The surprise announcement of a new Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, should be seen as significant for the business as well as the political world. The Australian Labor Party, seeing approval ratings plummet for previous PM Kevin Rudd, took swift and immediate action to alter the course of the media narrative that had turned against Mr Rudd thereby potentially undermining Labor’s chances in the forthcoming Australian General Election.
Business can learn a lot from this episode and could do well to watch how Ms Gillard performs in the coming months under intense scrutiny from her h…
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Isn’t it about time sports organisations and teams got a better grip on their communications? Over the past 48 hours we have seen the England football team implode publically as former captain John Terry addressed the world’s media at the team’s daily press conference. While some have applauded his honesty others have questioned the loyalty to his manager, Fabio Capello, and his successor as England captain, Steven Gerrard.
Subsequently Terry has apologised for publically undermining his teammates but this has been an unwelcome extra episode in the long-running soap opera that is team E…
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Talking to almost any journalist over the last few weeks over a drink or lunch and they are pretty unanimous in their hope The Times will be successful with their recently installed pay wall. Journalists realise that with so much content out there it is very unlikely that, in just a few years time, one or more of the national newspaper titles may have disappeared from our newsstands. With ever declining circulations coupled with ever declining ad revenues the newspaper industry is under real threat.
In a previous blog I discussed the merits of pay walls. Media commentator Roy Greenslade has int…
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The general election campaign kicked off with a poster where David Cameron promised to ‘cut the deficit, not the NHS’. This directly followed his earlier pledge to protect NHS budgets against cuts, which would be inevitable in other Government departments. Now that Mr Cameron is at No. 10, the Coalition Government has stuck by this promise but is now under attack for doing so. If the deficit is even more of a black hole than the Conservatives imagined in Opposition then how can it be justified to protect health?
Those ‘airbrushed’ posters may not have been the roaring success that CCHQ hoped for…
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The Government has announced plans to open up Government data to the public, publishing information on topics including crime, hospital infections and Government spending. It is clear that this new transparency will lead to greater scrutiny and we have already seen headlines focusing on the fact that more than 170 civil servants are paid more than the Prime Minister’s salary.
Politics in the UK is still reeling from the expenses scandal and the events of this weekend are a timely reminder to all MPs about the dangers of a lack of transparency. The publishing of data online by the Government is…
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