Friday, November 27, 2009

Here's a couple we did earlier...

Another one for the mantelpiece, courtesy of the European Newspaper Awards.

Was this a case of months of planning - or just an example of the amazing things you can achieve when you're hard up for a front page picture? You decide.

Either way, we're gonna need a bigger mantelpiece people.
What Will they do next?

Congratulations to Will Lewis on his latest promotion - this time to launch a new division of Telegraph Digital following his Harvard sabbatical.

I'm not sure what a move to Euston means for the man Murdoch Mclellan first hired as City Editor then promoted to Deputy Editor even before he'd finished his gardening leave at The Times.

But it was only a matter of time before Tony Gallagher cashed in his brownie points over the MPs expenses exclusive to take the editor's chair.

What intrigues me most about this, though, is the promise of 50 new digital jobs.

The Telegraph Group has come on leaps and bounds, but one thing they have got disgracefully wrong over the past year or so is the misguided way it it has discarded some of its best talent, particularly among the more anonymous, junior ranks. If a stint at business school has taught Lewis anything, I hope it is how to recognise where the real value in a workforce lies.

And, maybe, invite a few of them back.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

A timely intervention

I've just joined an interesting think-tank which aims to explore emerging cross-media business models.

It's an academic network funded by London's Kings College and Bristol's Brunel University and has the backing of a number of diverse digital businesses and the AOP.

It's early days and I'll report back on progress. This space needs to be watched.

PS: a small boast. We've just bagged another award. Need a bigger mantelpiece.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Katie pays the Price

I hope the Sun’s first-person headline on Katie Price’s jungle torment was rhetorical. Since she returned to I’m a Celebrity last week, strutting around in a Lara Croft outfit and telling everyone she was there for “closure” when she meant exposure, viewers have been voting for her to do every gruelling, filthy and frankly, highly disturbing task on offer. Thus the question: Why are they picking on me?

The answer, as your publicist must surely have told you, is simple: that’s what you are there for.

Anyone who builds themselves into a massively lucrative brand by taking their clothes off, having boob job after lip job after boob job, earns a bundle from a fly-on-the-wall documentaries on their every movements and flogs their wedding pix for substantial sums must realise that is their role in life.

This show is built on the premise that viewers can pay small amounts via their phone bills to put minor and rather annoying celebs in the stocks, happy in the knowledge that the show’s producers will throw more than tomatoes and rotting eggs at them.

And given the C-list group they have in there at the moment, a cockroach or two down Katie’s cleavage is, frankly, the best we can hope for. Which is also probably why she attracts a considerably higher fee than her camp mates.

That aside, let's hope the medical support we keep hearing about is as good as we’d hope. Sideshow that Price is, can it really be right to subject anyone to such pressure? Is it wise for someone with a genuine water phobia to be entombed underground in the dark surrounded by rats – and then literally flushed by a sudden and surprise torrent into an underground tank and left screaming to get out?

To give her credit, she does get stuck in. But all the controlled conditions and teams of medics on hand doesn't mean someone can’t have a heart attack?