In the highly-regarded Insider‘s Heat poll, the region’s PR agencies mark their peers and competitors. This year, SKV Communications yet again won the admiration of other agencies, achieving a 52-point margin over the second placed agency.

As we are in the reputation business, it’s superb that our own reputation is so highly regarded by our fellow professionals.

Our clients can rest assured that SKV’s levels of service, professionalism and creativity are up there with the very best.

We would say that, of course. But it’s nice to know that the rest of the region’s PR and communications sector thinks so, too.

Peter Hook has given me a mention in his How Not To Run a Club, quoting from my 1989 piece in The Face about the Hacienda’s slow death-by-gangland, which also got re-printed in the Jon Savage-edited The Hacienda Must Be Built.

And going back even further in shared histories, there’s Mark Kermode’s It’s Only A Movie, his highly readable biog, an entertaining speed-read through the career of the Radio 5 Live, Culture Show and Observer film critic.

With winning self-deprecation, Dr K (as fans of his Simon Mayo R5 Live spots call him), devotes a chapter to his Manchester years, brimming with radical student politics, busking on his double bass outside the Royal Exchange, and working for peanuts at the wing-and-a-prayer City Life magazine which I founded and edited with two other ex-Manchester University students.

We are talking 1984-85 here, so when Mark took the stage at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Hall recently, his speech (accepting an Outstanding Alumnus Award) took me right back to the days before blogs and the Net.

Now anyone can publish their views online, but back then DIY publishing meant a xeroxed fanzine or printed fortnightly magazine like ours, selling ads to theatres, nightclubs, bookshops and vegetarian wholefood co-ops as means of funding our own view, for our own readership, on this city. Even the cheapest fanzine could not give content for free; it was the means of publishing the content which cost, and that had to covered.

The City Life worldview meant a default and often aggressive opposition to the mainstream view of Manchester, crysallised for us in the all-powerful MEN.

Mark really does capture the atmos back then in the old City Life offices at 1-3 Stephenson Square, a colourful cast of odd characters inspired by punk ‘n’ hippy radicals, and aspiring journalists just passing through – like Liz McKean, (now on Newsnight), Kathryn Holliday (Telegraph magazine), John Naughton, (The Word/Empire) and Aidan McGurran (saddled with The Sun’s Lenny Lotto persona for a while, before he escaped to The Mirror).

Also hanging out  were music biz media folk who have gone to be even better known for their illustrious and variegated careers – front cover genius photographer Kevin Cummins, the Happy Mondays designers Matt, Pat and Karen Carroll, designer Mick Peek (who later did the MCFC crest), and writers Jon Ronson, Sarah Champion and John Robb. The late artist Ray Lowry used to come in and deliver a fistful of scratchy cartoons, and if we published one we’d send him £7.50.

Mark Kermode’s book details his thrill at getting a review published in a magazine sold on the news stands. Getting each issue out seemed a titanic struggle yet the end product was worth our 60 hour working weeks, because publication felt like power.

Seeing each issue on sale down Oxford Road and Deansgate pegged up alongside ‘proper’ magazines was a rush which even now lives with me. I did a double take when I dug these covers out – yes, we really did sell for just 30p.

City Life was a magazine by, about and for ‘us’, the 20-40s with left-leaning cultural interests.  Something you could hold in your hand, pass around, take to the pub and refer to, and collect. Yet these days no end of online gurus could write yards of WordPress on ‘communities of interest” about the most niche online forum with a handful of devotees.

Ultimately, ‘us’ turned out to be no more than a few thousand readers, which is why it failed as a business and was bought out of administration by the MEN in 1988. It published the title as a mag until a few years ago, but closed it down. But its brand lives on in the paper’s features pages.

As I heard Mark’s eulogy to mid-80s Manchester to the assembled throng of post-grads and their parents – “whatever you wanted to do, you could make happen in Manchester” – I was reminded of the part we alternative publishers played not only in the life of Mark Kermode and I, but in the life of the city.

When the MEN bought City Life out of administration in 1988, they inherited a collection of City Life mags. I have no idea if that collection is still with them, but I have a pretty intact collection of the first 300 or so issues. They provide a unique picture of a social, cultural and political view of the city from 1983 onwards that you won’t find in the MEN’s own cuttings, or anywhere else.

Can anyone suggest a home for them where they might be useful to those wanting to study a period of the city’s life? It’s an archive of a crucial period of Manchester life, reporting with rough energy and scathing wit on the birth of the alternative Manchester which turned out to be so influential – the Hacienda and Cornerhouse, the rise of the Stringer/Leese/Bernstein council, Madchester, the city centre living and leisure boom, the city’s comedy stars and the growth of the city’s contemporary art scene, etc etc.

Mark Kermode’s award was made at a post-graduate degree ceremony, and was hosted by imposing-looking academic figures in gowns and a range of outlandish headgear. He had to wear one too. There was much chuckling at how unlikely it all seemed that we’ve gone all establishment.

Except, really, what was establishment and alternative has disappeared. The young rebels of the 80s media scene would have boggled at today’s melding of the old battle lines.

The city fathers promote ‘innovation’ and ‘cultural industries.’ Manchester sells itself on its history of rabble-rousing musical roughnecks. And the Prime Minister loves The Smiths.

What used to be called ‘alternative’ media – like the so-called ‘alternative comedians’ – have ceased to exist. Tribal media is vanishing along with tribal politics, with the decline of national newspapers part of that trend.

There is no alternative anything, because there is no need for an alternative when the Net hosts a myriad of communities and possibilities, and the instant means to express them.

Maybe the Facebook generation has no interest in those who came before them. But perhaps when our collective synapses have blown in some mass social meejah TMI overload, people may have the time and space to wonder at just how the city that we take for granted today, actually came to be.

Then some dusty old journals might help the curious, the amnesiac or the scholarly shed some light on what, even now, seems like ancient Manchester history.

Any takers  for my collection of old mags?

So it feels like a refreshing change to be at events which live in the memory only – in fact, maybe it feels a more valuable experience for being live,  personal and not available for posterity.

Stephen Bayley‘s talk at the BDP studio for the first pro-Manchester lecture was a rare pleasure, because he has total command of his subject and also because he knows a bit about the human theatre of giving a talk.

The check suit, the flowery shirt and horizontal striped tie did rather hint that this man could be interesting. Not a lecture, more of a performance. He ripped each finished page of notes from his book, then crumpled and dropped them on the floor behind his lectern. Class.

I dare say many people would have gone online to check out his heartfelt, learned views about the British loss of traditional skills and why politicians are responsible. But they can’t. No one filmed it, and I for one am glad I was in the 70 or so people in the room to hear why ‘Design is more important than politics.’

Then I was at the opening of a very unusual art show – Night and Day, the splendid exhibition by Jan Chlebik of photos of Manchester music venues past and present, organised and with text by Phil Griffin. It’s on Piccadilly rail station platform 12, which means it must have the highest footfall of any art show outside the Tate in London.

About 50 brave souls donned woolly hats to gather to wish the protagonists well, and to forgo the wee dram which is the traditional salutation to an art launch (drink is banned on the platforms). Griffin bellowed a few words at his guests, during which the station tannoy announced an arriving train, which disgorged bemused commuters into the art throng. A priceless moment.

I will value it more for having a picture in my head, than on a video. I did, however, take a photo. Hats off to Network Rail, by the way, this project makes them no money and logistically is probably a pain, so here’s to them/it.

There’s no website for it – just 22 photos of places in which you’ve probably spent some of the most exciting and memorable times of your life. So you’ll have just have to get yourself down there. It’s free. You don’t even have to buy a platform ticket.

Earlier that same day, at the launch of Innovation Manchester Boardroom, veteran sooth-sayer Dave Haslam was telling me why he was not videoing his one-to-one chats with music figures he admires – Mark E Smith and Dexy’s Kevin Rowland are first up.

The events are fast selling out, he says, and if people can’t get in and then can’t see it later, that drives up the value of being there.

He’s right. It may be that a digital record will be immortal and forever inhabit the Internet. But being at an event boasting super art and stimulating people can give you a buzz which a video would only spoil the memory of.

That it came on the day when the BBC opened a potential Pandora’s Box of proposed cutbacks to its output was merely coincidental.  But in such a tense political atmosphere there was definitely a public relations sense of making the most out of an out-of-London opportunity .

I was invited by the BBC’s Economics and Business Editor Jeremy Hillman and met him and a number of London-based BBC journalists and production people who’ll work from Salford Quays when the BBC moves five departments  including 5 Live up next year. The excellent Tony Livesey R5 Live show is already coming from the city four nights a week.

Some of the people we met are currently house hunting up here, which makes them a rare breed in the current market. They pointed out that, while they were moving happily, there were huge logistic and emotional difficulties for many – not only moving house, but uprooting their children, as well as the responsibilities they have for elderly parents.

The number of relocators is nearly 50%, I believe, which is higher than the usual. Manchester sentiment has been scathing towards those who have opted not to move or have spoken out about their doubts over it, but perhaps Northern opinion-formers should not be too quick to criticise without knowing the personal circumstances of individuals.

The Green Room was full of media people – including Nick Jaspan of How Do and editor of Northwest Tonight Cerys Griffiths, and I was chuffed to be chatting to a presenter who I identified clearly just by his voice to be Mark Pougatch. He excused himself from our chat – because he had to go off and present the show.

There is always a buzz about being at an event broadcast live, with the floor manager whipping up applause and counting down to being on-air.

The debate itself was enlightening and a bit more civil than I expected, with fan passion from the floor generally good-humoured.  There was a general consensus around the notion of the ‘specialness’ of football and the need for better regulation, but whether that should be self-administered or the role of an independent body, there was no agreement.

If nothing else, the discussion showed for the umpteenth time the silky skills of PFA boss Gordon Taylor, who dips and swerves his way round would-be crunching tackles about player pay with the verve of a Cesc Fabregas and occasionally delivering an incisive thrust worthy of classic Ian Rush. You’d expect nothing less from the best-paid union boss in the UK, and very possibly in the world…

Everything from hidden messages to the decline of educational standards, to the wit of unknown graffiti scribblers.

For example, the Conservative Party have spent a few bob saying ‘ta’ to the people of Manchester – the ‘thank you for having us’ posters adorn a few key sites, including a key city centre gateway on Great Ancoats Street.

Carry on just 500 yards into town, however, and you’ll encounter this.

Political point-making? There was no room for the ‘f”, obviously, at the end of ‘con.’

My drive into work takes me past that inadvertent piece of political commentary and past The Lighthouse opposite the MEN Arena – and what a spelling shocker: ‘formally’  instead of ‘formerly’. And it’s not the kind of sign which looks to cheap to change.

Occasionally you get a piece of graffiti which eschews (look it up) the abusive and brings a wee smile – step forward the Northern Quarter wit who amended the roadworks notice.

As for the Whitworth Art Gallery noticeboard, in the absence of anything official, people simply WILL fill the frame with ‘art’ of their own….

Sometimes currents and ripples become waves. Autumn 2009 certainly feels like a watershed  right now for the Manchester media. We’ve already lost the Metro Manchester pages, while the online services seem be gaining a foothold, however slippery.

Last Friday I attended the leaving drink for 39 staff (a number I was given by more than one attendee) from the Manchester Evening News; outgoing editor Paul Horrocks was also there to make it a round forty.

The Old Grapes was the venue, the choice of an after-work snifter for many a MEN hack in the days when I worked in the Deansgate offices (1989 to 1998), and that too felt appropriately ‘yesterday’ – the boozer is owned by Liz Dawn, the Coronation Street actress.

And well, well, the subject of our chatter, alongside the ”got anything lined up?’ conversations – was the news announced that same day that the London Evening Standard is to go free.

It felt like the sound of the tectonic plates shifting. Forbes‘ reports a possible merger with London Lite, something denied by the Standard’s new owners.

The departing hacks in The Old Grapes were realistic about the way the world is going. They can see it all around in the rise of the Web.

One told me he’d been offered a job that week by a North-west B2B mag publisher editing a number of titles, with a salary range offered of £16-24k, a wage a graduate might be glad of, but not a seasoned journo with long experience.

That process, it was agreed, makes a victim of quality – another swore he’d seen a headline with the word ‘flies’ spelt as ‘flys’ in a local paper.

You can forgive the old sweats their moans and grumbles. I pointed out, probably unhelpfully, that the more mature among them had enjoyed the good days – the decent pensions, the ‘lunch at desk’ expenses, the 6 weeks’ holidays and not that long ago (I had one) the extra one-month’s paid sabbatical every four years  to match those of  the dons and writers at The Guardian.

Former MEN features editor Ken Wood helpfully pointed out that the high peak of circulation had been all the way back in 1969.

But if we are approaching the end of forty year end game, there was booze-fuelled speculation about what that future holds for the MEN: weekly only? Fully free?

On a basic level, many of us in Manchester PR agency world are intrigued how the paper will look once shorn of so many heads; some familiar by-lines will not disappear, thanks to some budget for freelances. But will there still be plenty of pages to pitch our stories?

Coincidentally, the same day I had been up to see The Times’ Northern man Russell Jenkins in his News International eyrie at 111 Piccadilly. He’s the only journo there, covering Liverpool to Hull, apart from a gaggle of News of The World-ers. The Sun’s Northern reporter who works from home is presumably building a fine collection of pyjamas.

Change is in the air in Manchester. The Conservatives – government-in-waiting according to the polls and the media – open their first party conference in the city this week, with an election only 6 months away.

Change? In politics? There is a tendency among the non-committed to feel that the more things change, the more things stay the same -  ‘whoever I vote for, the government always gets in’.

But the kind of changes we are seeing in this city’s media are not the same – the trends making my former colleagues in the newspaper and magazine sector redundant are irreversible.

But while those changes are as unmistakably clear as a 72 point headline,  when it comes to finding sustainable financial models for the new media replacing newsprint, and when we can see chunky numbers of decently-paid journalist jobs again, wherever we are headed is pure guesswork.

As Mao Tse Tung said when asked about the impact of the French Revolution…”It’s far too early to tell.”

So among all the mwah-mwah-ing, there is a background bitching. I am glad to be on hand, however, to lend some clarity in the fog.

Your answer, dear mutterer, is in the free market business of ticket touting.

As a proud owner of tickets for both the Kraftwerk launch show and the remarkable Halle/Elbow event, I was tickled to hear the perennial back-of-the-throat croak of ‘anyone need tickets?’  Ah, the unmistakable cry  of that hardy creature, the omni-confident Manc ticket tout.

It was a sure sign that the popular side of the festival content was making itself known among those gentlemen (never seen a female tout yet) who surf the uncertain tides of supply and demand around the concert-going public.

But, as in all trading, it’s a risky business – made even more so by the fact that all reputable venues regard the touts as a plague and these days release a number of tickets on the  day of the show to screw up plans to profit from desperate fans.

It’s true that at Kraftwerk there were a some empty seats.

But anyone who had a good look at the fistfuls of tickets being brandished by touts outside the Velodrome – how fun it was to see the South Manchester art set lying on the grass in the Beswick sunshine – can see how the touts, like an over-exuberant share trader – piled in too high and got stuck with stock they just couldn’t shift.

It’s almost exactly 30 years ago since a cold September night, my very first in Manchester, when I got off the train, dumped my bags, and made my way to the Apollo, where I bought a ticket for the Boomtown Rats from a tout hanging out of a car window.

You see the very same faces outside every gig; true existentialists, living off their their trading spirit and their confidence in their own ability to gauge the demand of any show.

I know there will be those morally outraged by the fact I feel sorry for them when they are stuck with a pile of paper for seats no one wants. But remember, what they do is not illegal. And many of us will have bought their goods and have been happy to pay their asking price.

Looking at their disappointed faces outside Kraftwerk, I wondered how many of them have heard of, or are using Twitter – what a fantastic tool, I reckon, for using social networks to shift tickets on the day of a gig. Like e-bay  – but without the cumbersome bureaucracy and the commission.

So come on, you touts, get Tweeting – social media is the way forward for entrepreneurial micro-businesses like yours.  It’s your bridgehead into the world of Culture, geezer.

I can hear the croak now outside the Art Gallery… “Tickets for the Alina Ibragimova solo violin playing JS Bach at the Zaha Hadid gig, anyone?”

I was sceptic when I first the saw the visuals for what eventually became (for a while) the nation’s tallest sculpture, but I started to warm to it when it went up and a Newsnight vox pop had a scally at a Beswick bus stop who shrugged: “It’s great – it’s Manchester, it’s different.”

I grew to love it, and to appreciate that the scale and proportions seemed just-so against the height of the stadium and a beautiful blue sky. On match day, walking up Alan Turing Way, I’d wonder what the away fans made of it and remembered that it sent out a great message to the media and the visitors:  yes, Manchester does things differently.

So the legal wrangles between the creator Thomas Heatherwick and the council were really disappointing to those of us looking forward to it rusting away nicely as a companion to the brave new era for the local area and local team.

Most people I know hoped that a suitably safe area could be cordoned off around it, and ‘the B’ – or the Ker Plunk, as some dubbed it – could be left intact, potentially unsafe only to any nutter intent on slipping security and daring the prickly monster to kebab him.

Perhaps because of the legal liabilities and implications, the contractual stuff, and the kind of nightmare Health and Safety scenario which any major organisation now has to factor into decisions, the Bang had to be silenced.

But not, I hope, for ever. The council is putting the Mancunian porcupine in storage.

One day, with a solution found which, as a H and S professional might say, ‘significantly reduces the risk profile of the sharpened ends of the elongated sculptural elements so as to limit the likelihood of serious injury or death to zero probability’ – oh, and a cool £3m found from somewhere – we may, just may, see Old Spiky rise proudly once again.

There’s loads of good detail about it on Wikipedia and there’s a wicked 360 degrees virtual tour on the Net too.

And boy, do they make you think about the contrast between some of the Tweets you get – of the “just enjoying my beans on toast” variety – with some of the real life drama being played out across my Tweetdeck.

One reads: “RT from Iran ARD: Mir Hossein Mousavi speaking in South of Tehran. All mobile services cut in south Tehran.”

A pretty young woman with a nose stud Tweets: “PLEASE do not post names of twitterers in Iran. It’s very dangerous. Use RT from Iran or RT. This is very important! RT” The fact that she sent it five minutes ago brings home the urgency.

Many speak of planning to be among hundreds of thousands (some speak of 2m) of green-clad protestors at silent mourning protests today (Thursday 18), for those who have died since the protests at allegedly rigged elections by the country’s Islamist rulers.

Many people worldwide have picked up the technique adopted by Iranian Twitterers and have tinted their Twitter id photos green in support of the colour adopted by the supporters of reformist Mousavi.

One Retweet I am seeing again states “Iranian Supreme Leader Khameni is now using Twitter. Now we know how desperate they R.”

Desperate, or just using getting savvy to the same tools as protestors? Meanwhile, other Tweets label this source as a fake. Yet others in the US use the #iranelection hashtag to cynically get clicks to their commercial sites or, unbelievably, their charity fund-raising sites.

Indeed, the traditional media have been pointing out, and are right to do so, that any Tweet is essentially unreliable. Every one has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

A real authority among the green fog is exercised by the excellent Nico Pitney’s blog on The Huffington Post; it’s brilliant, because it evaluates what’s really valuable about the stuff coming out of and about Iran, and is also a live commentary on unfolding events. And it signposts to excellent links.

I hadn’t heard it on the UK news, but he says You Tube has relaxed its usual restrictions on ‘violent or gratuitous’ content to allow video files of demonstrations containing violence to be accessed.

Pitney quotes and links to a You Tube spokesman’s comment in the New York Times explaining their approach and praises it for being “one of the last broadcasters standing” in Iran, despite the authorities having been able to cut 90% of its traffic.

He points out that the site Citizen Tube is full of videos coming in.

One I’ve seen shows ordinary looking people running down a ordinary street while gunshots sound; they look bemused, walk back and forth towards the direction of the shots, some are bleeding and press their wounds, and some carry a man who is bleeding, leaving blood on the ground.

No editing, no effects, no direction – just recording. The camera goes up and down the street, back and forth, capturing the confusion of this Citizen Journalist, and you can hear his (or her) heavy, anxious breathing.

We are used to TV news ‘packages’ – commentary, editing, the structure of the Report. We have absorbed this visual grammar all our lives, we know how it works; then the news report finishes, we tut tut and our attention is taken by the next item.

The very ordinariness of these videos is shocking. They look like just us, our friends and neighbours. Ordinary people who want the kind of ordinary lives we take for granted, like being able to listen to their music, sport daft funky haircuts, and use Twitter and You Tube – which the authorities are doing their best to block.

There are other videos which are far more gruesome, and responsible sites carry appopriate warnings. I haven’t the heart to watch them. Real people, real injuries, in almost real time. Given that so much of what we watch on You Tube is entertainment, this content arouses uneasy feelings in me.

The Web and social media are changing our lives so rapidly that no one can really describe the impact on us and people – and on whole societies.

Who can guess how the situation in Iran will turn out? Whether there’s a revolution or not in that state, one thing is for sure – the impact of online technologies and social media is inexorably leading to a revolution in the head.

PS This site is for those who want to do simple things online to help the protestors , like relocate your Twitter setting to Iran to confuse the censors.