Rebekah Brooks is back. To use Robert Thompson’s words: “Rebekah will lead a great team at News UK into the digital future, while maximising the influence and reach of our newspapers, which remain the most informative and successful in Britain and beyond”…blah blah blah. Michael Wolff, the American author of a biography of Mr Murdoch…
The BBC crowned Liverpool player Luis Suarez the king of football controversy yesterday afternoon following the FA’s announcement that they have handed him a massive 10 match ban. The scandal has had scribblers on the sidelines outraged at football’s reputation since. Left, right and centre, commentators have been clamouring to declare that football’s reputation is…
Many media commentators are speculating on who exactly has the most to lose from the precipitous events caused by the News of the World hacking scandal. The obvious casualties are the hundred journalists who have been pushed out into the cold. Murdoch has withdrawn from BSkyB bid. Other titles are in a definitive tailspin. Andy…
In a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, or so it would seem to anyone born after 1989, there was a big TV name called Michael Elphick. He had a hit show, attracting millions of viewers. He’d been a party animal in his time and, for some reason, a Sunday taboid editor decided to take…
Yesterday was a momentous day for British journalism and, of course, the PR industry. The world’s biggest English speaking Sunday tabloid newspaper is dead. Rupert Murdoch’s action to try and halt the hurricane sweeping through his empire by taking a Butcher’s cleaver to his own corporate flesh was tactical filicide. It seems clear from the…
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace in 2005 for $580m. Yesterday it sold to an online ad company for around $35m. Few tears will be shed for Rupert’s $545m loss. Did anyone know the true value of MySpace? More pertinently, does anyone recall the MySpace hype? Current PR hot air suggests that other media darlings…
In the 21st Century, with the Twitter cycle outpacing the news cycle by a length, with fewer people working for newspapers and, with Murdoch insisting that content has taken a step up to Emperor, stories move too fast for journalists to stop for anything as paltry and deadbeat as a fact. The truth is dismal,…
Speculation surrounds the departure of Jonathan Ross from the BBC after 13 years – did he jump or was he pushed?
As the former editor of the News of the World turned PR man for David Cameron, Andy Coulson’s appearance before the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee the other day was always likely to be difficult – this is a high-pressure enquiry into the phone hacking scandal. His performance was a masterstroke,…
As someone who has been involved part and parcel in the modernisation of PR under the influence of the Murdoch papers, the internet and 24/7 news and who has watched from the inside as celebrities took to selling their stories to the press in the same manner as a butcher sells sausages, I am inclined…