Posted on ‘He’s an escapist’, the writer Nathaniel West once wrote, ‘he wants to cultivate his interior garden.’ What is striking is that everyone has a tolerance for coronavirus news and especially if you’re in the public sector communicating it. At times, a 24-hour flow of information can intoxicate. If only, you think, if I keep reading […]
Posted on You may have seen the very warm public response Yorkshire Tea got this week after enduring some severe trolling. If you missed it, the brand got a kicking after the Chancellor Rishi Sunak was pictured with a big bag of tea bags. The attack follows a backlash at Heck Sausages for hosting Boris Johnson. In […]
Posted on There’s a cracking cartoon that tackles the problem of mental health in the workplace. “We know that mental health is a problem,” the boss says “so we’re changing things.” “What?” says the worker. “You’re taking on enough people to help me actually do my job without feeling burnt out?” “No,” the boss replies. “We thought […]
Posted on Earlier this year a dam burst near the Brazilian town of Belo Horizonte and within minutes 40 were dead and 300 missing buried under thick brown sludge. In the UK, its been almost 100 years since loss of life from a dam burst from any of our almost 3,000 dams. In August 2019, it nearly […]
Posted on This week you may have come across the Twitter rant unleashed by the employee of an MP. Gareth Arnold took the unusual step of handing his notice in by posting thread of tweets from the account of Jared O’Mara MP he had access to. It was oddly polarising. It was greeted as a glorious ‘f*** […]
Posted on I was involved in a conversation about a communications strategy a short while back and it made me think. Firstly, it made me think that its great for communications to be involved at all. But it also reminded me of the icebergs that looms when you are involved with communications. Any of the icebergs can rip […]
Posted on There is a camera for every 14 people in the UK and comms teams are slowly waking up with the idea of re-purposing CCTV and body-worn footage into comms. What does the footage show? Work at the sharp end, fundamentally. It can show what teams are up against. Beyond that, it shows how the organisation responds and […]
Posted on We will look back at 2007 as being a year when the world went in a new direction and communicators struggled to keep up. In January that year, Apple’s iphone, Google’s Android and BBC’s iPlayer were all launched. Tom Baldwin in his book ‘Control, Alt, Delete’ singles out the pivotal year of 2007 as the […]
Posted on As I sat on the train scrolling on my phone for Brexit news, a curious landmark update dropped into my timeline. It was 10 years, the tweet told me since I joined Twitter. It made me think and reflect on the journey I’ve taken and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Many have been […]
Posted on As a keen junior newspaper reporter, I was once told the key to writing features was to put the best quote in the intro. So, John Lennon’s ‘Beatles are bigger than Jesus’ should always shout from the first paragraph to reel the reader in. I was reminded of this gem listening to Marc Reeves, editor-in-chief […]