The Media Blog

Rappers? They all look the same to me

Red faces over on The Telegraph where Kanye West looks for all the world like 50 Cent...

Thanks to Media Blog reader Richard Hall for flagging...

Howay Viz: Happy fookin' birthday man!

Considering most of them can’t actually reference, let alone reproduce, even 50 per cent of its content (Mickey's Monkey Spunk Moped, anybody?), the mainstream media is being very generous to Viz as the controversial comic celebrates its 30th birthday this week.

7 questions on Viz- BBC

Rude comic Viz celebrates 30th birthday - The Metro

Viz Comic Celebrates Its 30th Birthday - Sky News

At home with the Fat Slags - The Independent

Viz comic celebrates 30 years of crude, surreal humour - Mirror.co.uk

30 years of Viz - The Spectator

The Spectator, seriously...?

In its late eighties heyday Viz sold over a million copies in the UK before figures began to tumble to 200,000 and below as its status as a British institution waned. All this coverage however, and the nostalgia it is stirring for characters such as Finbarr Saunders or Buster Gonad (whose inappropriateness take on a new level of humour when read in the serious tones of Wikipedia), will likely ensure the 30th Anniversary edition sees bumper sales.

Sorrell on 'one medium, one country' ITV

Sir Martin Sorrell is one of the Today programme's go-to men.

Every three months, when his company's quarterly results are announced, the WPP CEO will appear on Radio 4's flagship news show and offer his economic state of the nation.

WPP employs 135,000 people around the world, is worth some £5bn and has its fingers in many, many media pies - advertising, public relations, lobbying, marketing and investment management among them.

All of which makes him an interesting and informed listen on business and consumer sentiment.

Right at the end of this morning's interview he was asked about ITV's continued search for leadership, and he offered this stark assessment:

ITV is in a tough spot. It's a one medium company in one country. And that's a very difficult place to be particularly when you compete against the BBC who get three and a half billion pounds from the licence fee payer every year, in cash, upfront on January 1st.

One medium, one country? News to all those beavering away on ITV.com catch up, or at its Global Content division.

Perhaps ITV should have held on to FriendsReunited after all.

(You can listen to the full interview on the BBC iPlayer. Starts around 1.21.00)

Related:
- YouTube If You Want To: Why Susan Boyle Won’t Save Michael Grade’s Micropayment Plan

Phwoar: Check out the seat of learning on ‘er!

Students at Cambridge University have sparked controversy – the kind of controversy that often exists purely at a superficial enough level to justify saying something has sparked controversy – by launching a ‘tabloid’ style website, called The Tab. It covers life in the City and its colleges from an irreverent, gutter-press point of view. They even have a ‘girly’ section featuring female students in their skimpies.

It sounds cheap and nasty. No doubt that is the point as its founders are clearly aware of the ‘psychology of the unexpected’ (man bites dog) and it’s ability to sell newspapers.

As the Daily Mail, explains:

As one of the world's most prestigious seats of learning, you would expect Cambridge University students to be focused on dusty tomes and high-brow literature.

Exactly! No doubt that is the very reason three students decided to launch the site, and exactly why it is getting so much coverage.

In and of itself, it’s a student rag, online.

It’s what it isn’t – “dusty and high brow” – that sets it apart.

A successful launch then? Helped no end I imagine by the ‘negative’ press surrounding it.

Twitter schizophrenia hits mainstream media

Earlier this week a survey story about how social networks cost companies £1.4 billion/year in lost hours hit the headlines. The Mirror wrote "Twitter is a time waster", the FT chimed in with "Twittering workers waste £1.4bn" and Forbes perked up with "the cost of tweets and pokes." Fortunately, I suspect most people who heard about the story through social networks are also likely to have read the excellent debunking articles by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch and Charles Arthur at the Guardian. 

Since the invention of social networks, and their subsequent shock! horror! highlighting of human nature (people like to chat, no matter the medium) there's been a rash of stories about the waste they allegedly cause. The BBC reported in 2007 that social networking sites were costing up to £133 million a day, a preposterous figure of £47 billion a year. That story prompted a minor backlash in the States, with posts from Warner Bros. VP of Technology Ethan Kaplan and Robert Scoble criticising any company that can't get constructive with social networks. 

Commercial companies aren't the only bodies concerned with the activities of their staff. Kent County Council banned social networking sites in 2007 in an effort to reduce time wasting among its 32,000 employees. Portsmouth City Council also banned its 4,500 staff from accessing Facebook, even though it was shown that each employee was only spending 5 or 6 minutes a month on the site. It turned out to be a group of around 50 employees racking up hours on Facebook every day.

Strangely, the same news sites that covered these unquestionably negative angles also post a decent number of "good news" stories about use of social networks. A BBC report from New York showed that small businesses have been able to bring in customers and combat the recession through the effective use of sites like Twitter and Facebook. Another article, also from the BBC, reports that colleges are reducing student drop out rates through communication with students online.

This weird, contradictory coverage does in some way represent a truth about social media sites: they can be extremely useful in making contacts (and money), but they can also be distracting when you're trying to complete a single task that requires your full attention. Still, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that taking away the social network won't solve the underlying problem. Procrastination wasn't invented with the computer.

A few stories facilitated by social networks:

@Victoriaraimes' story of a pensioner who laid dead in her flat for five years came through a tip-off on Twitter.

Telegraph correspondents used Facebook to contact Rudy Guede, the murderer of Meredith Kercher, after he fled to Germany.

Pick up a newspaper and you'll likely encounter stories quoting Twitter streams from notable individuals. See: Ben Bradshaw says BBC biased, Hugh Jackman Twitter gaffe, Mark Cuban fined by NBA, Miley Cyrus quits Twitter, etc.

Got any more? Add them in the comments.

Will celebrity Tweeters cash in on sponsorship?

Would you keep following Stephen Fry or Jonathan Ross if sponsored tweets started appearing from them?

I’ve just read an interesting piece on the Vancouver Sun website (of all places, I know! Thanks to a couple of people for flagging).

It discusses the money which can be made from sponsored Tweets by celebrities with the largest followings. We’re told stars with upwards of 100,000 followers can claim serious cash per sponsored Tweet:

But Sean Rad, founder and chief executive, said celebrities with Twitter followers in the millions can command paid tweets in the five-figure range. Rad said his company limits the number of paid tweets to avoid having them regarded as spam…

Sadly that isn’t his call to make. Spam is in the eye of the receiver.

And is there really an audience there anyway? How many active followers do these celebrities have among those astronomical numbers of people who signed up on day one of joining Twitter?

Is everybody who signed up for updates from Jonathan Ross still hanging on his every word about walking the dog, or helping his kids with homework? Harsh possibly, but I’d guess the level of engagement with celebrity accounts is far lower than with follower/followed relationships where both people know one another and mutually trust or at least value the opinions of the other - conversation being more engaging than 140 character broadcasts.

As such I imagine these advertiser's messages will often be lost on the vast majority.

Naturally there will be those celebrities, at the shallow end of the celebrity gene pool, who think nothing of such agreements. It will be a natural extension of the revenue stream which results from being famous for being famous. But surely any celebrity who believes there is value in Twitter beyond the amassing of a large following simply ‘because they can’ would balk at the idea, realising their followers would be free to vote with their mouse buttons; those who haven't tuned out already.

New Statesman announces new deputy editor

The New Statesman today announced Jon Bernstein, former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News, is to become the title’s new deputy editor.

Jon joined ITN in 2005 as editor of the Channel 4 FactCheck website. Prior to that he was editor-in-chief of the DirectGov website, a position he also held at silicon.com – where he helped launch the UK’s first online video news service, catering for the business and technology sector.

Oh… and he was also a founding blogger on TheMediaBlog.co.uk.

Not all social media is digital

Late last night a hand-delivered letter dropped through my door. It began:

Dear colleague,

You should have received a ballot paper to vote for a new editor of the Journalist - the NUJ's magazine.

I live in Honor Oak, SE23, and have dropped this through your door to ask you to vote for me, Richard Simcox.

I was impressed, not necessarily by the Simcox manifesto, but by the campaigning. Honor Oak is not a million miles away but nor is it a stroll around the corner.

During a postal strike, the message needs to get out and this would-be editor was willing to put in the hours.

There are eight candidates hoping to run the National Union of Journalist's house magazine. It's a high-profile role and the first time in 21 years that the position has been vacant.

It's also a key point in the evolution of the print publication. Its production cycle has been cut from 12 to six issues a year as more and more NUJ news and information goes online.

One of the dilemmas the new editor will have to wrestle with is how to balance a web presence with a print presence. Sound familiar?

And that's another reason why the hand-delivered letter was interesting. It brought home the potency of 'push' communication, when done right.

Simcox, like his fellow candidates, has ticked all the digital boxes: website, Twitter, Facebooketc. The NUJ, too, will explore ways to use social media to make the most of its ready-made community with its shared interests.

This all matters but so too does the 'physical contact' that the print magazine dropping on the doormat every other month provides.

Any future editor who thinks that the only social media is digital would be very wide of the mark.

Related:
- How The Atlantic Is Rethinking Magazine Publishing
- As Print Dwindles, can Amazon Re-Kindle?
- Five innovations in news journalism, thanks to the web

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News, editor-in-chief of Directgov and editor-in-chief of silicon.com.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Story of the week: 'Giving' Phillies fan offers a treat to news editors

This story has spread to the four corners of the world (from Korea to China and Australia via heavy syndication), combining as it does the media tick boxes of morality, novelty, scandal, sex, sport AND technology in the shape of web sensation Craigslist. Not often can a story boast so many reasons to read.

This version from the BBC:

A US woman charged with offering sex for baseball World Series tickets has denied she did anything wrong. "I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," Susan Finkelstein, from Philadelphia, told AP news agency. The 43-year-old was speaking a day after meeting an undercover policeman responding to her ad on Craigslist.

What are the chances?

But I can’t help thinking what comes next is the real kicker for the story. I’m surprised it was buried so far down:

Mrs Finkelstein said she had wanted to get tickets to take her husband to Wednesday night's opening game…

Excuse me? Here’s a novel idea: how about her husband doesn’t get tickets to the game, but nor does his wife have sex with a stranger… just an idea.

But while Mrs Finkelstein may be regretting her unwelcome time in the global spotlight, the media has proven both a blessing and a curse. The BBC adds:

Mrs Finkelstein was eventually given a pair of tickets for another game this weekend, through a radio station.

Oh Mandy... beware the ‘dodgy dossier’

Speaking at the Cabinet Forum Conference earlier today, Peter Mandelson referenced the report written for Morgan Stanley by 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson which was subsequently heralded as a defining moment in the evolution of the media (or "The report that shook the City" to quote the Guardian).

Among the revelations Mandelson shared was the fact teenagers want digital music, but ideally they wouldn’t want to pay for it. Indeed. He decided to spare us the nugget about teenagers watching a lot of television.

This is nothing against the author who must have been incredibly bright to have secured the internship in the first place and whose report would do no disservice to any 15-year-old. But this blog has criticised the use of the report once before for being little more than a cheap PR stunt that did for serious debate on the future of the media what the Emperor’s new clothes did for sartorial elegance.

I do believe Mandelson did a good job of talking about the issues this morning, but hiding behind a five-month-old report into the bleeding obvious may do little to convince anybody that action will follow his fine rhetoric.

Digital rights and wrongs: Mandy talks a good game

Peter Mandelson today announced plans to overhaul UK digital rights management to provide a fairer deal for media producers and consumers.

At the heart of his fledgling proposals was a call for a common sense approach that chastised both producers for their inertia and restrictive past-demands and consumers for their theft of intellectual property.

Mandelson told attendees at a Cabinet Forum Conference this morning: “There is no economy on earth where the creative industries play such an important role in wealth and jobs creation [as the UK]. Today our collective challenge is to deliver the basis for the next 50 years of creative endeavour and leadership.”

But he added: “The big challenge the digital economy produces is content producers having control over their ideas.“

And although Mandelson cited a statistic of only five per cent of songs downloaded in the UK being legal, he also laid some blame at the door of the producers and rights owners for such a statistic.

“People want access to copyrighted material in ways and on formats that the industry currently doesn’t provide.”

He added that every time the industry drops the ball on such consumer wants and demands it invites theft upon itself.

“We need to make breaking the law an unnecessary risk. All the rules need to be sensible and need to be up to date,” he said, pointing to the fact that technically moving a purchased song from CD to iPod or computer to an affiliated iPod is technically illegal.

However, Mandelson said any change to the rules must ultimately recognise the fact: “Taking people’s work without due payment is wrong. It is not just morally unacceptable but it is unsustainable.”

“The days of consequence free online infringement are over.”

However, Mandelson was quick to discount notions that barring illegal file-sharers from accessing the internet would be anything other than a final measure.

Speaking more broadly, Mandelson said the UK needs to continue building an infrastructure – through investment in both technology and skills - for a successful economy built upon digital media. Schools must foster creative and technical skills from an early age and steer people towards careers in a changed economy, he added.

“I’m a big defender of an economy based on making things… in terms of added value the difference between making a car or a plane or a television programme or computer game is a meaningless one.”

Some links for 28.10.09

I've been catching up on some reading and couldn't help noticing the big media news of the week which you may have missed - and a headline that jumped out at me - Trainee passes shorthand exam - with broken arm - good for her.

Here are some other links worth a look from the past couple of days...

Fuller: content is king in digital age (Guardian.co.uk)

Dead Celebrities Are Good For Dying Media Industry (Forbes.com)

Paper profits plummet at Daily Sport owner (Daily Mail)

The King Of Toilet Humour Turns 30 (Sky News)

Charge for iPlayer, says ex-BBC man (Guardian.co.uk)

Straw to consult newspapers on super-injunctions (Press Gazette)

And from the weekend, but still well worth a read...

If you monitor your brand on Twitter, read the tweets before replying … (Blog: Malcolm Coles)

YouGov responds to BNP claims

Following a Media Blog post published earlier today YouGov has issued a response, reproduced, in part, below:

"There have been reports in parts of the blogosphere that certain YouGov members have been attempting to recruit BNP members to the YouGov panel, in order to influence the results of polls and generate revenue for the BNP. Here is YouGov’s response to these reports.

YouGov actively recruits the majority of our panel using a variety of techniques, although self-signup and referrals from other members are also possible. We constantly monitor the profile of new panel members, and track differences in survey results, to ensure that our panel is representative, and to protect the quality and integrity of our data.  Moreover, YouGov’s sampling methods ensure that new members who sign themselves up cannot have a statistically significant impact on any YouGov polling results.

As a further test, YouGov has examined the results of the survey conducted after BBC Question Time poll. The survey, of 1,314 electors, included 156 who had joined our panel since May 2009. This covers the period when, it is claimed, BNP bloggers advised party members to join our panel. Of these 156, just one respondent said they would vote BNP in a general election. Any attempts to inflitrate YouGov's panel with the aim of increasing the BNP's reported support have plainly failed.  

Nevertheless, to put the issue beyond doubt, and in line with our practice at the last general election, we had already started a "close" period, during which no new self-signups or member referrals to YouGov will be invited to take part in political polls. This "close" period started on September 1 and will last until after the election."

Why AA Gill hasn’t gone ballistic and Ian Morbin may be the luckiest man online

AA Gill shot a baboon. But you know that already, because he wrote about it in the Sunday papers and now people are up in arms about it on Twitter. He admitted it was indefensible and explained he did so in the same gratuitous spirit of cruel and facile self-fulfillment that motivated the fox-hunting community:

I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this. There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun...

He really wasn’t trying to win friends was he? And with thousands of people Twittering about it, the obvious comparison has been to Jan Moir’s recent run in with the Twitterati.

But the two don’t compare, even though Gill is still flitting in and out of the Twitter Trends list as I write and understandably offended a great many people. It may dent Gill’s ego to play second fiddle to anybody, let alone the likes of Moir, but this 'scandal' will not and cannot go as ballistic as hers.

Even forgetting the actual subject matter for a second, there are a number of major reasons for this:

1. Gill provided a very detailed, factual account of an act we were meant to find distasteful. The facts he armed us with were his own. Moir’s was baseless speculation and ugly anachronistic opinion which is far easier to tear apart. No matter how much you loathe what Gill did, you cannot refute he did it. He didn't even give us scope to attack his justification because he offered none.

2. Moir was topical, creating an urgency to the backlash. Gill’s recollection of his act of animal cruelty makes for unpleasant reading but it is not something that taps into the zeitgeist at a specific moment in time. The stampede to condemn Moir was fuelled by the fact Stephen Gately’s funeral had not even taken place when her comments appeared in print. (The opportunity to take the Daily Mail down a peg or two was doubtless also a contributing factor, while AA Gill is a less obvious enemy of the social media state.)

3. Campaign fatigue. Underestimate the power of the Twitterati at your peril, but there simply cannot be a 'villain of the week' on Twitter or it loses its impact. The self-regulating nature of the conversation will ensure this doesn't happen. And whatever an individual's personal beliefs about the relative evils of hunting vs alleged homophobia, only the fights the majority believe must be won will be fought so full-bloodedly, which means not each and every week.

4. Perhaps most tellingly in this discussion about trial by social media, Gill’s backlash started to break into a gallop on Twitter at the start of the week when we’re all a lot busier, while Moir fell foul of that Friday feeling and experienced a reaction which lasted into the weekend.

Just look at the search pattern for ‘Twitter’ over the past few weeks, it is indicative of an interest which comes to a head on Friday / Saturday each week (continues...)

So if you’re going to risk the wrath of the Twitterati, do it on a Sunday for Monday.

The obvious exception to this is London Underground worker Ian Morbin who resigned yesterday, following an angry confrontation with a customer that was caught on camera and which subsequently began to take off online on Friday 16 October. That is until Jan Moir took over and Morbin very quickly dropped from the social media and mainstream news radar and Morbin was spared as severe a trial by social media as he may otherwise have endured.

For a member of the public to be caught in the full glare of the social media spotlight for any length of time must be a worrying experience but it could so obviously have been much worse. For that Morbin probably owes Moir a drink or two.

I just hope I'm not in the same pub.

'BNP Gaming YouGov' adds another chapter to Question Time blockbuster

The BNP/Question Time story arc has followed a fairly predictable trajectory.

It began with several weeks of pre-show outrage mixed with libertarian nose-holding. This was followed by on the day protests, the 105 minutes of television, the reaction and the backlash to the reaction.

As a final act we had the post-show opinion polls which rather conveniently provided ammunition for both the 'Griffin blew it' and the 'BNP boost' brigades.

But now an unexpected epilogue.



Sunny Hundal over at Liberal Conspiracy notes that one of the administrators on the BNP website recently set up a page on its social network entitled: YOUGOV – Let’s increase BNP’s support in polls, and raise money at the same time!.(note, this links to the BNP site).

The post urges BNP members to sign up to YouGov so a. the pollster won't ignore them in subsequent sampling and b. they can raise money for the party via regular £50 participation payments.

Gaming YouGov? This feels like a conspiracy too far. Only one place to turn: the Political Betting blog where Mike Smithson writes:

Such ideas have been floated from time to time and clearly all online pollsters which use polling panels are vulnerable. There was talk of UKIP doing the same thing ahead of the 2004 Euro election. I’m emailed Peter Kellner [YouGov's president] and I’m sure he’ll tell us that measures are in place to identify and deal with such approaches.

As a starting pointing the BNP might have had a better chance of succeeding if they hadn’t first put it on a website that anybody could find within a few seconds on Google.

We await the Kellner response.

Related:
- How ‘Nutter’ Griffin Matched Nobel Obama
- BNP on Question Time: The BBC should be applauded

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News, editor-in-chief of Directgov and editor-in-chief of silicon.com.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Is this the most predictable media story of the year?

So the London Lite is on its last legs, with Associated Newspapers announcing it is to close the title.

Who could have ever seen that coming?

The very second The London Paper announced it was to fold the clock started ticking for the London Lite, not least of all because the very co-existence of both papers appeared to owe much to the egos of two combatant owners intent on not blinking first. So the London Lite has stuck around for a lap of honour before now following the outlived London Paper onto the scrapheap.

If that, and the apparent failure of cheaply repackaged 'what did Lily Allen do today?' content wasn't enough, the decision of the Evening Standard to go free was surely the final straw.

This now clears the path for London's original evening paper, but it would be interesting to know whether the Daily Mail & General Trust stands to make more from its minority stake in the Standard than it ever would from the London Lite.

What's the future of syndication?

'Prisoner Of The Taliban' looked like a compelling, if slightly familiar, read. Spread across pages one, two and three of yesterday's Sunday Times News Review section, it was an American journalist's account of his seven-month kidnap in the Afghan desert.

A quick scan to the end of David Rohde's piece revealed all, in customary italics:

Extracted from an article that first appeared in The New York Times.

And that's where I and, most likely, other Sunday Times readers had read the original in all its five-part glory.

Syndication is a normal part of the newspaper business, whether it's a tabloid previewing the latest celeb photo-shoot from one of the glossies, a broadsheet recasting an essay from a highbrow monthly as op-ed, or - as here - a UK paper taking some of the best journalism from abroad.

But in the link economy, where access to the original source is only a click away, isn't syndication increasingly redundant?

Last week, I suggested that the likes of the Associated Press were the real losers in a world where aggregation ruled. And that's probably still the case for those whose business is predicated on providing copy for multiple sources. In other words, those businesses which conform to the most exact definition of syndication.

But for publishers there is another, softer reason to continue this content-sharing relationship besides any monetary exchange: profile.

And that, after all, is what I am doing by publishing this article here and here. Albeit on a much, much smaller scale.

Related:
- NewsNow: ‘End These Indiscriminate Attacks’

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News, editor-in-chief of Directgov and editor-in-chief of silicon.com.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Tweets, Pokes and uploads: watching social media's growth in real-time

Twenty hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, nearly a million blog posts each day, 600,000 new members of Facebook and around four million tweets via Twitter every 24 hours - some social media numbers are quite hard to fathom. 

Not sure if Gary Hayes's real-time counter makes things easier but it does offer another way to watch the dials whizzing round: 

Related:
 - Is Social Media A Fad? Apparently Not

What's the secret of the Daily Star's success?

In September only one national newspaper increased its circulation – the Daily Star. Every other paper lost readers.

Incredibly, the Star was up 18% year-on-year. It now sells over 863,000 copies a day – overtaking the Daily Telegraph to become the fourth best-selling paper (behind The Sun, Mail and Mirror).

The Mirror was down 9% over the same period. Theoretically – if both papers' circulations continue on this trend – the Star would overtake the Mirror within another two months.

So what explains the Daily Star's amazing circulation increase in the face of a shrinking market?

A 20p cover price certainly helps. There's also its unapologetically low-brow content, of course. (Look up the Star on Google and it informs you its major areas of coverage: “Sport,” “Celeb babes,” “Celeb news,” “Celebrity,” “Big Brother,” “Horoscopes.”)

But this of course is testament to its incredible, laser-like focus on its core audience, a discipline we're more used to expecting from the Mail.

The Star knows its readers inside out. No longer is the target reader just a white van man. It's broadened out to attract women too (the Star's editor is a woman, after all – Dawn Neesom, now the only female editor on Fleet Street), so nowadays there are a few bare six-packs scattered amongst the cleavage.

But what's remarkable is that almost every front page story is driven by reader input and comment. Last week a lead story promised to reveal the secrets of The X Factor's success. Turn to page five and all we actually got was some opinions from readers, along with expert commentators (including the naturally unbiased Max Clifford, who just happens to be Simon Cowell's PR man).

It scarcely counts as a story, but it feels like readers talking to other readers. It creates a community and a conversation. Perhaps, of all national newspapers, the Star is the one that has most effectively applied the lessons of social media to its print product.

Social media gets politicians out of the brown stuff

Gordon Brown has come out fighting with his response to the news that Britain remains in recession with a podcast on the official site of the Prime Minister's Office, Number10.gov.uk.

The news of Britain's continuing economic sickliness is undoubtedly a blow for the PM, especially with a number of other countries pulling out of recession, including European neighbours France and Germany. Brown - the man who preached prudence as Chancellor of the Exchequer - may have lost the economic boost he was hoping for and with it his last chance of not being out on his arse in a couple of months time. 

In the podcast, all two-and-a-half-minutes of it, Brown promises that things will get better as long as we're all "confident but cautious" with his "steady and clear policies". There is even time to go on the offensive, with promises to crack down on the "sharp practises" of irresponsible lenders and the "unfair bonuses" of City fat cats (it might be worth getting that Fred Goodwin effigy out of the shed).

While the Churchill-esque rhetoric may be predictable enough - although it's probably wise to steer clear of any "never has so much been owed to so few" citations when talking bonuses - the PR behind a podcast response is a masterstroke; Brown, under attack from all sides, got his message across uninterrupted and unopposed.

If Brown had ventured on to the Andrew Marr show yesterday morning he may well have been questioned on any of the subjects covered: Blair for European president, the Royal Mail strike, MPs expenses and, of course, the state of the economy. Instead Marr and his guests merely quoted the PM's podcast and chose instead to take Adam Crozier and a Miliband to task. It might not be a passage from The Art of War but if you ain't there, you can't get beat.

Next year's election will no doubt see the usual toe-curlingly dull party political broadcasts and the usual mud slinging, but it will also be the first election fought with the tools of social media. David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, has already ventured into the water with his Webcameron and has wisely veered away from shots where he tried to convince the electorate, press and probably members of his own family that he always loaded the dishwasher.

The number of MPs on Twitter continues to grow, as does the number with blogs. A large proportion of voters will, at best, reach for the mute button at the first sign of a political broadcast or use political pamphlets as tomorrow's budgie cage liner. If politicians can engage with people online it could open up a channel of communication so often denied by an apathetic electorate. It could even help raise worryingly low voter turnout come the big day.

It will be interesting to see how, and if, political parties use social media in the run-up to the election. Brown's team have taken him out of the line of fire for a few days with their effort and avoiding an appointment with Messrs Humphreys or Paxman or even the great unwashed British public will be attractive to most MPs.

We'll draw the line when prime ministers start fielding PM's questions via videolink.

Related:
- Can the BNP ever play the media game?

Neil Willis is a former freelancer with experience in the charity and consumer sectors, business to business publishing and national newspapers. He now works for an international news digest.