A weekly roundup of media news and talking points, sans effort

 

Thought for the Week 

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.” Steve Martin, at some point in his wonderful career, as quoted by Parade this week to mark the comedy hero’s 69th birthday.  

 

Weekly High

In an ever changing world it’s nice to know you can still find familiarities- such as David Attenborough’s soothing voice. Like a wonderfully caring grandfather, hearing his caramel tones is like coming home, and as such when we found this video online, in which the famed nature documentarist observes the most curious of all species- teenage ‘fangirls’- we couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear. And then laugh, out loud. Unsurprisingly, it’s currently riding high in the UK viral chart.

 

Weekly Low

Aberdeen Council’s Newsbite magazine, which is sent out to 23,000 social housing tenants in the city each issue, decided to run with the following cover for the latest edition, but only when the presses had stopped rolling did staff realise the ridiculous mistake that had been made. Cue a lot of people poking fun on social media, not to mention referencing how fitting the blunder was given the increasingly poor treatment of social tenants on the part of the UK government, all of which evidences why attention to detail is everything in this line of work.

 

Stories to keep an eye on

More worries for Britain’s magazine industry have emerged as the Audit Bureau of Circulation confirmed that collectively consumer titles lost 1million sales during the first half of 2014. 
Twitter is investigating its policy on abuse in a move prompted by so-called trolls sending Zelda Williams, daughter the late Robin, mocked up pictures of her father after his suicide.
Social news site Reddit has released its ‘pressiquette’ guidelines to help journalists harness the platform effectively while avoiding disrespecting its public users. 
 

Just in case you missed it…

This week we launched Travel PR month on the Smoking Gun blog, during which we’ll be looking at the key press outlets of influence in the industry, the top tastemaker bloggers, and the brands that are doing travel PR, marketing and advertising differently. Take a look at our introduction here.