Did Piers Morgan 'Invent' Phone Hacking?

Image via WikipediaThere are growing mentions in media linking my old pal* Piers Morgan to the phone hacking imbroglio that has so excited the British media and parliament over the past two weeks - and which is now showing every sign of crossing the Atlantic in a tide of Murdoch-toxic sludge and washing up against the shores of the home of the brave and the land of the free.

I'm sort of sorry about that, because I'm quite the Piers fan. I admire the way he picked himself up after riding the crest of a wave as Murdoch's brightest, blue eyedest boy, leaving Murdoch behind him as he became editor of the Daily Mirror and then being dumped massively overnight following the Iraqi abuse story that saw him fall foul of the very authorities that had courted him so assiduously right up to the day of his fall from grace. I've worked with him professionally on a couple of occasions and, once we all accept this is all about Piers, he's quite fun to be around. He's very smart indeed, viscerally and intellectually understands the dynamics of fame and celebrity and is very much the larger than life character that manages to project itself into millions of American homes.

He must be getting his wagons into a circle right now. You see, Piers is on the record as referring to some of the techniques used to do phone hackery. The smoke has already started rising, this post at UK blog Guido Fawkes shedding some light on matters by documenting how the Mirror hacked Ulrika Jonsson's answering machine to scoop the Sven Goran Eriksson affair, while MPs have now started baying for Morgan's blood after references in his most readable memoir, The Insider and in his diaries have clearly put him in the frame. This diary entry, in particular, was called out by one MP:

"Apparently if you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages."

This, of course, makes things even more interesting - pulling a major American talk show host (which is, love him or hate him, what is keeping Piers in Rice Krispies these days) into the scandal is going to add plenty new fuel to the flames and keep the pressure building nicely on Murdoch - although Morgan's comments don't talk to his time on Murdoch's watch, he does bring a nice splash of star quality to the story and keep it building nicely.

This has turned into the biggest story since the Daily Telegraph exposed MPs expenses - probably bigger, as it now has much greater international appeal. It's a fantastic opportunity for anyone wronged by the media to get stuck in and we can expect to hear lots of calls for restraining and reining in the dangerously unfettered press, particularly from those who have a vested interest in ensuring the media are cowed and sycophantic.

The fascinating question is whether this will bring Murdoch down and I, for one, would be selling any NewsCorp shares granny left me. Quite what impact it has on the rest of the Fourth Estate is yet to be seen, but I'm not optimistic. Parliament reminded me in a queer way of Tahrir Square. Here, again, was a people casting off the yoke of their oppressors...

*The 'my old pal' is ironic. Piers wouldn't know me from a broom handle.

Update: Radio-tastic pal Robert 'Wes' Weston turned me onto this - eight minutes enjoyably spent! Piers gives MP Louise Mensch a jolly good roasting over the hackegations story here: Piers owns MP Video.

When Sorry Doesn't Wash: NewsCorp and BP compared.

What have News Corp and BP got in common?

The UK's newspapers all carried advertisements from media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation headed 'We are sorry' this week. Which is an interesting response to the whole phone hacking furore (phonegate, if you likes your clichés). Murdoch himself has given but one interview on the whole debacle, to the Wall Street Journal, which he happens to own.

He has not responded to any other media. He has not said one word himself, but has relied on this advertisement to do the job for him. This is nice, as it avoids him actually having to say the words. It's different, you know, actually saying you are sorry rather than getting an ad agency to write up some 'sorry' copy.

It's a lesson BP learned (or perhaps didn't) over deep sea oil spill screwupgate. They spent $50 million on a glib 'sorry' ad campaign that backlashed harder than a snapped high-tension cable. Although CEO Tony Hayward actually appears in the video, something that Murdoch has failed to do in addressing the increasingly serious tumult around his company's journalistic ethics, Hayward didn't actually say sorry. Really, truly, sorry. Using advertising tactics to put out reassuring images isn't saying sorry. Talking about how you're making it all better isn't sorry. Saying 'We really, really screwed up and we recognise that' in person - now that's saying sorry.

You can't apologise by proxy and expect to be taken seriously.

And that's the key to the Murdoch ads. How many people think he truly is sorry? And how many think he just bought space rather than get out there and express true, humble, real contrition? And if he's not sorry after all - what's going to change moving forwards?

A Most Respectable Blogger

I actually have this as a t-shirt and I'm very fond of it, too...

I was asked by my co-host on the weekly UnWired radio programme, Rama Chakai, what it was that made me 'a blogger' (I'm introduced on the show as a public relations director, writer and blogger). The answer is, of course, other people. It's not a title I have ever given myself - other people, media in specific, give it me to validate me. You see, journalists do tend to think I'm not much use as a public relations person (unless the story is about public relations, of course), so they have to find something more acceptable to the public. Like bank robber or canary molester.

I have written here before about media using 'experts' with no validation of their expertise. It's an insidious game. And I'm part of it, despite the fact I have never introduced myself as anything other than my day job.

Would I still be 'a blogger' if I had a more acceptable job, such as Middle East Analyst at the SNAFU Institute? No, I don't think I would. So here is proof that it is more generally acceptable to be a blogger than a public relations person.

Yeah, I know the bar's incredibly low there. But it's perhaps interesting how bloggers have acceptability as qualified sources of information for mainstream media.

Hacks Smacked With Phone Hack Cack

Image via Wikipedia



"...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Thomas Jefferson



I have been watching with a growing sense of awed, horrified amusment, the escalation of the News of the World phone hacking scandal. From the British parliament baying sanctimoniously for blood to the smug opportunism of Ed Milliband (Am I the only person convinced he's the Heat Electric tortoise reincarnated?), the stony stoicism of Rebekah Brooks to the arrogance of Rupert Murdoch, the whole drama has been singularly unmissable.

Anyone who's read Piers Morgan's unforgettable memoir about his time as the darling of Murdoch's British empire would have had an insight into the snuggling up the red top tabloids (and the press in general) do with British politicians. It's a relationship built of loathing, one trying to use the other in a game of political power-broking and influence. Murdoch's ability to reach out to a huge slice of the electorate made him a political power broker, parties anxiously sought his backing - none more so than the Labour party, which has traditionally enjoyed Murdoch's support (but had to work damn hard for it).

Now the contagion has spread to the States, where a senator has started raising questions and will no doubt soon find himself at the head of a braying pack of political power-brokers desperate to minimise the massive power of Murdoch's US media holdings, including The Voice of Reason, Fox News.

This isn't about phone hacking at all; mercy me, no. And it's not about the freedom of the press, although it raises many questions about that most important of freedoms. This is about breaking the power of a man who was too powerful and too influential for his own good - and whose power and influence have waned sufficiently, because of the power of online communications, to embolden politicians to finally stand up to him.

They want to take him down, baby. And if Milliband and Cameron can stop sniping at each other for two seconds, they'll do it, too.

Will this be a blow for freedom of the press? I doubt it. It's more about the freedom of media oligarchs to extort politicians - and the freedom of politicians to do cosy, corrupt deals with media.

We can only look forward to an equivalent scandal breaking out in the Middle East, when journalists are found out to be lifting handsets and using telephones to call and verify facts rather than just hammering out press release and newswire copy.

BTW, This fascinating piece in Foreign Policy does a much better job of discussing the above than I did...

Google+ -- Information Overload?

Parental Guidance Warning. This video is icky.

It's like a helter skelter, this social media business. And there are times when you might just want to get off before your head explodes.

Google+ has finally pitched me into information overload. I'm dealing with too many streams of information and it's becoming uncomfortable. I know I'm an unusually 'connnected' person: quite apart from the Twitter, Facebook, Blogger triangle, I handle reasonably large volumes of email and follow a lot of blogs and sites. I'm rarely truly offline. It's one reason I find it funny when my bank tells me they tried to get in touch with me but couldn't. I mean, there are people who actively try to avoid me and find it hard. It got so bad that when we returned from getting stuck under the Tikkipukkapokka, or whatever it was called, Icelandic ash cloud, I actually gave interviews to media amused that I had been caught offline in a totally analogue rural lighthouse.

Apart from the radio shows, conferences and other presentations and workshops I do, I'm also spending most of my days managing one aspect or another of online communications. Online stuff has come to dominate my working life as we have started to transition from 'traditional' public relations practice to integrate more and more online thinking into our communications work with clients. When you add stuff like GeekFest which, despite my best efforts to be UNinvolved still has created a regional network of Facebook and Twitter feeds with thousands of people behind them, you can start to appreciate how very, well, online things are.

And that's been fine. I've been good with it. I've used a few wee tricks to help things glide along: I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but the blog updates my Facebook page with every post so at least there's the appearance of engagement. I rely quite heavily on NetVibes, an RSS reader which organises my many streams of information into nice, manageable tabs that let me dip into updates of what's relevant when it suits me. Twitter has become a comfortable background habit, a sort of place you drop into on the way from a completed activity to a new one. (If you find me on Twitter at the weekend, chances are that Sarah's trying on some new clothes in the shop.) And I have been quite selective about what 'social media' sites I use, so although I'm 'on' Quora, FourSquare and the like (you have to understand what makes them tick, at the very least, if you're going to advise clients), I'm not active.

Strangely, most of my writer friends are on Facebook and fewer use Twitter. Another oddity is that people have started commenting on blogposts on Twitter rather than using Blogger's comments feature. It's always fascinating to see the shifting dynamics of different networks and their interactions, a little like the iridescence of oil on water.

But Google+ has presented me with a dilemma. Do I stay or do I go? It's yet another social network, it's becoming more demanding as more people have joined up and started to poke around, exploring what the new room looks like. It extends the powerful sharing capabilities of Twitter, allowing longer posts than 140 characters along with link sharing, but brings the powerful 'circles' feature to bear. Circles are like Facebook's 'Lists', but are more siloed - you share easily with only the circles you want to share with.

It's very similar indeed to Facebook, in fact, but it's a lot faster - perhaps a result of the fact that it's still dominated by 'early adopters' and therefore a geekier, more aggressively 'sharey' crowd.. I was asked what Google+ was like yesterday and I replied "More Facebook than Twitter but more Twitter than Facebook". If that doesn't seem helpful, well, I don't know.

Google+ is disruptive. It's Facebook at near-Twitterspeed. I'm finding I have to consciously decide whether to share information on Twitter or Google+ and frequently wondering why I'm sharing at all and just don't bother. The world, as a consequence, has not ended. Life has gone on. The one decision I have not had to make is whether to share on Facebook, because I never really considered it a sharing platform in the same way as Twitter, for instance. and yet Google+ is just that - it makes it very easy to share links, pictures and thoughts. It combines some of the learnings from Buzz and Wave and makes crowdsourcing and conversation easy. But the wide-ranging topics and speed of updates are slightly scary and very distracting. Even Google has been caught out with the volumes - they had issues with their notification management servers as a result of demand spikes from Google+.

A TweetDeck for Google+ may be the answer, a Circle Manager. It might be that we evolve better techniques to manage circles based on topics and content flows rather than relationships.

But right now, Google+ is a time-suck and I'm having to consciously invest in it as everyone tries to figure it out. I suppose the great difference is I'm still there looking around - with Wave and Buzz, I was out of there within 48 hours. This time it's more sticky.

The jury's still out, but I'm beginning to see how Google+ could well do what Orkut failed to do. But something's got to give somewhere - we're fast approaching the point where I cannot see how people could maintain yet another platform. I reckon two's company, but three's a crowd.

Anyone else out there reached a limit?

Strength Through Joy

Image via WikipediaWe're about halfway through the Great House Rebuilding following the Great Water Disaster. It's actually been easier than at first thought, only the spare bathroom's had to be completely gutted and the hardcore packing the floor removed, the two bedrooms have dried out to a certain degree and only required the floor tiles to be lifted and new ones laid. Of course, the bathroom tiles couldn't be matched and so the walls have had to be smashed and new tiles laid to match the floor.

It's been a week of banging, dust and workmen scraping their way through the house - and another one to come, including tiling, repainting and the like. Sarah's driven demented. At least I've been escaping by day to our bijou offices in darkest Satwa.

The builders are Egyptian, with a couple of Bangladeshi labourers. I am ashamed to say I had strong preconceptions about Egyptian builders, at least any of 'em born after 2,500 BC. My prejudices have been turned on their heads by Mr Oussama and his merry men. They turn up on time, are careful and clean up after themselves, have so far (and no reason to assume this won't continue) done a grand, workmanlike job and have been a cheerful bunch altogether. They are highly amused at Sarah's grasp of the mechanics of building (Our girl's daddy back in Oireland is a builder, see?).

The fly in the ointment has been a number of routine maintenance tasks that have been taking place alongside The Big Rebuild. Our landlord is a wonderful chap, a very honourable National of Yemeni stock who is always scrupulous about any maintenance we've ever requested. The trouble is the execution of his desires is in the hands of his 'man', who combines a strong mendacious streak with a total inability to accept any form of practical reality, no conception of time or its value and an unerring ability to create situations where we end up hanging around waiting for him for hours on end.

Sarah, who has seen a great deal more of him than I have in the past week, wants to drink Vintage Grand Cru Extra Brut from the man's skull. Interestingly, he doesn't seem to realise how close that has been to becoming a reality as the days have dragged by.

In hindsight, we should have moved house rather than put up with this. But then hindsight is a marvellous thing, isn't it? I've locked up the champagne and sharp knives, just in case...

Amazon Acquires The Book Depository. And a Little Bit of Egypt!

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAmazon.com's decision to acquire Guernsey-based online book distribution company The Book Depository was announced in a terse press release over PR Newswire from the online retailing giant. The move is subject to British regulatory approval, but would see a small online retailer gobbled up by the behemoth. Many people have seen it as a sort of David/Goliath thing.

Interestingly, the man behind The Book Depository, Andrew Crawford, has done it before - he was part of the startup team at bookpages.co.uk which was acquired by Amazon way back in 1998.

Even more interestingly, there's a Middle East angle to the acquisition - The Book Depository is the majority holder of an Egpytian business process outsourcing company, elkotob.com, which provides back-end solutions for online book sellers but which also has expressed an aim to "to lead the Arabic book market, in the Middle East region as well as becoming the biggest Arabic books supplier in the world."

Will the move bring Amazon, finally, to support readers in the Middle East with Kindles and content? Will we now be able to access amazon with Middle East addreses and accounts? Will Amazon start to support Arabic in a big way? Will Amazon's e-commerce engines replace elkotobs? Will the 65 staff be expanded or replaced by Amazon? Will this see Amazon outsourcing some of its own massive development and server infrastructure to Egypt?

This could be an interesting move indeed...

The ENOC Case Study Continues

Image via WikipediaSorry, but I started following this story and I can't seem to tear my eyes away from the wreckage even as I try. Today's newspapers report Dubai based petroleum company ENOC's denial of yesterday's Gulf News story.

Yes, that's right. ENOC Group suddenly had something to say after something like a month of obdurate silence.

Top honours to The National once more, which carries a better researched and more rounded story, taking the opportunity to recap the whole episode and referring to ENOC, with perhaps a grim smile as it rewards weeks of treating the press as if they don't exist or matter, as a 'troubled company'. Khaleej Times couldn't bring itself to name its long-term rival and refers to 'reports in a section of the English media'. Gulf News itself wasn't for stepping down, running ENOC's denial but affirming its report that 'sources in the oil industry confirmed the possibility that other retailers have shown interest in assuming responsibility for those [ENOC's] operations'

Breaking its long silence has certainly brought ENOC to the fore again and will once again step up the pressure from media and the public for some form of clarity. Sadly, there hasn't been a lot of that around but ENOC's statement to the media yesterday does rather protest too much when it accuses Gulf News of baseless speculation.

Here are five rules of Public Relations that may help:

Rule One
News expands to fill a vacuum
This is a Great Truth of Public Relations. If you do not speak clearly and with purpose, you leave room for speculation. The media, like the people it represents, will speculate. Experts, pundits, the public will all speculate. Many will happily speculate for the media to use in its own speculative stories. If you decide to issue 'no comment' or, worse, not to pick up the phone, you have invited speculation round to yours for dinner and have no right to complain when your paintwork gets scratched and your carpet ruined.

Rule Two
Responding to speculation legitimises it
If you respond to one speculative report, you respond to all of them. Many major corporates have a policy of not responding to rumour or speculation, precisely because you really don't want to start affirming or denying purely speculative plays. It's actually a journalistic technique, to speculatively assert something to see if you get a 'bite'. By all means respond to legitimate public concern and hard facts presented to you. But don't fail to respond to those and reserve your powder just to waste it on speculation.

Rule Three
Don't pretend to play hardball
ENOC's statement asks for an apology from Gulf News. This was, in my professional opinion, a basic error (one of very many). Gulf News hasn't apologised and has stood by its story. So where are you going to go now, big shot? If you just let that go now, you just affirmed the story, which only ever discussed a possibility in its original form. Discussing a possibility is, of course, pure speculation. Better not to have gone there in the first place, IMHO...

Rule Four
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
Interestingly, ENOC's statement only comments on one aspect of Gulf News' story, the possibility that ADNOC will be given the running of ENOC stations in Sharjah and the northern emirates. It doesn't comment on part of the story that discussed ENOC requesting a lifting of the price cap or the strong rejection of proposed solutions by government officials. It only talks to one fact in the whole story, but has now established the principle that ENOC will comment to correct facts presented by media. It's not a rounded statement, where one was most certainly called for.

Rule Five
Have a communications strategy
Have an agreed strategy in place, don't just go knee-jerking all over the shop. The National today gleefully trots out the original statement made to media by ENOC, that the affected stations were subject to 'technical upgrades' and the subsequent lack of any evidence to that effect. Having made a statement that few, if any, believed and then followed that up by totally ignoring the media, the company has now arguably lost public trust. As one commentator in today's National story has it:

“I doubt they want to hang onto the whole network, otherwise they would have supplied them. We’ve gone beyond that point now. It’s all speculation of course, but Enoc may just be trying to get a better price for them.”

That's pretty cynical, no? But it's hard to see what the company's management of the media and public transparency aspects of this story has done to mitigate such cynicism from the public, pundits and media.

ADNOC - The Winner Takes It All?

Image via WikipediaGulf News certainly has the bit between its teeth on the ENOC Group story. Today's paper asserts that 'sources in the oil sector' have said the UAE government is 'moving to cancel licenses owned by ENOC and EPPCO in the northern emirates and allow ADNOC to take over the running of the service stations.'

That this move is being discussed seriously is hardly a surprise after the past few weeks' shenanigans, but the discussions (at least, those Gulf News reports) are remarkably wide-ranging. Apparently, the ENOC Group has been arguing that the fuel price should rise to realistic market rates - that would treble the price of petrol in the UAE. Although such a rise in fuel prices would be felt at the pumps, the issue is much wider than that. As a component in economic cost, petrol is an insidious little critter. If the cost of transportation of goods went up commensurately, we'd see some serious rises in commodity prices here, something that nobody really wants right now. Even the suggestion that UAE Nationals receive a petrol subsidy was apparently rejected - and quite, right too - they wouldn't be immune to the rise in the price of basic foodstuffs and other daily needs that would be triggered by unleashing a 300% increase in petrol cost.

Besides, if Abu Dhabi's ADNOC can profitably refine fuel at the current capped prices, why buy the stuff on international markets at all?

However, worryingly, for the last three days my local ADNOC hasn't had any Masafi, just Al Ain water. Please don't tell me this whole scenario is about to be repeated in the bottled water sector - I only drink Masafi...

Joy

Image via WikipediaOn the morning of the second day of ArabNet in Beirut back in March, I was woken by a phone call from Sarah. It was a somewhat panicky call. Water was welling up from the guest bathroom floor, what was I going to do about it?

I'm sure I didn't sound terribly supportive in the circumstances, but given I was in Beirut speaking and moderating at a conference, my options seemed somewhat limited. Pointing this out turned out to be the marital equivalent of saying yes, your bum looks totally enormous in that; I mean, why not try something more suited to your age?

Pal Derek was a tad closer to hand and duly hove into view on a white charger as the upstairs of our house slowly filled with water. By the time I had changed my flight to the next available return, he had worked out what was going on. Our landlord had recently had the roof of the villa sealed (it's a semi-detached villa) and the workmen had brilliantly sealed up the outflow, but had left a nice gap around the pipework into our house. This had combined with next door's pump regulator malfunctioning and causing their water tank to overflow onto the roof of the villa. Derek, a hydraulic engineer by trade, estimated something like two hundred gallons had been pumped into our house. It was streaming down the walls in the kitchen, welling up through the tiles in the upstairs rooms and generally flooding the house as Sarah struggled to move furnishings, books and the like.

Villas in the UAE are constructed strangely. The upstairs floor spaces are something like eighteen inches deep and in-filled with compacted sand and rubble before the tiles are laid. The Great Water Disaster meant that the two hundred gallons had seeped into this filling, saturating the floors of the three rooms, two bedrooms and a bathroom, to the rear of the villa. Four months later, the water's still in there and the downstairs ceilings are yellowing as the sandy dampness penetrates the fabric of the house. There's only one way to get it out - take up the floors, chuck out the wet sand and replace it.

The builders are coming tomorrow. We've moved all the furniture, sealed the doors with plastic sheeting and covered our possessions, upstairs and downstairs, with more of the stuff. The entire contents of the upstairs of the house is now in our bedroom, tottering piles of books making the place look like a model of a dystopian cityscape. Why? Because we (well, more Sarah than I - I went to work while she stayed home and endured it) have been through this kind of work before and know precisely how much noise, dust and crap it creates.

It's going to take two weeks or so to dig up the floors, refill them and re-tile them, including rebuilding a bathroom. Two weeks of hammering, tile-cutting and shovelling, workmen trudging through the house and dust filling every nook and cranny. Two weeks of getting by in a covered-up, echoing skeleton of a home while July, baking hot summer in one of the world's hotter places, takes place outside.


Oh, joy.