly difficult weekend helping out a poor innocent who was the subject of some unpleasant attention from a Sunday newspaper, a note arrived in my inbox from a pal who had heard about the dilemma. “Take a look at this to see how the weasel words and lies of a news desk are treated…
Times A £200 million national film centre. A permanent home for fashion shows in London. Funding for avant-garde film projects. A Davos-style arts and finance conference. These are among a range of commitments to the arts being set out by the Government next week. Mark Borkowski, who works in public relations for arts and media…
Media meltdowns never fail to astound me; the Archbishop of Canterbury’s PR faux pas last week is probably one of the biggest slip ups – it’s high on a list of cock ups alongside Pope Benedict XVI’s Islam blunder, Prescott’s Green Pledge, Stephen Byers getting his times-tables wrong, John Selwyn Gummer feeding his daughter a beef burger,…
The media circus moved out of my village on Sunday. Without doubt the best take on the surreal turn of events came from Cole Moreton. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/chalfords-donkey-derby-780514.html The aftermath seems to have divided the community; some suggest that it’s painted the village as full of eccentric geriatric freaks who can’t clamber up the hill, others have…
I am compelled to write about an extraordinary event that has spiralled today concerning my own sleepy village in Gloucestershire. Someone once wrote “..if ever a place deserved the often over-used cliché, “undiscovered gem,” Chalford is the place! ” The village is located in a ridiculously lovely valley bounded by strikingly steep hillsides. It’s an…
I often comment on the stupidity of PRs, but idiocy in media land is not only demonstrated by publicists, but also journalists. I was told two corking tales by a very well placed journalist friend of mine involving two astounding hack faux pas. The first was about none other than Britney Spears; a story was…
Two great opinion pieces in the Guardian today written by Peter Wilby on the subject of Alastair Campbell’s Cudlipp memorial lecture last week – http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/04/media.pressandpublishing – which neatly seg-ways into Nick Davies op ed rant to help push his book Flat Earth News. The opinion feature “Our media have become mass producers of distortion. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2251982,00.html…
I notice the Guardian has picked up on my blog over the weekend about Tom Cruise, Scientology and the web community. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/04/news
2008 is a bad PR year for Tom Cruise. “Being a scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else when you drive past. You know you have to do something about it because you know you’re the only one that can really help”. http://gawker.com/5002269/the-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientology-tried-to-suppress.
What a mistake that Christmas card was, says Jasper Gerard. Didn’t Derek Conway know that a Tory MP posing with his family meant he had something to hide? The Daily Telegraph 31st January 2008 Reaching for the marmalade, you glance at the photo on the Telegraph’s front page – and you are suddenly consumed by…