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.

Gina Sharp ponders whether the News Quiz or The Now Show could survive without the tabloids?

Topical comedy The News Quiz has been back on Fridays on Radio 4 for a few weeks now. And I'm disappointed, frankly. I view this show the way I anticipate England football games. I know I shouldn’t but I always convince myself that those on the News Quiz team are world-beaters and that they’ll slaughter the opposition. On their day they could be as good as anyone. Come on Hugh Dennis!

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?

We’ll never know if Richard really did murder those princes, but Will Shakespeare effectively destroyed his reputation long before he was found buried under a Lidl car park. Some things never change, says Gina Sharp

Know what? I knew it was him. When I first saw it plastered across twitter: the skeleton they discovered in that car park in Leicester, there was something about it that said “Richard III”. Call it a hunch.

'You've booked the hotel suite, hosted the lunch, paid the mini bar bills and given out all the freebies. But how do you know the journalist is going to write about your client?' asks Mark Dye

What makes a good flack: 'Is it nature, nurture or chutzpah?' says Gina Sharp

You might have seen in the news that Jane Cummings, Britain's chief nursing officer, has called on the nation's nurses to show more compassion. The problem, apparently, is that nurses are now recruited by the NHS on their ability to pass exams. One of the ideas mooted was to teach compassion to undergraduate nurses.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that whilst you can teach people skills, some students will always be outperformed by the naturals. It goes without saying this is true of other vocations that call for humanists with good listening skills, empathy and warmth, such as counsellors, doctors, social workers and, don't laugh, public relationships experts. Well, we are spin-doctors after all. Spin doctors cum counsellors cum teachers in many respects.

Football provides many examples of how misdirected anger can be converted into positives, if you know how to express yourself properly, says Mark Dye

In media training courses, we often draw people out of their shells by doing unusual exercises that are designed to be fun while concentrating the mind on a skill they might need every day.

If the editor of Newsnight can be taken to pieces in an interview, then maybe we need a back-up defence, says Gina Sharp.

If you ever need to cheer yourself up, listen to the brutal dismantling of George Entwistle by his ex-colleague John Humphrys on the Today programme.

It's hack eats hack as the BBC goes into meltdown. For anyone that's been on the sharp end of a hack-attack, it’s quite reassuring that Entwistle, who edited the BBC's flagship Newsnight programme for years, is seemingly so hopeless under interrogation.

One of the ironies of any craft is that the more work you put into it, the easier it looks to outsiders, says Mark Dye

You really have to work hard to make things look simple to other people. The hallmark of genius is a person who can make the other person feel clever. Not my words, but those of Albert Einstein, who was reasonably intelligent by all accounts. Not that his job looked all that difficult.

Be mindful folks. Stalking can kill your hard won friendships like a chimp with a machine gun.

Like all technology, marketing machines are powerful weapons that can work both ways. Marketing automation is like a loaded gun. If you use the power of automation properly, it's a tremendous force for good. If you point it in the wrong direction, you're going to hurt somebody.

Steve Gold remembers the ‘90s and harks back to a time when there were IT journalists aplenty and KPIs few and far between.

Back in the early 1990s, when there were IT journalists aplenty and profit margins – on hardware and software – were as meaty as some of the Roger Melly like epithets coming from marketing directors at the shows and conferences of the era, PR professionals had the joy of being able to wine and dine us press reptiles on a grand scale.

In the latest of our series of #hackbugbears Tara Evans wants PRs to make sure they get their facts straight before getting in touch.

If I were to write an article that hadn’t been well researched then I’d be torn to pieces in the ferocious (but uniquely funny) Mail Online comment section at the bottom of the article.

In the same way if I ever make a mistake in an article (which, I never do of course!!), then I’m often treated to a polite email or phone call from the press office pointing out my error.

That’s why I’m often flabbergasted when I receive a call or email pitch from a PR person when they clearly haven’t taken the time to research what I write and who I write for.

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 Sally Whittle has some advice for those interested in improving blogger relations.

Those journalists, they love a good rant about hapless PR campaigns, don’t they? Well, they do – I was one for 12 years and I ranted with the best (or worst, depending on your perspective) of them.

But in my two years working as a full-time blogger at Who’s the Mummy and the Tots100, my relationship with PR agencies has shifted quite dramatically.

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.