Bye bye Big Brother, enter Little Britain

Channel Four should be congratulated for unwittingly doing more to expose Britain’s racist undercurrent than any TV documentary.

I say unwittingly because it’s, sadly, the natural consequence of putting such a cross-section of our so-called integrated society under the microscope.

No amount of subterfuge, lapel cameras, hidden microphones or Donal Mcintyres could have unearthed the uncomfortable attitudes and reactions we are now having to face.

From the moment three girls giggling under a duvet like some teenage sleepover began to isolate Shilpa Shetty to Channel Four’s denial, Ofcom boss Ed Richards’ refusal to “rush to judgment” and Gordon Brown’s repeated use of the world “tolerance,” Big Brother gave way to Little Britain.

What does that collectively say? We simply don’t know we’re doing it. If we do, we’re in denial and if we’re not, we simply don’t like to talk about it.

In fact, so cautious have been some broadcasters that many are still referring to these blatant ethnic attacks as “alleged racism”.

Viewer complaints have been rising by the hour like the death toll after an earthquake. Technology has helped here. Bloggers, dedicated websites, email discussions, SMS appeals by TV and radio have opened up the discussion. But they haven’t inflated the issue as some have suggested.

Many have found it good sport. Sheena Hastings of the Yorkshire Post summed up the scene more vividly than most when she described an Afghan hound surrounded by pit-bulls.

Every time we have to deal with something so uncomfortably close to home, we trivialise it on the basis that we all know it happens but, hey, life goes on. Then we ask, why aren’t the papers reporting the real issues such as global warming, famine or or Iraq?

They are. But this is the issue of the moment and the press is good at tapping into the public mood and writing about what people are talking about. And I make no excuses for repeating myself here - that’s the saving grace in all this.

I’d rather this appalling reflection of ourselves prompted public outrage than the uncomfortably silence that allows it to happen.


PR tip to Gordon Brown: don’t overdo tolerant. We tolerate noisy neighbours and unruly kids, not someone who has carved a fabulously successful career in one of the most thriving film industries in the world.

PR tip to Dirk: When is the A-team going to show its Face and come to the rescue?

Big brother, bigger issue

I’m dismayed but not a bit surprised by the racism that has been pervading the Big Brother house of late. But I’m also encouraged by the sheer numbers who have recognised it and complained to Channel Four and Ofcom.

Sadly, the perpetrators – an Essex girl, a WAG and a fleeting pop star – are probably not even aware of it. And that’s the saddest thing of all. Factory floors, pubs and Jeremy Kyle shows are full of people who think racism is throwing stones at corner shops and making monkey noises on football terraces. Suggest they were guilty and they’d dismiss it by showing you their Beyonce albums.

As if to prove the point, TV-am led on it this morning – along with a flood of letters from viewers dismissing the claims as over-sensitive. I rest my case.

If the show really is to live up to its claim of creating a human laboratory and not just an outlet for the once well-known to revive their careers, this could ironically be its moment.

It can't be wrong, it's in the paper

How not to set a good example. I've just completed a gruelling two days of marking on a student media project. To pass, the students have to have something published. To do well, the unsubbed version has to be worth paying for. I mark everything with a red pen like the one the Daily Sketch prodnose wore behind his ear in the Printer's Pie.

One lad scored well with a vox-pop for a local paper but included the phrase: the building will be demolished and replaced by retail outlets and residential units. I circled them and wrote in the margin: shops? - flats?

Then I read the cutting he'd added at the back. It was in print. A result. A page lead, complete with byline and pictures. Oh, and and retail outlets and residential units.

Memo to subs: careful you don't end up hiring students who know more than you.

Sites for sore eyes

Spent many hours at the end of last week judging the online category for one of the country’s leading local paper publishers. Not saying which one as I’ve made my choice and will keep shtum until the night.

The prospect of surfing literally scores of sites and navigating my way through endless podcasts, videos and blogs from people I’d never heard of appeared quite a quest.

Happily, the experience was quite different. Having drawn up a pretty strong shortlist I found I bonded with a few of them and began following the progress of stories in places I’d never heard of. I actually felt quite a lift when a posting at 10.40 headlined something like: Man held in pelican crossing death inquiry suddenly switched to Man charged with pelican crossing death half an hour later.

While the rest of you were following developments in Northern Ireland and the fallout in Iraq, I was awaiting a timeline of tragedy on what was surely the worst blackspot in Nether-Bottom-on-Tweed.

Seriously, some of the innovation was heartening. Local papers are no longer enjoying the heydays I knew but they’re making a good fist of new markets. I noted quite a few ideas and circled one or two as “possibles” for a project I’m about to work on myself. And there was one piece of video so off-beat, I made a mental note to try to headhunt the editor over canapes at the awards do.

The best of it though was that many of these sites were staffed by what, old Fleet Streeters would call a man and his dog.

You wouldn’t know it though.

Big Brother - who's in the running?

I’m not surprised celebrity Big Brother drew an audience of more than seven million last night. The entertainment value of what has become the ultimate in fly-on-the-wall viewing is only strengthened by the sight of so-called celebs meeting for the first time and wondering who everyone else is.

Aside from Carole Malone, a tabloid columnist who recognised everyone, as you’d expect, and the pleasingly savvy Leo Sayer, what a joy it was to see the footballer’s wife and a low-rent rock singer oblivious to the presence of one of the leading film directors of his generation.

One of my most enduring memories of the last London marathon was watching from a Docklands pavement as notables past without note, eclipsed by the huge reception given to BB winner Jade Goody.

Until recently, I would join the trail of joggers along the Thames path from Canary Wharf and often found myself overtaking (she was slow, I wasn’t fast) a certain 70s comedy star only I appeared to recognise.

That was Cleo Rocos. Cleo who? to anyone I spoke to after the third or fourth meeting. I guess she’ll jog with a minder after this.

When Max Hastings was editor of the Telegraph, he banned use of the word celebrity, asking us “what does it mean?” I thought at the time we were losing a valuable generic.

Now, I’m more inclined to agree.

Day off? Yule be lucky

It was great not having to work on Christmas Day. Don’t know why, but there was a tikme when I always seemed to draw the short straw and end up watching the Queen’s Speech on one of the TVs that dangled over the news desk.

The production editor used to say: don’t worry, it’s only a few pages, the night editor used to say: it’ll be a breeze. Nothing ever happens, the facilities manager used to say: we’re laying on food in the room next door.

Most years they were right. Until Ronnie Scott, the jazz musician, died which meant changing the obits page and problems formatting the chess column on the social page weren’t helped when I rang the social sub to find him prematurely pissed.

Then Richard Branson’s balloon made a crash landing in the sea just as we were closing the first – and supposedly only – edition. Four hours, two new splashes and a complete rehash of an early spread later, I left an empty building and got into my car, having exceeded the cheap stay rate at the Canary Wharf by a mile and was stung for an £18 ticket.

A few days later the social sub meandered over and handed me a crested letterhead. It was from Buckingham Palace wondering why our coverage of events at Balmoral was not as comprehensive as usual.

Belated apologies ma’am.

Day off? Yule be lucky

It was great not having to work on Christmas Day. Don’t know why, but there was a tikme when I always seemed to draw the short straw and end up watching the Queen’s Speech on one of the TVs that dangled over the news desk.

The production editor used to say: don’t worry, it’s only a few pages, the night editor used to say: it’ll be a breeze. Nothing ever happens, the facilities manager used to say: we’re laying on food in the room next door.

Most years they were right. Until Ronnie Scott, the jazz musician, died which meant changing the obits page and problems formatting the chess column on the social page weren’t helped when I rang the social sub to find him prematurely pissed.

Then Richard Branson’s balloon made a crash landing in the sea just as we were closing the first – and supposedly only – edition. Four hours, two new splashes and a complete rehash of an early spread later, I left an empty building and got into my car, having exceeded the cheap stay rate at the Canary Wharf by a mile and was stung for an £18 ticket.

A few days later the social sub meandered over and handed me a crested letterhead. It was from Buckingham Palace wondering why our coverage of events at Balmoral was not as comprehensive as usual.

Belated apologies ma’am.

Give me a break from the c-word

I don’t want to sound mean-spirited but if I read another headline in my local paper with Christmas in it, I’ll cancel my subscription and buy Watchtower. The latest edition of festive fonts in seasonal serif reminded me why I handed out humbugs to my staff at an editorial conference many Decembers ago.

My objection has nothing to do with political correctness, just an assault on the senses.

Page lead after page lead managed to shoehorn in the c-word. Apart from the usual round-up of seasonal events for local prisoners and patients and an interview with a Christmas card maker, we had a court report which told us a thief will be behind bars for Christmas, stolen ponies recovered in time for Christmas and a teacher retiring as the children broke up for Christmas.

Ok, there was a Citizens Advice piece on seasonal credit card debt, a picture of the local MP judging a Christmas card competition, but - get this - the sports pages carried headlines about the rugby team looking for a “points-filled Christmas” and a leading football club being in good shape for “the festive period”.

Even the splash came gift-wrapped. Under a sprig of holly in the masthead, the usual “seasons greetings”, puffs for a Christmas TV guide and a festive quiz sat a good yarn about police using a new law to close a drugs den. The headline? Christmas joy as police close crack house.

Christmas joy? Do I now have to look forward to “Happy Easter as jobless totals fall again? May Day delight as porn baron jailed? Rate rise means Solstice hell for shoppers?”

Memo to chief subs: a story is a story whatever the time of year. Which is what I told my young guns on one local weekly all those years ago. They weren’t best pleased: We can’t use Christmas in any headlines? What if the Arndale reports record Christmas sales? “Record sales” is fine, I said. People know what day it is. What if Father Christmas is mugged in his grotto? Use Santa it’s shorter, and more vulnerable. And if a single mum phones to say burglars have stolen all her starving children’s Christmas presents on Christmas Eve? Do me a favour: after you’ve used gifts, trees and tears, you’ll run out of space anyway.

And so it went on. My ears were burning at the office party later but I did concede to a touch of masthead mistletoe and one “highly relevant” 18pt s/col top:

Christmas chemists’ rota.

No cause for alarm. It's simply deja vu

The Telegraph's new offices were briefly evacuated last night. For 15 minutes staff stood on the freezing pavements after a tannoy message announced an "emergency". It was a false alarm but it did left a few of them somewhat miffed.

For the longer serving faces who'd survived the countless cuts and can recall the early days of Canary Wharf, this may have been an unwelcome reminder of bygone days.

In those days, when the fabric of the newly-finished building creaked beneath your feet, the alarms went off all the time. Close to deadline, reporters would carry on working from mobiles in the lobby while subs nipped off for a pre-edition jar by the river. They were always false alarms. Often caused by the proximity of a sensor to a stir fry in the canteen kitchen.

Still, they broke the night up once in a while. Just like the printers tended to do in Fleet Street. Now can anyone remember those days?

Codes are for breaking

Should bloggers sign up to a voluntary code of conduct? Only if bears promise to clean up after themselves. You can no more regulate blog content than ask estate agents not to fib.

The hard core have been banging on by the Tetrabyte about everything from Star Trek to the price of modem upgrades for years without so much as a backslash. Okay, so the new wave of beardless ones have occasionally been sacked for posting stuff better suited to the pub after work and a few heads have rolled on Capitol Hill, but never before has speech enjoyed so much freedom.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine touched on this recently when he said most bloggers tend to publish first and edit later and leave the refinements to others. That’s true so long as we’re happy knowing that the truth probably lies somewhere at the end of a link.

But it also brought home to me while taking part in a defamation forum last week how our laws have not kept pace with media consumption. More on this later when I’m not about to jump on a train.

It is an important issue. Only a matter of time before someone tells us we’re drinking in the Last Chance Internet Café

Blink and you'll miss it

I finished a 12-week stint at Kingston University yesterday. I was a last-minute replacement for a module called print media in the digital age and had to pick it up and run with it at short notice.

I worked from a learning template printed last year to guide students through subjects from convergence to the role of aggregators to the future of the written word.

It was a testament to the speed of change in the industry that I approved the reading matter ahead of the first lecture but much of it was out of date by the time the course ended. It was further testament to the way the industry has embraced new media that the best reading was not found in the library but the media pages. This could save time researching future modules if I can dismiss the reading list section with: "buy a paper every day."

I’m at City University from today, guiding international scholarship students through a project that requires them to produce a business newspaper. Old fashioned journalism. In print, and using Quark Express.

But I guess this will have changed by the time we're off the press. Before you can say InDesign, in fact.

Press Gazette VIP

Press Gazette had a lucky escape. To misquote Oscar Wilde, losing only one edition may be seen as unfortunate. Had it lost too many the industry may have deemed it careless and decided it could live without it. Glad it doesn't have to. Welcome back. It'll be interesting to see what format the awards take under new ownership.

Press Gazette RIP

Just feel I have to add my eulogy to those on the demise of UK Press Gazette which has been part of my life for 30 years. I got my first proper job from it, appeared in it several times, wrote the odd piece for it and even sat on its judging panels.

In fact, pride of place on my study wall is a framed UKPG award for reporting. It's the one I always put on my CV, more for the kudos of the Press Gazette name than the achievement it commemorates.

An attempt to get an industry consortium to save it didn't achieve the support it needed so, in the face of competition from a growing mainstream interest in media matters, such as Media Guardian which gutted its jobs pages, it folded.

In many ways this was inevitable but there lies the nonsense. Anyone who watches Have I got News for You will know there's a journal - often ridiculously quirky, always well-supported - for every industry.

I just find it odd that, if there's a magazine for the serious goat breeder and one for miners specifically interested in tunnelling and trenchless construction, how on earth can the very people who are the media be denied one of their own?

It's like General Motors not having a car park or Google not having broadband.

The Little Britain spectacular at the Hammersmith Apollo was one of the funniest shows I’d seen in ages. Matt Lucas's Vicky Pollard live was far better than anything she (he) has done on TV, we saw rather more of Jeremy Edwards than even a post-watershed slot would allow and not quite enough of Kate Moss. But you couldn't have scripted the priceless ad-libbing. And that's what theatre is all about of course.

But the real fun was in the little Britishness that set the scene for the 4,000 of us there: the usual £4-a-time wine in plastic beakers, the overflowing gents loos at the back of the stalls that gave atmosphere to the more lavatorial humour, the drunken guffawing of the stag party to my right, the constant shuffling of seats from the five-pints-in-the-interval crowd and the way the people behind took one look at Thierry Henry a few rows in front started calling out to Ian Wright.

Well, black blokes with bald heads? Same difference in Little Britain, surely.

How to cover a funeral

After two seven-day weeks working across what seems like the entire publishing spectrum, I decided to take myself off for a long weekend in the country with one of my sons.

An early start, 300 miles of motorway and I was drying off from a stroll across Boscastle harbour in front of a roaring fire in the Cobweb Inn.

It’s one of those places you can imagine walking into on a dark evening where conversation stops, the boards creak underfoot and over the crackling of embers, someone mutters to the strangers: “If you’re heading back on t’ moor, mind you stick to the road.”

Instead, it was just real ale, real local banter and a real fire. No deadlines, no laptop - and no Beast of Bodmin.

And, of course, a chance to catch up with my favourite paper, the Cornish and Devon Post, a crumbly 150-year-old broadsheet with adverts all over the front page and more parish pump than you could serve up at a young farmers’ bring and buy.

Instead of blogs, there were logs: ads for them, piled high on the front page where the splash should be. ‘Cut and split to your requirements’ with bags of sawdust given away for 50p like scratchings at a chippie.

But inside, amongst the cheque presentations and spreads of Remembrance pictures was a page you’d never see on a Blackberry and one that'll probably be still standing long after the last podcast: the obituaries.

And these break all the rules of the obit writer's craft. Rather than recording the richness of country lives, the stories are all angled on the funeral services. No gripping intros recalling anti-bypass campaigners defeating County Hall Goliaths or penniless war veterans who returned to become tin mine millionaires.

Instead, we had: “There was a large representative attendance at Stoke Climsland Parish Church” or “The Funeral Sevice took place at Callington Methodist Church” and “A service of thanksgiving for the life of . . . took place at . . .”

After a paragraph or two about the deceased having “attended” school and being brave towards the end – came the real news - column-upon-column of mourners’ names.

And that means everyone. If you turned up, you made it into print. In this part of the world, village reporters stand at church doors as the bereaved file in and meticulously jot down their names, often who they came with, who they are representing - and they rarely get them wrong.

Upcountry emmets like me can laugh all we want but these people have been doing for years what the sharp suits in Soho are waking up to now: understanding what readers want and, maybe just occassionally, using the media as a marketing tool.

Put it this way: if the solicitor who prepared the dearly departed’s will couldn’t make it, he’d do well to send a junior exec with a business card. The auctioneer who cleared the cottage is likely to put in an appearance and so too is the local estate agent. Putting aside the genuine paying of respect, there's value in being seen and there's value in the dropping of a name in a column that's read more keenly than the leader page or the TV guide.

The editor knows too well that if postmistress Betty Sweetpickle didn’t show, tongues would wag as much as an appearance by councillor Potbelly and his rather peachy new secretary.

So everyone wins. Acres of must-read lineage and a PR machine that targets its audience closer than any blog.

Is that too cynical? Surely not. I never stood in a windy church doorway in my reporting days down there but I did get my gossip at the bar of the Cobweb and this is nothing that wan't hinted at more than once over a pint and a knowing smile.

But of course that was a long time ago.

So, Dickie gets his Wiki

I now have a legitimate home on Wikipedia, thanks to colleagues who pointed out that they'd earlier profiled the other slightly more famous bloke by mistake.

A few more emailed me to take the p*** during the day after seeing Shane Richmond's hilarious picture caption which reminded me why I never hired anyone called Liz.

I am immune to all this of course. Anyone who has spent a lifetime in the media as a one-man joint byline and sensed the constant disbelief in the voices of switchboard operators and receptionists would be the same.

I did once work with the namesakes of James Last, Peter Green and Jimmy Edwards on the reporter's desk of the Herts Advertiser. Green had left Fleetwood Mac but was still massive at the time. That was a brief respite from a lifetime of torment. When Johnny Cash recorded Boy named Sue, I lamely registered my protest by buying my mum the single. But she didn't get it.

Once, in desperation, I tried referring to myself in the shortform and rang a contact with the opening line . . . "Hi, this is Dick Burton." Someone further down the desk started to hum . . . dum-diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum . . . The penny dropped. Dick Barton Special Agent.

I thought about bylining myself Rick but my mates said I sounded like a salesman. Then they rubbished everything else. Rich? (sounds like a biscuit). Richie? (gay), Ricardo (waiter). And so on. I was scarred for life and eventually, after ten years on the reporting front-line, took the only proper way out.

I became a sub.

A little bitch (sorry, pitch) to PRs

Memo to PRs: stop snubbing student journalists.

I see about 300 of these people a year – about a tenth of the number of press releases you send me – and devote a lot of energy to prising them off Google and out into the real world.

I don’t expect them to doorstep criminals, pap celebrities or tap phones. But I do expect them to understand information channels and learn to appreciate the rights they have to legitimate inquiry through pertinent questions.

Learning to interact with people in the know such as yourselves is a vital part of their training in both gathering information and relationship building.

It’s just not good enough for you to tell them: “Sorry, we don’t talk to students.” And yet, course-in, course-out, that's what so many of you do.

I wouldn’t dream of not giving an opinion on a press release a PR student has emailed me. I might make them wait, call me back and not drop everything there and then. But I'd do what I could. We’re all part of the info-go-round after all.

Besides, it’s an investment in the future. Aren't these the very people you’ll be phoning, emailing, and dragging in front of your clients in a few years' time?

PS. I'm well hacked off. Someone stole my bike yesterday. Hacked right through the security chain and rode off leaving the pile of scrap they rode up in behind in its place. Very clever. The CCTV cameras show only someone cycling in to the car park and cycling out.

Super subs for a superhighway

Kim Fletcher hit the nail on the head with his Media Guardian story In praise of the sub editor about the importance of subs in new media.

He begins: The way those who understand the future explain it, the new media world is all about reporters; reporters who used to carry a pencil and notebook going round with digital recorders and cameras and filing words and pictures and voice reports and video clips and whatever they think of next, to any device that people might be using. Including, for a little while longer, newspapers.

He then turns his attentions to the "self-effacing gang that works behind the scenes" and, quite rightly, extols some of their virtues and the importance of their role in the digital age.

And so he should. He was in charge of the Telegraph web site at the time we (and others) were redefining what subbing was all about.

He'll remember well our (literally) minute-by-minute coverage of the devastation caused by the Gujarat earthquake, the downfall and political fallout that followed Peter Mandelson's resignation from government and the hundreds (again literally) of times we updated on 9/11. And all without a reporter in sight.

In the pre-podcast days when nerds blogged and reporters searched telephone directories and A-Zs, there simply wasn't time to indulge ourselves in the luxury of a newsdesk. News, when it broke, had to go by the minute - seconds in you were running a ticker - and go and go again as events changed.

Our sources were the wires, the statements that dropped on to official sites, the shorthand notes from the survivors on live TV and the mass of background info available in an instant to anyone familiar with the logic of George Boole.

Whether you're a multi-national broadcaster, a national daily newspaper or a local weekly, the web is a level playing field when it comes to breaking news and readers will follow the links to those that break it first.

I'd been a Fleet Street sub for 15 years and subbed many running splashes, updating between editions and late into the night during events ranging from the Zeebrugge ferry disaster to the death of Diana. Many a time I'd hacked a new intro out of a late PA snap or worked in key quotes from Reuters so we could slip a page between editions.

It was only when I arrived online in 2001 that I realised there was a place for the printed word with no editions. Only impatient readers and a competition far wider and more diverse than a mere newspaperman could ever have imagined.

The only part of Kim's piece that made me double-take was his intro in which he referred to the way new ways of reporting are the talk of "those who understand new media".

If I didn't know him better, I'd suggest that was a subbing error.

Dial C to comment

Got a call this morning from a old Fleet Street pal telling me (after stuff about his divorce and how crap Leicester were at QPR a few weeks back) that I was too hard on reporters-turned-bloggers in my last post, calling me a luddite and pointing out that even the most low-key writers should be congratulated for at least putting a toe in the brave new world.

I took the call on the hands-free in the car, told him that was like saying every bored housewife should write a children’s book and every inebriate on the 6.15 from Paddington has a novel in him because the company sent him to Zagreb and he thinks he’s James Bond. Anyway, he didn’t like the bit where I said anything that costs has to earn its keep.

What a prat. Of course it does. Anyone who thinks an editor will pay them to gabble on about what they watched on Freeview when they should be churning out pages from last night’s planning committee should be given gardening leave to blog at home like everyone else.

Conversely, anyone who can write effortlessly and openly about life as a single mum bringing up three kids in a tower block, deserves to be coining much more than the giro she gets mugged for.

Anyway, Luddite? Sorry pal, but who rang who because he couldn’t work out how to leave a comment on the blog – and who took the call via Bluetooth?

And Leicester weren’t crap. They were unlucky.

Good blogs, bad blogs

If I had any doubts about the power of the pen in a blogger’s hands, it disappeared when Andrew Grant Adamson questioned the purpose of blogs in national newspapers.

His Wordblog entry certainly touched a nerve at the Telegraph who lined up a defensive wall of their finest online columnists
with the online news editor Shane Richmond in goal behind them.

Why? It may have had something to do with the fact that Andrew had produced Technorati listings of Times bloggers which showed that the world and his wife were not exactly reading all of them. He then went on to carry out a similar exercise looking at the Telegraph blogs.

I’m caught in the crossfire here: as a colleague of Andrew’s in academia and Shane’s former boss. But one thing’s clear to me, and this is what I’m telling publishers I advise on such matters: everything that costs has to earn.

The Telegraph writers make a strong case for the value of their contributions and I hope they’re building the readership their efforts deserve. But Andrew’s blog demonstrates wonderfully the raison d’etre for the medium: to touch a nerve and spark debate.

Some writers, on papers and magazines that can ill-afford downtime, will happily spend 90 smiley minutes a day churning out self-indulgent blather and give you 50 page impressions. No return on investment there, but better than a smack in the gob if it puts you in the blogosphere?

Not really. Newspapers reinventing themselves as multi-media platforms are brand-building all over again, making up the rules as they go, and can’t afford to have their credibility questioned.

I’d rather these writers spent their time checking links on the cookery pages, or at least, sparing readers the ignominy of their voice mail.

Others, however, will give you stunning personal insights into worlds we’d give our right arms to get a glimpse of. That’s why I – and my then online news editor Avril Ormsby in days when few print journalists had even read a blog - was so keen to encourage foreign correspondents to lead the way.

I judged their worth with a dinner party analogy: who would you prefer to sit next to? Sidney no-mates from Soft Furnishings who brews elderflower in the airing cupboard, Boring Bernard from Bought Ledger – or the guy in the safari suit who taught himself Punjabi and dodged bullets crossing the Kashmir border on the roof of a bus.

So what if Safari Suit’s first few blogs didn’t harvest the same hit rates as a picture gallery on Kate Moss? It doesn’t matter. Every hit strikes where it should, a whisper in the right direction, taking your brand into new territory. Direct hits, as I call them: the ‘sticky’ ones that build the reputation you want in a territory you want to conquer.

There are writers on several regional and national papers I’d hire tomorrow for their blogging potential alone. In fact, there’s one such ‘deal’ I’m trying to broker as I write.

And there are those I’d return to normal duties forthwith - and let them blog where they can do the least harm. In the bar of the Rat and handbag after work.