MoS Festive Welcome For Whingers and Moaners

It's that time of year again when an eclectic bunch of freelance hacks get fed and watered by those fine people at the Scottish Mail on Sunday.

But it was a bit of surprise to receive an invite, given I can't remember the last time one of my tales graced its pages, unless you count a recent page lead which scraped in to sister title the Scottish Daily Mail.

So thanks in advance (speaking later in the day can become problematic) to news editor Jamie Macaskill for an offer you can't really refuse: "Come down, whinge about the credit crunch and moan about payments over some Asda price lager and Lidl crisps".

Usual venue in Glasgow next Tuesday and knowing the MoS, even in these depressingly bankrupt times, I am confident they will do better than cooking lager and crisps at "the SuBo edition Christmas feast".

ps I think Gordon Currie did such a fine job of the speech last year that he be nominated again.

MILF Headline Could Cause Unholy Row

One thing which used to drive me nuts when Mike Gilson was editor of The Scotsman was the proliferation of tree hugging environmental/wildlife stories about some lesser know endangered species, which to be honest no one cared about. For a while I thought the RSPB had commandeered the newsroom.

Glad to say things have changed under hard-nosed John McLellan but it seems Gilson may have taken heed, and judging by this headline, is championing an entirely different kind of story at his new berth at the Belfast Telegraph. (Three MILF Charged Over Kidnap of Irish Priest).

Go to say MILF is a huge improvement on Belfast's more typical terrorist group acronyms such as IRA, PIRA, UDA, UDF ect. And full marks to the sub who sneaked this one through.

Now John, how about some MILF stories in The Scotsman?

Hib Hib Hooray For MacKay Hannah

The power of the internut. After I ranted last week about receiving unsolicited emails from public affairs specialists, MacKay Hannah, it brought the desired result and we are all pals again.

Head of Marketing, Jane Wilson, was quickly on the case and sorted out the problem as well as sending an apology/response (below). Seems MacKay Hannah also have a sense of humour. I ungraciously said their website was "pisspoor" and Jane thanked my for my "constructive feedback".

Now, if I had known director Angus MacKay was a good Hibee I would never have gone off on one.

Thanks Jane.



Stephen

MacKay Hannah apologises for any inconvenience caused. We are currently in the process of updating our systems and unfortunately, due to a technical problem, our unsubscribe function was not picking up your email addresses. You were down twice on our database under two separate email addresses and our unsubscribe function only picked up one of these. We have now taken urgent action to resolve this and once again, please accept our sincere apologies for this.
Thank you also for your constructive feedback on our website. We are also working closely with our website partners to update our site and make it more interactive/user friendly.

Jane Wilson
Head of Marketing
MacKay Hannah

What Part Of Unsubsribe Don't You Get?

You ever heard of a company called MacKay Hannah?

No, me neither. Apparently they focus on "contemporary public policy issues of interest to the public, private and voluntary sectors" according to their pisspoor website.

As I stifle a yawn I am trying to understand why MacKay Hannah think I may be interested in receiving their unsolicited emails.

And I am trying to figure out which part of "unsubscribe me from all mailing lists" they don't understand.

It seems the "unsubscribe" button on the various received emails does not work and four email requests to take me off their lists have fallen on deaf ears.

MacKay Hannah is run by Gail Hannah, who worked in local government, and former Scottish Government finance minister Angus MacKay. Hannah is responsible for "managing implementation" while MacKay does "strategic development". Maybe between them they can instruct their marketing team to strategically implement my removal from their mailing lists?