What a week, inflation dropped, Labour celebrated 100 (difficult) days of being in power and Brewdog got themselves in embroiled in another scandal. Welcome to Good and Bad PR.

First up, let’s take a moment to celebrate the life of tech journo supremo, Steve O’Hear. I won’t profess to knowing Steve well, but I met him quite a few times over the years, and he was everything we need from a journalist. Inquisitive, spikey, honest and bloody fantastic at his job.

I was gutted to hear that he had passed away, the tech sector is a quieter and much lesser place without him.

BBC suffers death by a thousand cuts

Another bad PR week for BBC bosses. Hardtalk, Click and the Asian Network’s bespoke news service all got canned. It came as part of a £24m round of BBC cuts.

The Click closure hit home hard in our house. Virtually the only BBC show on TV now that all my (teen) kids would sit and watch… largely cos I made them, but they enjoyed it.

Worryingly the DG of the BBC said that cuts to the World Service news functions were creating a gap that state funded news services in the likes of Russia and China were keen to fill. The lack of scrutiny of the state owned media channels is the clear threat here.

For all the abuse the BBC gets, it can’t be accused of not trying to hold governments to account, largely in the form of high-quality journalism, which is sadly now getting cut to ribbons.

Sainsbury’s and Lidl have a great PR week

How quickly the tide turns when it comes to PR. Only a few weeks ago Sainsbury’s was getting brickbats for playing fast and loose with a single food standards sticker. Fast forward to this week and the trade and national media is back loving the orange logo’d supermarket giant.

Sainsbury’s have announced the biggest shake-up to its stores since, erm, forever. After a strategic review it is making a number of big ticket in store changes.

The one that stuck out for me, and makes sense when you think about it, is the change away from segregated rows of products. Instead of a row of chilled, a row of frozen and a row of canned goods, these will now be mixed together and ordered by grouping product and meal choices.

The best example I could think of is: imagine you fancy a steak dinner (do enough people still eat meat in 2024?). Instead of getting the steak in one aisle, the frozen chips in another and the associated vegetables in yet another aisle, the contents for that kind of meal would all be next to each other, or at least all in the same section.

What a great idea. No more trekking about, forgetting what you were looking for, everything in a more natural placement system. The days of hiding bread and milk far apart from each other, to try and tempt browsers into buying more than they came in for, could well be numbered.

Sainsbury’s were not the only supermarket getting praise this week though. Take a bow, Lidl. It announced the first intake for its degree apprenticeship scheme. Over 5000 school leavers applied for one of just 51 places.

The starting salary of £26k, rising to £46k by the fourth (and final) year of the apprenticeship also turned a few heads. This all comes after the original graduate scheme did so well for the brand. A great week in PR for both retail leaders.

London Bridge (reputation) is not falling down

Everyone knows the story about the idiot American who was duped by some savvy English folk into paying for, and transporting over the pond, what he thought was Tower Bridge but was “just” London Bridge.

Well, it turns out, the American family in question dispute the English version of events. They were happy to let it slide because the myth helped boost tourism numbers in the new home of London Bridge.

The grandson of the buyer said, during his recent trip to meet the replacement London Bridge, that his gramps knew exactly what he was doing and what he was buying. Whilst the media lapped up the story, we all know the truth, but we appreciate his trying to save face. I have heard that Kier is trying to swindle New Mexico into renting the Northern Lights next.

King Conker caught out 

I think this story has been sent to me more times than any other in the history of this column. “King Conker”, David Jakins and his balls of steel! That’s right, this is bad PR for David Jakins, disgraced conker champion, but great PR for the sport of conkers as a whole.

This story has appeared all around the globe. Jakins protest that the steel ball was just for lols during private displays was ignored. It does everything to further the global notion that we are a nation of oddball’s and eccentrics but very little to dispel the rumours that we use underhand tactics.

I don’t know the truth of this story, nor do I really care. I do love that a 82 year old man could be embroiled in such a very British scandal. He faced further accusations that he was marking the conker shoelace strings so that he could more easily identify the stronger ones during the big competition. I love it even more.

In the end, the conker committee cleared Jakins of any wrongdoing, but we all know the truth. Maybe Kier should hire him for the Northern Lights rental scheme!