The obituaries to the New Day appeared before the first edition. The announcement, 49 issues later, that the paper is closing has come with little surprise. The media bubble postmortem has latched onto not what went wrong but the lunacy of launching a new for-sale paper in the first place. Was failure really written from…
The injunction farce shows there are no boundaries in social media, according to a PR and branding consultant. Mark Borkowski said the truth will ultimately come out as it did when football’s Ryan Giggs tried to hide his infidelity. ‘This scenario is akin to King Canute who sat on the beach trying to hold back…
People are reading fewer print newspapers now than they were fourteen years ago. We know, hold the presses right? But we didn’t come here to tell you what you already knew. We’ve put together a graph plotting the circulations of five daily broadsheet papers over the past fourteen years. The overall shapes might be familiar,…
Last Wednesday, the cuddly, credit card provider Mastercard ran into an alleged ‘PR fail’ storm when their PR agency mishandled and misjudged a bevy of journalists they were inviting to the Brit awards. Scribblers claim that, in exchange for entry to the event, they were asked by email to guarantee coverage, and were requested to…
Quentin Tarantino’s outburst last week should have come as no surprise to anyone involved in the juggernaut of movie promotion. If anything, it is surprising that it hadn’t come sooner. It is all too easy when watching a five minute long video clip from such an interview to forget the hours and hours – if…
At Borkowski towers we took in John Major’s statesmanlike Leveson testimony with bated breath, gathered around a single laptop like blond-mopped 30s tots listening timorous but resolute to the velvety tones of Churchill on the wireless, the glow of the screen illuminating our haggard faces like a ray of hope stealing through the curtains of…
The Spider-Man musical has previewed on Broadway to a chorus of boos from the press and I am bewildered as to why Broadway has not harnessed the power of social networking to counter the effect of people like the New York Post’s Michael Riedel, otherwise known as the Butcher of Broadway. It’s a grossly unfair…
There’s a deal of speculation about how long Fabio Capello is to stay in the job as England’s manager – a statement was even put out before the decisive group match suggesting that his job was in jeopardy. It seems likely that he will go, and soon, despite a few bullish headlines suggesting that we…
Tiger Woods is preparing his comeback and the first step on his road to recovery is taking place tomorrow. It’s not clear what the event tomorrow morning is, other than it isn’t a press conference. Many are suggesting that it will be a day of apologies. I’m not convinced. It may be speculation, a leap…
I was asked to comment on the fallout from Tiger Woods’s bad week in the press by the Guardian last week – the resulting article appears in today’s Media section and online under the headline In Need of a Tigerish Attorney. I took a critical look at the way he and his lawyer, Mark NeJame,…