You have to hand it to Ferguson, says Gina Sharp, he did what all of us would do. In football parlance, you can only beat the opposition that’s put in front of you.

He has always insisted that no man was ever bigger than Man United and that yardstick was a tremendous discipline for players and their greedy agents alike. But critics might have argued that he didn’t seem to apply that logic to his own dealings with the press. In boycotting press conferences, every time he had a grievance with the BBC, some insist that he was breaking his own rule. Critics accused him of seeing himself as too big to suffer any criticism.

Why it took almost three days of confusion for Sunderland and Di Canio to draw a line under this story is anybody’s guess. Either way, it’s the perfect example of how a poorly executed corporate communications strategy can damage your brand, says Mark Dye

I couldn’t help but cringe as I sat and watched Paolo Di Canio’s first press conference as Sunderland manager. As sure as eggs are eggs, there was only one question the gathered media throng wanted an answer to and this was, ‘Was Paolo Di Canio a fascist?

In the latest in our series of #hackbugbears, Charles Arthur thinks the PR industry needs a wake-up call.

At present, the practice of PR is full of mistaken ideas. Let's spot a few together…

The first is thinking that email is an essential medium through which you can place stories without doing any more work than drafting a press release, titling your email "Press release", writing "Please find the attached press release" and titling the attached press release as (what else?) "pressrelease.doc".

Yeah, you're laughing, aren't you? I get a couple of those a month though, a statistic that has remained unchanged for at least ten years.

In the latest of our #hackbugbears, journalist Dan Raywood says that if we’re ever to see a real change in PR tactics it must come from the top.

The recent blog by Jessica Twentyman on PR pitches returned some positive feedback on how approaches to journalists should be made and what we are looking for.

Having seen several amusing rants about the relationship between journalists and PRs on Twitter of late, we thought it might be a nice idea to let some of the journalists speak out about the things that annoy them the most. In the first of our new series of #hackbugbears, journalist Nick Booth wryly ponders the disturbing similarities between PR people and estate agents…

Shows and exhibitions have come and gone over the past 20 years. Some are impossibly popular and extremely expensive while others offer far better value for money. But the fact remains the same: unless you happen to be Apple launching the iPhone 5, do not bother announcing anything at events. It will simply get sucked into the noise and sink to the bottom of the news pool.

Even as a junior PR I knew what many agencies now still don’t realise: Journalists hate follow up calls. You’re only useful if you’re helping them do their work. If you stop them, to make them help you with your admin, they’ll soon learn to cut you out the loop. So my first ever PR job was nearly lost over a huge row over follow-ups with journalists.

It seems that releases concerning new appointments are being written in a kind of retarded shorthand, drawn from the same bucket of words to gloss over flaws, dehumanise the people involved and make a potentially interesting story as standardised and dull as possible.