The shock closure of the ‘News of the World’ might be seen as a major PR offensive designed to bring the debate on the phone hacking scandal to a close but it could well be an opportunity for Murdoch junior to kill several birds with a single stone.
Those that think that twitter is one of the birds in question would be guilty of an oversimplification.
The closure certainly seizes the news agenda at least for a time. It changes the direction of the media storm and perhaps is intended to give Rebekah Brooks some breathing space but dig a little deeper and there’s another angle.
It was reported well before the latest storm broke that the were management mergers at the top of the Times and the Sunday Times but also at The Sun and the News of the World. Rebekah Brooks was on record saying “We will take a comprehensive look at where there is common ground across our titles …where there is common ground we will find ways of implementing efficiencies to editorial systems and processes and, where appropriate, we will find ways of introducing seven day working.”
Tellingly the web addresses sunonsunday.co.uk and .com were both registered two days ago by a UK individual using the name Mediaspring and who opted to have their address omitted from the registration. Would it be too cynical to imagine that Murdoch has used the situation to cut costs at Wapping and retain an integrated Sunday red top tabloid using the Sun brand?
It began with a conversation in the Blackdog Ballroom with Dom Burch. He is about to take a six month sabbatical from his role as Head of Corporate Communications at ASDA and he has a new twitter profile to mark the occasion. I then saw on twitter that the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is moving to ITV and will therefore cease to be @BBCLauraK; re-emerging in the autumn as @ITVLauraK.
In the last three or four years there has been a rush amongst many PR consultancies to appoint a head of social media or to build a digital team. If there was a right time to do this (and I doubt it), that time has certainly passed.
Lady Gaga is the first entity to gain 10 million followers on Twitter. Although teen idol Justin Bieber is gaining followers at a faster rate, 23,000 a day against Gaga’s measly 22,000, he still has around 300k to go before he crosses the line.
Amidst all of the buzz around Twitter’s $50 million bid for Tweetdeck, a new app for the iPhone is launched today. To date the iPhone version has been something of a compromise; a big box solution squeezed into the narrower confines of a handheld device.
It began in earnest with Trafigura but the freedom to publish now means that the superinjuction, a form of gagging order in which the press is prohibited from reporting even the existence of the injunction, or any details of it, is now almost impossible to enforce.
The longest gap between a tweet being tweeted and then retweeted will shortly pass the five year mark, when someone sometime after 9.50pm PST will RT the first ever tweet from Jack Dorsey, or @jack, Twitter Chairman and author of 
Earlier today San Francisco web developer Joe Johnston launched his contribution to the social web with a small post via his twitter account @simple10. It said simply “connect.me beta sign-up launched 
