Off topic: the language of advertising

The Ideas­Broth­ers blog has uncovered a novel writ­ten by an advert­ising plan­ner.

In a pent­house apart­ment on the right side of town, a 28‐54 year old man called Dan tried to con­trol his breath­ing. Someone or some­thing was mov­ing about down­stairs. He listened intently. There it was again. In the inky dark, the sound had real cut‐through com­pared to the thou­sands of mes­sages he was bom­barded with through mul­tiple chan­nels each day.

My favour­ite bit?

Dan looked around for a weapon. There was noth­ing heavy but he found his 5.2 mega­pixel mobile phone in the hall. Even if he couldn’t stop the intruder he could at least cre­ate a piece of con­tent to upload and share with his friends online.

My new job…and yours?

I am delighted and — yes, excited — to announce that I’ll be join­ing the World Eco­nomic Forum as Man­aging Dir­ector and Head of Com­mu­nic­a­tions from August. [More here.]

In the new role I’ll be remov­ing my com­ment­ary hat and trav­el­ling a lot more, so the blog will prob­ably fall into abey­ance — it’s been suf­fer­ing from neg­lect of late.

Graduate School of Journalism, City University London
Con­tinue read­ing

Obama: justifying a news media bailout?

If you wondered about the US gov­ern­ment and the news media, and the pos­sib­il­ity — the hint, flicker, barest glim­mer — of some kind of bail­out, then listen to the last few humour­less minutes of Barack Obama’s speech to the White House press corps (it’s from 2’50″ in on the clip below).

Is he merely play­ing to the gal­lery? Or is he provid­ing the intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fic­a­tion for future action? Or am I simply indul­ging my journ­al­istic pas­sion for over-interpretation?