Category: Comment

  • The art of brevity

    The art of brevity Twitter has made some 336 people redundant, mainly in the product and engineering teams. There’s little doubt that Twitter has played an important part in helping media organisations push news stories to readers, but the company has struggled to turn its mass appeal into real income. It’s difficult to see an…

  • International Print Day

    International Print Day Today, Wednesday 14th October, is International Print Day, so expect a lot of stories all over the press and social media about how wonderful print is, and try to forget that you’re reading this on a screen. Ironically, the success of last year’s event was measured in the number of tweets –…

  • Big trouble in China

    Big trouble in China Recent weeks have seen some shocking falls on the Chinese stock exchange, which has mostly hit smaller investors, and taken the shine off the West’s love affair with the Chinese economy. So far, the various Western stock markets have survived, albeit with a few wobbles. But just how much of our…

  • Giving it away

    Giving it away So, the NME, the venerable music industry magazine, is giving in to its declining readership figures and is instead to be given away for free. Cue much talk of how the circulation will immediately go up, because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t want something for free, especially the NME, which has generally…

  • The great charter

    The great charter 800 years ago – the 15th June 1215 – King John signed the Magna Carta, though the king had no intention of honouring his promises, the Pope promptly revoked it and the British didn’t even think to mark the spot – leaving it to the Americans to set up the memorial. The…

  • Epic fail

    Epic fail On the face of it, sending press releases to journalists ought to be fairly easy. What could be difficult about pasting the content into the body of a plain email and attaching a Word file plus a picture or link to a picture. Press releases that are difficult to access are less likely…

  • Paper or disk?

    Paper or disk? Not so very long ago the press centres at large trade shows, such as Fespa, where I am at the moment, used to feature row upon row of racks with paper press releases. Nowadays most PR agencies have switched to digital formats, which does make it a lot easier to cut and…

  • Spotting the forgers

    Spotting the forgers A new law – The Specialist Printing Equipment and Materials (Offences) Act – is due to come into force in May and will make it a criminal act to supply printing equipment and consumables knowing that they will be used for illicit purposes. This could include producing false ID documents as well…

  • That’s torn it

    That’s torn it My local council sent me a letter to confirm my details from the electoral roll. It’s a straightforward monochrome variable data document. But this one had been torn in half and then sellotaped together. The local council didn’t seem too bothered, telling me: “It’s come straight from the printer, not from the council.”…

  • The sum of its parts

    The sum of its parts This week sees the Hunkeler Innovation Days event take place at Lucerne, Switzerland. I’ll be at the show and will post a proper report once I’ve had a chance to get around all the stands. But it’s worth noting that this relatively small show has become one of the most…

  • Digital life span

    Digital life span Vint Cerf, vice president of Google and an Internet pioneer, has warned that we could lose a large part of our collective history through over-reliance on digital technologies. Actually, this is a problem that we’ve known about for several decades. The television industry has already had to deal with the difficulty of…

  • Happiness in a bottle

    Happiness in a bottle Coca-Cola has been forced to drop its #MakeItHappy campaign after Gawker subverted it by creating a bot to tweet excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf diatribe, which in turn tricked the Coke bot into repeating the text in the form of soppy pictures. Coca Cola pointed out that the Internet is awash…