A weekly roundup of talking points, sans effort

 

 

Thought for the week

“He has not just walked away from the talks – he has walked away from his own commitments to the press victims.” Labour leader Ed Miliband discussing Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to curtail months of rhetoric on press regulation following the Leveson inquiry, and instead take his current reform proposals direct to a House of Commons vote next week.

Weekly high

On Wednesday the world’s largest message in a bottle was put to sea from Marina San Miguel, Tenerife. The stunt, which is to promote Norway’s Solo soda (spreading the ‘greatest drink on Earth’ across the planet), took months to prepare, featured in newspapers across the globe, and the oceanic odyssey can now be followed by logging onto Facebook (clue- change the language settings on the app to English first). Nice job.

 

Weekly low

Before the new Pope was chosen ignorance caused Twitter chaos. A British MP accused the BBC of racism after it asked whether smoke above the Vatican would be black or white- referencing the centuries old method of declaring a new church leader, rather than speculating over his race. Elsewhere, thousands of social media users- including self-proclaimed ‘gurus’ and journalists- followed @JMBergoglio, a fake account set up under the name of the man now in charge of Catholicism, despite the content being blatantly sarcastic. Evidently translating Spanish to English for accuracy is too much effort…

 
 

Things that might happen in the next week…

The House of Commons will vote on David Cameron’s own proposals for press regulation following the Leveson inquiry on Monday, Tuesday sees the inauguration ceremony for the new Catholic chief Pope Francis, meanwhile Vogue Editor and ‘most powerful woman in fashion’, British born Anna Wintour- the inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada, will prepare for her new post as Artistic Director of luxury publishing behemoth Conde Naste.

Just in case you missed it…

Twitter is abandoning many versions of its subsidiary application TweetDeck, bought for $40million just two years ago. Chrome, browser-based, Mac and Windows versions will continue to be developed. Read more on the story here.
 
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