Monday
Wake up to forecast of rain. Get on my bike anyway and ride to work in Piccadilly Circus, managing to avoid the showers and white vans.
Good early morning discussion about our new website. Agree we need to expand our team with a new online editor to manage day-to-day content and liaise with our newspaper stakeholders.
Emails this morning around the latest ABCs, confirming big national events boost readership. The Times jumped by 120,000 copies across the Golden Jubilee weekend.
Afternoon spent discussing our forthcoming sector research. Interesting to see that one of the main reasons why retailers value news brands so highly is still the fast cover build – they can reach 24 million people in a day.
Break the back of the Media Week Awards online judging, and then get into the right frame of mind for this evening's poker game with friends.
Tuesday
Michael Heseltine once said the world is divided into three categories. Ten per cent believe the glass is half empty, 10% see it half full, and the rest of us can't make up our minds. Taken at face value, the entrants to the Media Week awards see a glass that is overflowing. There are some strong stories in a year that was pretty tough for most people.
The IPA delivered an interesting presentation about Touchpoints to the Newsworks team this morning. Many other surveys underestimate the time people spend with news brands on phones and tablets. Lord Justice Leveson was depressed to be told it was only 30 seconds a day, but Touchpoints actually offers a spot of sunshine to lift his gloom. It shows it is more than two and half hours a week.
Fascinating lunch with Lord Guy Black, chairman of the Pressbof and executive director at the Telegraph, and Stig Abell, now at Pagefield and formerly the PCC. More confirmation that the newspaper industry is keener to work together than ever before.
Back at the office to meet a client keen to run multi-platform research across a variety of news brands to show how the different platforms amplify one another.
Before I leave, my colleague Rhona Livesey tells me the feedback was good following the Newsworks presentation to clients from GSK, McDonalds, Nationwide and Molson Coors.
Wednesday
Early morning meeting with Vanessa Clifford, who will be joining us from Mindshare [as director of client services and strategy] in September. Lively discussion about the potential of the tablet as a news brand platform (which we will be running an event about). It is, she says, "the shiny squirrel" of the industry, which means it attracts interest and attention. Really looking forward to Vanessa joining us. She is full of ideas and is well plugged in.
Before I leave, check that preparations for tomorrow night's Newsworks Dinner are in order. It is the first in a series of monthly dinners for senior advertisers on topics where news brands drive the conversations. They are co-hosted, and for this one on the crisis in the Eurozone, we have Alex Brummer and Guy Zitter from the Daily Mail sitting around the table with The Guardian's Mark Finney, Richard Furness and Philip Inman. It should be a thought-provoking evening, with Adam Posen from the Bank of England as our special guest.
Thursday
Attend the breakfast opening of 'Road to 2012', a fantastic NPG photographic exhibition. It is packed out with newspaper journalists and clients, including Ian Livingston and Suzi Williams from BT. But the guest of honour is Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, which explains why it is quite so busy – and makes the front page of The London Evening Standard.
The Olympics are big news for news brands, which are seeing boosts in advertising and readership. We are expecting readership to grow to 30 million over the course of next week. I hope Team GB can live up to all the expectations.
Today we send out 'Nuggets from Newsworks', our ebulletin, featuring our own Olympic film, made for us by McCann London, complete with Brian Cox voiceover. Get some good feedback immediately, so I know it has arrived.
In the evening, the Eurozone dinner goes well. There are just 16 of us, so we have the experts to ourselves – a privilege to get the inside track. Alex Brummer arrives a little late with the excuse that he was held up at Number 11.
Premiership football is the topic for the next dinner, co-hosted by The Mirror and The Telegraph at the Emirates.
Friday
Enjoyable meeting with comScore this morning. The degree to which you can track people's behaviour online never fails to amaze me. Which news brand do you imagine has a particular attraction for Ducati riders?
After lunch with the BBC's media correspondent, Torin Douglas, when we discuss the role of Twitter, the conversation continues with Patrick Owen [business director] from Initiative. He is showing how the IPG measurement tool Prophesee can track how stories build on social media and the key role the newspapers play.
The end of the week means the launch of my friend Simon Mottram's Rapha Cycle Club, a meeting place with food, drink and fine coffee available.
It will be a welcome addition to Soho, and is just around the corner from our office.
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