Posts Tagged ‘hack’

Yesterday I managed to find the time to lunch one of my old journalist pals. Now retired, the wizened old hack knew how to harvest my leads because he cut his teeth in an age when press releases were walked into the newspapers and news desks and journalists needed copious amounts of TLC.

In an age of time-compressed newsrooms and the ten-minute news cycle, opportunities for the old school long lunch are pretty much all encased in the British Museum, alongside a sorry-looking stuffed Dodo. This is a shame, as there were valuable lessons to be learned at the long lunch coalface back in the day.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from these Bacchanalian skirmishes was the precious skill of face reading. But now we live in a world where nearly all communication is done by email or text and a network of contacts can be built up with a few clicks on a keyboard.
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Is PR spam the new chlamydia? Certainly it’s being fulminated about an awful lot as the latest social disease that may have infected us all, although we’re too often too ashamed to check out the symptoms.
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