To be suited is to be not booted

August 18, 2009

alex-wade-in-a-suit

In the professions, is wearing a suit a must? We suspect it might be. The PR upsides to being suited far outweigh the downsides. Here’s why.

1. Wearing a suit makes you look professional.

Like it or not, someone dressed casually never looks as slick as the person who’s chosen a suit. Good suits can even disguise hangovers.

2. Wearing a suit is safe.

Even if your employer gives you the option of dressing casually, the safe option is, well, the safe option. What’s to go wrong with a dark blue pinstripe? A blazer and chinos, in contrast, can cause mayhem.

3. Wearing a suit is stylish.

Alex Wade, pictured here, had his suit made by Dress2Kill. Doesn’t he look stylish?

4. Wearing a suit provides you with a sense of identity.

The casually dressed are anonymous. They wear their badge of the quotidian with no sense of pride. To embrace the suit is to say: “I am professional.” There is nothing wrong with this. It is a good thing.

5. Wearing a suit does not necessarily mean you have to wear a tie.

Look at Swordplay’s sometime scribe, the stylish Mr Wade. Do you see a tie? Exactly.

6. Wearing a suit says that you’re organised and together.

The suit-wearer commands respect. The king of casual is a judgement waiting to happen.

7. In a recession, wearing a suit can save your job.

Asked to choose between sacking an employee wearing a suit and one who is casually dressed, nine out of ten employers say they’d save the suit-wearer.

Remember: if you’re not going to wear a suit, you’ve got to be very, very, very good at what you do. Only if you’re that confident should you opt for the casual look. Unless, of course, you have a job where no one can see you.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.