The world is changing fast and to keep up you need local knowledge with global context.
Naspers has said a newly created entity containing assets including a stake in Chinese internet giant Tencent will be valued at about $100bn.
This week’s diary records, inter alia, an astonishingly inept response to the Gatwick drone, the looming horror of chef censorship and how News24 got taken for a fake news ride.
It was just a year ago, that the PRCA made a decision to expel Bell Pottinger from the organisation amid the dodgy work it did for the Guptas.
Bell Pottinger might be dead. But the stink from its corpse still lingers.
Although Bell Pottinger employees were worried about the involvement of the company in Gupta activities, the firm continued to work for the corrupt. Its bosses made the excuse that the Gupta company had passed the KPMG “sniff test”.
South Africa’s shadow government, Tony Gupta and friends, is the centre of an in-depth piece in The New Yorker magazine on how one of the world’s most powerful public relations companies destroyed its own reputation.
It’s official – scandal-plagued political consultancy Cambridge Analytica is shutting down. However, before you chalk up a victory for the good guys, it’s worth pointing out that the investors and executives behind Cambridge Analytica are not really going away. They’re just rebranding as Emerdata.
Christopher Wylie, co-founder of the now infamous Cambridge Analytica, went public after realising the “cultural weapons” he’d helped build were directly responsible for subverting the democratic process.
According to the New York Times, a hypothetical Bell Pottinger death certificate would read “cause of death: acute embarrassment.”
There’s a saying in PR circles that there’s no such thing as bad publicity – and that certainly seems to be the case for James Henderson, the man behind Bell Pottinger.