This video of a US hospital's PR guy wrong-footing a TV journalist well-known for his aggressive interview technique is hilarious.
My theory is is that hospital community relations director Marc Slavin knows that Dan Noyes hates being touched, so uses it relentlessly to get rid of him. He's obviously goading the livid reporter to lash out by the end - therefore creating the possibility of an even bigger story than the hospital trust fund that Noyes is trying in vain to investigate.
It doesn't quite work as Marc does come away looking a bit odd and obstructive - which isn't the way PR should work at all (remember the notorious iPhone launch interview, anyone?). But his actions do seem to completely wrong-foot an allegedly tough interviewer.
Looking for cocktail inspiration ahead of the sunny Bank Holiday weekend? Well look no further than The Sun:
"TELLY presenter Nick Knowles baked an apple crumble in the nude, [burned] his WILLY on the oven door, then [rubbed] it with butter [and plunged] it into a pint of iced Pimms."
I'll get my glass.
Thankfully, given this complicated story has more twists and turns than a Roman road the Sun's art desk took it upon themselves to bring this hard-to-grasp tale to life with an easily understood graphic, showing us what the scene may have looked like.
Oooooooowwwww! His SEX is on Fire!
The source of this hard-hitting story was Knowles' own Twitter stream. Which is nice. Saves the journo getting out their seat.
There's often been a fine line between editorial and advertorial, especially when it comes to regional journalism, which is often dependent on advertising for its survival. But the so-called quality newspapers can sometimes be guilty of masquerading advertising content as journalism.
The Sunday Times'Style section this week (23 May, pp 14-19) included a long interview with Cheryl Cole, written by journalist Edwina Ings-Chambers.
The warning signs should have been obvious from the headline - "She's Worth It". The headline was paraphrasing the slogan of L'Oreal, who just happen to employ Cheryl Cole as the face (sic) of one of their brands of hairspray.
Within this interview - including the picture credits - were seven mentions of L'Oreal and ten mentions of L'Oreal products. L'Oreal products were given equal billing to the clothes used in the photographs.
The frequent references to L'Oreal were sometimes incongruous and, frankly, bizarre. Take this sentence:
"Cheryl barely reads any press, so she can't say if she was surprised by...the furore over her having hair extensions and yet being the face of L'Oreal Elvive Full Restore 5 Replenishing Shampoo."
The mention of the "L'Oreal PR [who] doesn't even have to make the coffee run..." sheds light on these odd interpolations.
The interview was presumably set up between the journalist and L'Oreal - the former given access to the celeb on condition that the company gets a plug or ten.
But this compromises journalistic integrity, surely? Instead of an interview that offers a balanced view on Cheryl Cole, we get a bland, admiring, product-plugging advertorial.
Cheryl's old assault charge is briefly mentioned, but balanced by the comment that she is an "everyone-deserves-a-second-chance kind of a person" - whatever that means.
It's clear that L'Oreal got a good deal here. They got a piece regularly name-checking them, photos featuring (and crediting) their products, and a plug for Cheryl's upcoming campaigns with them.
They also paid for a full-page advert within the interview (this time featuring one of their other "stars", Eva Longoria), which adds to the overall advertorial tone of the feature.
In return, The Sunday Times gets a feature with one of the most popular stars of today, and a nice cover picture.
But what does the reader get? Short-changed, maybe.
Often evoking the ironic #bpcares hashtag, the feed satirises BP's clean-up efforts through tweets such as:
The ocean looks a bit slimmer today. Dressing it in black really did the trick! #bpcares
Catastrophe is a strong word, let's agree to call it a whoopsie daisy
We cannot confirm or deny the rumors that a smoke monster has energed from the gulf. J/K! What will we do with our time once Lost ends?!?
With BP's reaction to the spill so widely criticised, it's no suprise this satire is more popular than truth. BP America's official feed, which is also responding to the crisis, has attracted a mere fraction of the spoof feed's followers.
So YouTube is five years old. And what do we have to show for it? A video of a baby biting his brother's finger, watched by 190 million people and counting, making it the most popular video ever on the site.
Yeah, thanks for that. But don't worry, it's not all rubbish. There's the sneezing panda of course, watched by more than 60 million people.
However despite such popular nonsense, there is no denying YouTube's impact has been profound - with two billion views per day currently - making embedded video on blogs such as this and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook an effortless, viral and widespread reality while turning bedroom creatives and online activists into overnight celebrities:
At the heart of much discussion has been the relationship between YouTube and the traditional media. This relationship has often been an uneasy one. Disputes over the use and abuse of copyrighted media have been a constant theme but at the heart is a wonderful, if awkward, symbiosis. We have seen television content become a YouTube sensation - see Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent - immediately bestowing greater success and global spotlight for the show and the channel which originated the clip.
It's no coincidence the mainstream shows that have benefitted most from the viral effect of YouTube are those programmes and broadcasts whose content can be broken down into short, easily digested clips - from song and dance routines to famous sporting moments.
In fact, it could easily be argued the popularity of YouTube and it's reduction of our collective attention span, has fundamentally changed the way we consume any form of video and the structure therefore of mainstream programming.
This clip from Charlie Brooker - for a while earlier this year the best-rated and most-reviewed clip of all time on YouTube - best reveals the revolution that has taken place. It's traditional broadcast content in a perfect, easily-digested two-minute chunk, which satirises its parent's obsession with formula, in a formula perfectly crafted for the ascending broadcast platform of the age. If you're still with me; if that ain't post-modern I don't know what is!
But if you want to really understand where the complementing ends and YouTube's own uniqueness begins, just look at the figures. YouTube may lack a single defining moment of mass audience engagement: compare the 190 million people who have watched 'Charlie Bit My Finger', spread over the past two years - at around 10,000 per hour on average - with the 715 million who all sat down simultaneously, during the same two hour period, to watch the last World Cup Final, or even the 600 million who tuned in for just nine minutes to watch The Grand National. But what it lacks in 'prime time' YouTube more than makes up for in relentlessness and breadth of content. There is no one definining moment; but rather there are millions of them, simultaneously, one after the other, one on top of the other. That is why it works, because we choose.
And then of course there is the democratisation of broadcast. You'd have thought with 500-plus channels and programme options available on many consumer cable and satellite services we wouldn't need this bottomless pit of random video. But traditional broadcasters could have a million channels and the mindset and heritage they brought to the table would determine that they'd still never have come up with anything so unnecessary yet truly captivating as 'Where the Hell is Matt' (28 million views):
And ultimately that's the greatest lesson we've learned from YouTube's unceasing rise. No matter how silly or surreal - and the odds still seem stacked in favour of the bizarre - anything can now get the audience it deserves, however you choose to interpret that.
No sooner had David Beckham delivered England's 1,700-page bid document for the 2018 World Cup than the whole thing has been thrown into doubt by a kiss-and-tell story in the Mail on Sunday that resulted in the FA's chairman Lord Triesman resigning his post.
However, the reaction has been one of almost universal criticism of the Mail's timing and intentions regarding the kiss-and-tell, which even when talked up in tabloid terms is hardly a classic of the genre.
Below is a selection of reader comments from the Mail's own website:
"I for one have had enough of the media's negative and damaging effect on our national game...The only way we can stop these morons from doing further damage is by refusing to fall into their trap and to cease buying their worthless little rag."
"I see the heading of this article has been changed to attempt to shift all the blame onto this woman. The Mail on Sunday showing just how spineless it is. Contemptible."
"Thanks very much the Mail on Sunday...You have destroyed the chance of our country hosting the world cup. SHAME ON YOU!!!"
"I hope there is a huge backlash...for this disgraceful attempt to cash in on a kiss and tell story but at the expense of the England 2018 bid."
"She was paid £75,000 for this - that's minuscule compared to the amount of jobs and money the 2018 World Cup would have provided to the under privileged in our country, let alone the pride of hosting the tournament."
"I would simply appeal to everyone that cares about our country to BOYCOTT THIS NEWSPAPER NOW! ...The world cup would bring in billions to boost our economy, all potentially ruined by a money-grabber and a disgraceful gutter press tabloid with the stupidity to pay for and print her 'story'."
"I cannot believe such ridiculous comments, made in private, were turned into headline news by your small minded editors."
"This is a disgraceful story ...you only survive on bad news, so you try to create bad news when none is around. If I worked at your newspaper I would feel ashamed."
Did somebody say own goal? Or maybe the Mail On Sunday simply didn't like the sound of all those horrible foreign chappies turning up in 2018.
The US media gets a hard time over its coverage of foreign news, which is normally shoe-horned in after a piece about a Rhode Island man breaking a hot dog eating record or a California/Florida woman who saw a bear/alligator in her back garden. But say what you like about this insular naivety, there's no denying they totally, like, know their hemispheres:
Except, of course, he does. Regularly. In columns like this one.
Today, he lambasts the people of "New, Narcissistic Britain" in the Mail: those who reveal "every tedious detail of their lives" and "blog and bleat and tweet and text you all the time". (There's also some shoehorned argument about Facebook privacy thrown in for bad measure.)
So it's ok for columnists to spew forth about their lives - and get paid for the privilege - but when lay people choose to share, it's somehow narcissistic nonsense. (The Mail's own Liz Jones publicises intimate details of her life through her column: her failed marriage, her eating disorder and, more recently, her money woes.)
It's another irony failure for the Mail - but as Cosmo says: "I don't have Google alerts that tell me every time my name turns up on the internet." He won't have to read my mundane, embarrassing drivel, then.
Plenty of liberal commentators over the past couple of days have expressed disappointment that Britain's new coalition government is so socially unrepresentative of the country at large.
Heading up the government are two white, upper-middle-class males, products of private education and Oxbridge - David Cameron went to Eton and Oxford; Nick Clegg went to Westminster and Cambridge - who both happen to be be 43 years old.
There's plenty of hand-wringing going on, especially at The Guardian, but isn't the media at least in part to blame for this new political reality?
Oxbridge
I don't mean there's an old boys' network responsible for pro-Oxbridge bias. I mean that it's a fact of life that visual media inherently favour people who tick certain boxes - the biggest one being that they are deemed 'presentable' in front of camera against a set of outdated principles which we could discuss the rights and wrongs of forever.
As the FT's Ben Fenton pointed out a while ago, as a general rule of thumb it's fair to say that the more traditionally telegenic Prime Ministerial candidate has won at every General Election since TV became important in the 1960s. (It was a close call between John Major and Neil Kinnock in 1992 but there incumbency won out.) Now we have leaders' debates, presumably the pressure on parties to choose telegenic leaders will only strengthen.
Moreover, the most telegenic candidate will coincidentally be the most youthful candidate.
Tony Blair
Cameron and Clegg are, historically speaking, incredibly young to gain positions of such power. Cameron is the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool (previously that post-Lord Liverpool record was held by Tony Blair in 1997, but Cameron beats him by a couple of months).
It seems like the days when politicians worked their way up through other Whitehall departments, building experience as they went, are gone for good. Nowadays your record isn't an advantage, it's a millstone around your neck - it means you've got to spend time defending the difficult decisions you had to make in the past, rather than talking about your vision for the brave new world of the future. Barack Obama triumphing over Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, and now Cameron and Clegg beating Brown, are all examples of voters favouring a new start over an experienced pair of hands.
Going into politics is an expensive business - as the expenses scandal apologists would point out the basic salary isn't all that great for such a position of power and profile - so if you're a young, ambitious politician with little or no baggage, it helps to be independently wealthy. Inevitably this skews things towards privately-educated, middle class candidates.
If we want our politicians to be telegenic, they better be youthful. And if we want them to be youthful, they better be wealthy. The media's inherent bias towards looking good means the best route to Downing Street for those not blessed in the beauty department is to inherit power - is it coincidental that this is what happened with a certain Gordon Brown?
The General Election will be remembered for many things, among them the outburst from Sky News man Adam Boulton on live TV. Struggling to drown out Labour spin supremo Alastair Campbell, a clearly aggitated Boulton eventually threw what can only be described as a temper tantrum live on air.
While we are all still waiting to find out who our next Prime Minister is, following last week's General Election, we do at least know what share of the vote each party got. As such we can also find out which of the pollsters was most accurate - an interesting piece of post-match analysis, given the role of the polls in the election and the tendancy for rival media outlets to favour one over another.
The British Polling Council (BPC) has revealed that ICM, seemingly favoured by The Guardian for its own pre-election insights, was most accurate, missing the mark by 1.25%. Meanwhile, YouGov, favoured by The Sun, was out by 2.25%. The full list from the BPC, which shows each pollster's predicted share of the vote, looks like this:
First it was Kay Burley turning on a protestor before attracting the abuse of the crowd. Now it is Adam Boulton who today appeared to forget where he was. It comes to something when Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell feels the need to interject for his attacker's own sake, imploring Boulton to show some "dignity" and remember "this is live television":
Regular readers of this blog and anybody else on Twitter yesterday will be well aware Danny Dyer caused outrage yesterday with advice to a reader of poor-man's porn mag Zoo, recommending a woman's face be permanently disfigured in a brutal knife attack as revenge for getting on with her life after splitting from her boyfriend.
And if Dyer ever finds out, he'll be well angry ...etc. etc. (In fact, Dyer did find out and issued a proper-well-unimpressed apology... which he may also not have written).
Of course nobody imagined Dyer really wrote this rubbish. Discovering he could write might even have seemed a stretch of the imagination to many. But you might have assumed comments likely to cause such offence would at least have been run by the actor (a kind of washed-up Artful Dodger-turned-sweary-mouthed cockney cliche, for those unfamiliar with his work).
In the newfound spirit of tactical voting it's interesting to note both The Mirror and The Guardian still feature David Cameron on their election day front pages - taking the unusual step of showing us who they don't want, rather than the more traditional and uplifting photo of who they do. (That said, it is of course a tactic which famously worked for The Sun with its 'Would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the light' photo of Neil Kinnock). Pictured, above right, is The Guardian's slightly sinister front page photo (Message: 'Careful what you open the door to...') and below is The Mirror's far less subtle front page, calling into question Cameron's fitness to lead the UK.
Papers such as The Sun (front page here) meanwhile have seized their last chance to give David Cameron one final shove towards the door of Number 10.
Anybody else think The Sun front page is trying just a little too hard? Such is the The Sun's well-publicised desperation to see David Cameron installed as Prime Minister all it really achieves is evoking the unmistakable whiff of 'Desperation: the new scent from Rupert Murdoch'.
Danny Dyer has caused a right old bloody palaver on the internet, by telling readers of jazz mag Zoo that a jilted geezer should go on the lash and smash anything that moves before slashing his ex's boat race with a blade so no other geezer fancies smashing 'er.
