She may be facing the biggest crisis of her career but Maria Sharapova gave a master-class in damage limitation when she announced she had failed a drugs test. For this story not to leak out beforehand is extraordinary in this era of innuendo, which shows the level of negotiating power that her management have. The…
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,…
This week saw the birth of a great stuntster. Clayton Pettet, the student who exploded across the internet last October when he announced plans to lose his virginity for an artwork has finally made good on his promise. Well, sort of. According to the Telegraph the actual event involved no hanky panky, little nudity and…
In the greater scheme of things, does it really matter who William Hague shares a room with? I’m sure his wife, Ffion, would think it does, especially as she’s the one who’s been thrown unceremoniously to the wolves in the name of promoting her husband’s heterosexuality, in the wake of the rumour-mongering hoo-ha over his…
It’s been a good week for stunts – the Barefoot Bandit’s a classy effort, but a little over-complicated. More gloriously simple is Island’s approach to promoting Tom Jones’s new album of hymns, Praise and Blame. Leaving the praise to the critics, who see it as an equivalent to Johnny Cash’s late bid for credibility, Island’s…
The Media Buying world is clearly in need of some PR help to drag it out of the 1980s. I found myself reading, jaw dropping to the table, this Media Week article by MediaCom’s Claudine Collins. It’s as if it had been ghosted by Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris and Helen Fielding – it reads like…
New media commentators have decreed that the age of the personal PR minder is dead. “Long live Twitter” is their clarion call. It’s the new communication tool for folk in the public eye. Openness and willingness to feed the twitter cycle offers an opportunity to unveil the ‘real you’; to be judged as well as…
I took part in a debate at the University of Westminster last night alongside that wily old fox Max Clifford (the second time I’ve shared a stage with him – it always makes for an interesting experience) and others, discussing Celebrity Brands: Desire, Dollars and Danger? It was a rather curious and disappointing night; most…
Jedward may finally be gone from the X Factor, but that’s no reason to expect that they have automatically dipped straight off the fame radar. For all of you wondering why and how they lasted so long on the X Factor, I contributed to a couple of articles in the Independent and the Telegraph looking…
A bumper day for picture stories in the Telegraph. First up, there’s the photo op for the launch of the Guinness Book of Records, which shows that the Barnum model of photo opportunity has never gone away – this picture of He Pingping, the Mongolian man, who, at 2ft 4in, is the world’s shortest man…