Pity poor old Julian Assange. There he is, crusading away in the name of freedom of expression, eager only to serve the public good, when the evil credit card companies decide to shut up shop.
The right-thinking among us must, of course, agree with James Ball in The Guardian and condemn the actions of the likes of Visa, Mastercard and Paypal as inimical to free speech. And yet…
Is it just us, or do others agree that when it comes to Julian Assange, one finds that one’s reserves of sympathy are running on empty?
One thing’s for sure. If ever there was a man who could do with some good PR, it’s the beleaguered Antipodean.
Pictured: the bankers’ consensus?
I’ve had a few problems with a Julian Assange lookalike crashing my parties. I’ve written up my experience at http://dasteepsspeaks.blogspot.com/2011/10/crashing-assange.html
Don’t you think he looks like the real Mr Assange?
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.
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 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.
Is there a geek inside all of us?
Excellent Nike ad
Memo to would-be hacks: good writing is no longer a tool of your trade
Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
This bank is so well designed that many of its staff never go home (allegedly)
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting.
If you become a star, you don’t change – everyone else does. Kirk Douglas, 1916 – present, American actor.