Author Archive
Undone by the paper trail (News International’s latest woes)
There’s always a paper trail — and it can come back to bite you at most inconvenient times, as the Murdochs are finding out. Convicted phone hacker, former New of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman’s 2007 letter in protest at his sacking by News International following his conviction is a case in point. The letter […]
Setting the news agenda … without news
You’ve probably heard the old saying, ‘If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. But if you owe the bank a million dollars the bank’s got a problem!’ OK, so, scale the numbers up for inflation, but you get the picture. It’s a bit like that with news organisations and the […]
Huffington Post ‘design competition’ backfires
If you want a laugh, take a look at how Huffington Post’s Tom Sawyer-like approach to getting a logo design for its politics pages — for nothing but a credit — went down. For the business accused of Unjust enrichment (even facing a lawsuit by bloggers who felt they were exploited by Huffington) to cast […]
Reading between the lines
These aren’t exactly the actions of an ally, now are they?: (from the Financial Times) “The US now has information that Pakistan, particularly the ISI, gave access to the Chinese military to the downed helicopter in Abbottabad,” said one person in intelligence circles, referring to the Pakistani spy agency. The Chinese engineers were allowed to […]
Three golden rules of crisis management
There’s a worthwhile story How the jersey row unravelled a brand in the NZ Herald today about the ‘furore’ engulfing Adidas prompted by over-pricing the All Blacks souvenir/supporters’ jersey to New Zealanders. Dumb actions (like pressuring online retailers to ban sales to NZ @!#**!) and untruthful/implausible statements from Adidas executives only made things worse, as Geoff […]
Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Yeah? No kidding. “Inside Look: Bristol Palin’s Reality Show Is Not Very Real” And yet the page title says “Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post”. Crikey. Tragic. – P
Gizmodo displays its journalism skills once more
News is that Gizmodo, who reportedly paid the finder of the lost/stolen iPhone4 prototype $5,000 for umm, ‘exclusive access‘ to the device (cough, — so they could photograph it and dismantle it and plaster images of it on the web) won’t be prosecuted for those activities. District Attorney Announces Filing Decision on Misappropriation of […]
Ironic juxtaposition
I’m doing research for an upcoming project and spotted this rather striking juxtaposition of the front and back covers of NZ INVESTOR mag — May 2010 edition. See the wee picture of Sandy Maier on the cover? It’s illustrating an article: Corporate fix-it man Sandy Maier is making sweeping changes at South Canterbury Finance … […]
Political neutrality of the SIS – er, FAIL
4 AA Political neutrality of New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (1) The Director must take all reasonable steps to ensure that— (a) the activities of the Security Intelligence Service are limited to those that are relevant to the discharge of its functions: (b) the Security Intelligence Service is kept free from any influence or consideration […]
SIS boss’s slow resignation letter + Slater says enuf!
Media wannabe Martyn ‘bomber’ Bradbury, twisting on the spit of his own sour double-mindedness appeared yesterday to pour scorn and contempt on his Right wing foil, blogger Cameron Slater: ” … to think that the SIS would hand papers like that over to Slater of all people is unbelievable.” and “It is an incredible thing […]
Makes you think
From The Guardian: Martin Rowson on the final crisis of capitalism European and North American stock markets are at their most volatile since the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. We had a GFC film festival at our house over the weekend watching Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a Love Story and the Academy Award winning documentary Inside […]
A business model to die for …
In the finest tradition of ‘wealth transfer’, here’s the end of the line for those who subsidized the debt-gorged Private Equity Partners ‘foray’ into book retailing. REDgroup: A ‘company’ (harrump!) conceived, badly-operated and then run into the ground by Australian accountants, taking with it a dollop of cash, milked by the ‘administrators’ then buried in […]
Browser choice and IQ
What a hoot reading the different ways a ‘study’ ‘finding’ that browser choice has been correlated to IQ has been (cough) ‘reported’… People with higher IQ are shunning Internet Explorer: study IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers [STUDY] Internet Explorer Users are More Stupid Than Others: Study Internet Explorer Users […]
Right wing vixen Louise Mensch front-footing it
We’ve discussed before my preferred policy of tackling criticism head-on, and also, as a policy, publishing all threats I receive. Yesterday British MP Louise Mensch, a protagonist in the ‘hackgate’ scandal admitted she exaggerated Piers Morgan’s ‘admissions/boasting’ of phone hacking in his Daily Mirror days, and publicly apologised. (Although in typical politician fashion, still tries […]
