Last week’s relegation of his beloved football team, Charlton Athletic, to the third tier of English football marked the beginning of a tough few days for ITV executive chairman Michael Grade.

Read more on ITV conundrum stretches back long before Grade…

Just got a mail from those folks at Wolfram Alpha who’ve been causing a bit of a stir talking about the launch of a new search engine.

The mail offers a sneek peek tonight at 8pm GMT during a webcast filmed at Harvard University.

Read more on Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Tonight!…

I’m not really surprised that Hitwise, via the fabulous Robin Goad, have reported that clicks to retailers from paid search have declined slightly over the last year.

While search volumes are growing year on year because of the usual reasons – more time spent online, broadband penetration, better devices and offline marketing campaigns driving people online, the economic situation is obviously to blame for consumers not leaping online to buy stuff like they used to before all this mess.

Read more on Consumers Are Still Searching! Are Advertisers Feeling Lucky?…

The focus has fallen on regional media in an unprecedented manner recently. Last week’s Digital Media Summit kept the issues squarely in the spotlight, attended by political heavyweights including PM Gordon Brown and business secretary Peter Mandelson, and industry bigwigs such as Mirror Group’s Sly Bailey.

Read more on New merger rules will result in horse trading not local sell-offs…

Anyone who saw The Apprentice last night will be jangling two keywords around in their head today – Ben & Sandhurst

I actually only caught the last 20 or so minutes but now know our friends at The Beeb and Surallan probably kept the bullish Belfast upstart Ben in the show because of his gargantuanly arrogant assumption that having a scholarship to Sandhurst was somehow a pre-requisite for being chosen as Surallan’s apprentice, and because we can probably expect to hear more equally moronic statements from the young man in episodes to come!

Read more on Sandhurst Famous on Twitter for the Wrong Reason – Ben Clarke…

No one in London can fail to have noticed the vast increase in digital out-of-home media in recent years.

Clear Channel’s iconic Piccadilly site and Titan’s Transvision screens on railway station concourses blazed the trail, as did CBS Outdoors’ escalator panels, six-sheets and cross-track projection screens in Tube stations.

Read more on Digital outdoor must demonstrate added value…

I recently received a copy of an e-mail that had been sent out by a press buyer at a top five UK media agency that made for intensely depressing reading.

The e-mail, submitted anonymously by a disillusioned sales rep at a weekly magazine, was sent out to the reps at news weeklies. It outlined the tough trading conditions the buyer’s agency was experiencing and that one of its large clients had cut its budget for Q2 2009. It basically went on to say that ads would only be booked for this client in titles that could offer further discounts on rates from Q1. The best deals would determine who made the schedule. End of “discussion”.

Read more on Agencies focusing just on price are risking disaster…