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The Blagger's Blog 23rd January 2015

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

 Jeremy-Kyle-Rex

Thought for the Week 

I feel disorientated and scared.” TV host Jeremy Kyle, commenting on when he was pepper-sprayed in Magaluf whilst filming his new show, The Kyle Files; the episode was aired on ITV last night. Just in case you missed it, though, here’s the moment again…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G42Z7NXvlU8

Weekly High

Best-selling author James Patterson has come up with an innovative, if slightly alarming way of promoting his new novel, Private Vegas. A special (to put it mildly) advanced preview copy is currently up for grabs at the price of $300,000. For that, you get a flight to an undisclosed location, a bottle of champagne, a bomb squad to hold the manuscript whilst you read it through gold binoculars, the opportunity to watch the book self destruct (you need to sign a waiver), and then dinner with the scribe himself. 1,000 digital copies are also available, which disappear from your device after 24-hours. How’s that for experiential marketing?
james_patterson_exploding_book
 

Weekly Low

We were tempted to get involved in the Page 3 debacle this week, but opted not to for the sake of originality. And the fact we stumbled upon a rather glaring oversight by the Labour Party. As if people needed any more doubts as to whether they have the strength in leadership and management to run the country from May, someone within the organisation forgot to double check the URL featured at the end of a new party political broadcast, directing viewers to a parked website rather than the correct domain. Which, to clarify, is www.labour.org.uk/harry – not labour.org/harry.
Labour_1592957c
 

Stories to keep an eye on

Google has invested $11million in lobbying for ‘net neutrality’ over in Washington D.C.
The world’s biggest English-language news website, Mail Online, has posted record traffic for December 2014, with 199.4million visitors in that month alone.
Blendle, the Dutch pay-as-you-go news aggregator that has been likened to an iTunes for current affairs, is set to expand outside The Netherlands as user numbers reach 200,000, with sights now set on Scandinavia as the next territory to target.
 

Just in case you missed it

The Guardian and Telegraph saw higher levels of engagement on Twitter than MailOnline, despite the latter being the most read English-language news site on the planet. Read about it here.

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