media & PR archive
How to get the job of issuing a press release calling on yourself to change your own decision
Never let it be said that the worlds of politics and media are overly self-referential… but Joe Otten has spotted the wonderful story of the Labour press officer with the job of issuing a press release calling on himself to change a decision that he had made.
Ouch, that’s some newspaper error
From the latest ruling of the Press Complaints Commission (with my emphasis): The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against the Alloa and Hillfoots Wee County News under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, after it published a front-page article about a local housing association which it said was involved in [...]
The First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life, Fortune and Tragedy of Rachel Beer by Eilat Negev & Yehuda Koren
Britain’s first female national newspaper editor, Rachel Beer, is a surprisingly little known person, all the more so given her lively and interesting family history and that she edited not only one but two newspapers, both of which are still very much with us – The Observer and The Sunday Times. (The first Sunday newspaper [...]
How a print publication prospered by switching to online – and not chasing traffic
There’s a fascinating piece over on The Media Briefing about how Computer Weekly went from print to digital: Ending the printed magazine was, admittedly, something of a milestone, given that Computer Weekly had been around since 1966, the world’s first weekly technology magazine… We’re pretty proud of what we’ve delivered – but that success has [...]
The most interesting sentence I’ve read about the Leveson report
It’s from Nick Clegg’s statement to Parliament after the publication of the Leveson report: Let us not forget that of the five Press Complaints Commission chairs, three were serving parliamentarians who took a party whip. Curious that a newspaper industry so busy telling us how politicians must not be let anywhere near their regulation is [...]
If nothing else, Leveson should herald a new approach to coalition government
A very sensible twist on the long-running differentiation debate.
So, where are the ITV resignations?
George Entwistle has, rightly, resigned for the combination of the Newsnight blunders and his own failure to show good leadership in public. (His final Radio 4 Today program interview will, I’m sure, feature in many future training sessions on how not to handle a crisis and indeed how not to ignore social media.) But of [...]
Media regulation: can you spot the fake quote?
A leader in one of today’s newspapers, a comment from an MP. One real, one fake. Can you spot which is which? The newspaper: Politicians like to claim they are thick-skinned; but given the chance, they will legislate to keep nosey journalists out of their business. It is self-serving – or downright naïve – to [...]
16 deaths or 957 deaths: which is the bigger story?
Choosing which tragedies to cover, and how much attention to give them, is an inevitable part of journalism. There are simply too many around the world to cover them all, let alone to cover them all in detail, even if you have the freedom of a website without space limitations. There are still the limitations [...]
What do people actually do online?
Less porn and more family history than you might expect. That's the answer from the latest Nielsen data on UK internet usage.
