Gaddafi is dead and solicitors shouldn’t be whistle-blowers. But why isn’t The Guardian opening a shop?

October 21, 2011
dude shop

Three questions to round up the week:

1. Colonel Gaddafi is dead. The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called his death “deplorable”. Footage broadcast on national television last night did not suggest that the dictator went gently into his good night. He seems to have been beaten senseless by a mob, but his demise provoked scenes of jubilation in Libya and, indeed, elsewhere, with both rulers and media among the nations of the west erring towards the vengeful sentiments of senior National Transitional Council member Mohammed Sayeh, who told the BBC he doubted that the colonel was killed intentionally, but added: “Even if he was killed intentionally, I think he deserves this. If they kill him 1,000 times, I think it will not pay back the Libyans what he has done. We’ve lost over 70,000 of our best men because of this monster.”

Our question: should we ‘celebrate’ anyone’s death? And why is it that it is acceptable to broadcast Gaddafi’s last moments, but not his funeral, which is apparently to be conducted in secret?

2. As The Guardian has it: “Julian Pike, a partner at Farrer & Co, the law firm whose clients include the Queen, told MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee on Wednesday that he was aware the company’s often-repeated ‘rogue reporter’ defence was untrue.” In effect, then, Mr Pike knew that all was not as it should be in the state of News International but did not speak up because of client confidentiality. He told the committee that he saw evidence in 2008 that suggested there was “a powerful case” that an additional three News of the World journalists were “illegally accessing information in order to obtain stories” and had informed NI of this, but condeded that “he hadn’t done very much” after he realised News International had misled Parliament. His answer to the committee’s obvious question – why didn’t Pike drop NI as a client or tell the police about his suspicions – was: “We have obligations to the client we work for.”

Our question: should solicitors ever be whistle-blowers?

3. The Guardian (them again) says it is not going to open a shop. This story came from the Telegraph, which said: “Guardian News & Media is eyeing premises in London’s expensive Covent Garden to open a lifestyle store, likely to be branded ‘G3′ – taking its name from the newspaper’s G2 supplement.” The Guardian denies what is not, in our view, the most scurrilous of allegations.

Our question: why isn’t The Guardian going to open a shop? Seems like a mighty fine idea to us.

Pictured: the Dudes Factory, Berlin, “as much a storefront for consuming and buying art, as it is a workshop, collaborative space and exhibition venue”, according to The Cool Hunter. Could it be how a Guardian shop might look?

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.