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

 

Thought for the Week

“Sad, scared old men.”
The placard held by the guy who egged Ukip leader Nigel Farage whilst the politician was on the European election campaign trail, which followed a Channel 4 News interview with one of the rising party’s key financial donors, who decreed that trousers should be illegal for women, amongst other eyebrow-raising sentiments.

Weekly High

Smoking Gun added another trophy to its cabinet this week by picking up the Best Small PR Agency title at the Prolific North Awards 2014. Take a look at the full list of winners here.

Weekly Low

Google suffered a significant stumble last week when the chap who had nurtured Google+ from the ground up announced his resignation. To make matters worse, speculation over the future of the platform caught fire, aided in no small part by Google’s decision to send out a survey basically asking people if they would ‘miss’ the network if it disappeared, not to mention the fact that so far no convincing statement has been made by Google to try and quash such rumours.

Stories to keep an eye on

*Good Morning Britain, the show ITV hopes will finally rival BBC Breakfast, lost 200,000 viewers between episode one and two this week, sounding alarm bells that it may be destined to suffer the same fate as its troubled predecessor, Daybreak.

*Escapism, published by London’s Square Up Media (who also own luxury lifestyle title Square Mile), is now the UK’s most widely available independent print travel title, boasting circulation of 105,000.  

*Facebook is now responsible for 24% of all referrals to news and entertainment websites, according to Quantcast.  

Just in case you missed it…

The latest edition of our monthly newsletter, John Watson’s Case Notes, is now out- this time round we consider the effect of image manipulation on brand and media trust, explore some little known facts about BuzzFeed, celebrate our favourite outspoken drinks brands, and consider what the future might hold if readers control the newspaper content. Take a look here.
If there is a success story, blunder, or news event you’d like to see included email helloATsmokinggun.co.uk or tweet using #blaggersblog. Happy Friday!