Britain’s Got Talent has rolled around again and again the nation is gripped. Out with the old and in with the new. It’s been this way for a while. Remember, it’s not five minutes since the X Factor was all anyone could talk about, but that’s seeped away into the mists of time as BGT…
I have known Keith Schilling for many years; he’s a highly able human being. On many occasions I’ve worked alongside some brilliant folk in his firm and have regularly taken part in their brilliant, thought-provoking, well attended seminars. In the last few days, Keith has been pictured in many broadsheet newspapers as journalists debate and…
It’s an unimaginable horror to be in the middle of an awful tabloid scandal, your human frailty laid bare. Yes dear reader – I’ve been there when it’s happened. It’s a dark, sad, dank and lonely space. Watching and being with the subject is not the most edifying part of my job, witnessing a tsunami…
A wry smile crossed my lips when I heard the news that lawyers have applied for a court order to force Twitter to hand over the person behind the whistleblower account. It’s taken one anonymous tweeter to spectacularly out the famous footballer hiding behind his privacy injunction and, in a heartbeat, neuter the legal profession….
It’s impossible to escape the stories spilling out everywhere about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child – but did you know about the Sperminator’s long-lost half brother? Neither did I, but then I saw the clip below – a clip from Russian TV featuring a terrible mime from a man who looked vaguely familiar. I did a…
Continuing the debate on the challenges that the PR industries face in the digital age, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair underlines some of the issues that I opened for discussion last week. It’s a hot topic, particularly as the story has broken at a time when many companies are becoming less and less tolerant of any…
According to Private Eye, Times media correspondent Patrick Foster was sacked after being earwigged by the BBC’s head of Press during a call in which he made a rather inappropriate comment to Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer. Paul Mylrea, head of press at the Beeb, swiftly raced off a letter of complaint to…
My favourite website of the moment remembers a long forgotten media age and celebrates the memory of a breed of journalism that seems to have vanished. The website is thegentlemenranters.com and it features splendid stories and reminiscences about such legends as the late Peter Batt and Leo Clancy, both of whom died recently.
This is the modern age, the age of the super-injunction, the age when celebrities want to keep their dirty laundry in bomb- and journalist-proof cages so that not even the slightest whiff of scandal can escape. Of course, it’s just not as easy as that, as the furore over someone posting information on Twitter about…
I’ll be appearing on BBC2 next week, as one of the interviewees in three part series Business Nightmares, with Evan Davis. I’ll be appearing in all three episodes, which cover product design and manufacture, marketing and PR and strategy and deals, discussing stories such as Sunny Delight, Hoover free flights, Ratner, Mini, New Coke and…