Author Archives: Gareth Weekes

It’s not always easy to be both a gentleman and a newspaper editor but Neal Butterworth managed to square the circle. He was a very effective editor and a kind and good man, and his death has robbed the Bournemouth …

Can it ever be wrong to tell both sides of a news story? When faced with conflicting opinions, news journalists are not normally expected to establish the truth one way or the other. All they need do is cover both …

A business editor on a regional newspaper once wrote that the correct relationship between a journalist and a PR person was “that of a dog and a lamppost”. I tried to explain this to a roomful of horrified PR people …

It’s amazing to think that even today, years after she faded from public view, Margaret Thatcher can still inspire vociferous disagreement. But even those who disagree with everything she stood for cannot deny she was a dazzling personality of breathtaking …

This morning would be a good time for Ellis Short to pick up the phone and talk to a hot-shot media advisor. Not as good as, say, yesterday morning but definitely better than this afternoon. By now the multi-millionaire American …

I threw out a perfectly good saucepan recently in the mistaken belief that using aluminium in cooking could lead to Alzheimer’s. Now I realise I was fooled by a health scare. These scares are coming thick and fast. In the …

“Omnishambles” has been named word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary but it may not be strong enough to describe this week’s election of crime commissioners. A bold political idea became a £100m disaster because of a massive …

The toppling of the BBC’s Director General carries a red warning for everyone taking over at the top of a big organisation: if you don’t have a close-protection public relations team in place you may be in immediate peril. Such …

If you have ever sat with colleagues and tried to imagine the mishaps that might befall your organisation you will know what a deeply unsettling process crisis communications planning can be. You dredge from your memory the dreams that suddenly …

  Disarming a hostile media is never easy. Various methods have been tried recently – shouting abuse at reporters, throwing stones and cancelling advertising. Rick Gorka, press secretary to US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, gave this on-air reply to reporters’ …