Aime is now off on maternity leave.  In her absence, please feel free to read and sign up to the blogs of her colleagues Matt, Kevin and Hannah, offering industry news, insider top tips and comments on breaking stories.  Enjoy! 

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That's all for now folks!

Some rather disturbing news hit the headlines this week when Schools' Secretary Ed Balls announced Margaret Thatcher and the Spice Girls as inspiring role models for young girls!

Now, call me old fashioned but I would have thought Mr Balls could have come up with a few more inspiring achievers - what about the likes of Dame Ellen MacArthur, the late Dame Anita Roddick or JK Rowling?!

Mr Balls' vote for Geri Halliwell, Victoria Beckham and the other Spice Girls came only days after they started their sell-out reunion tour.

In September this year Mr Brown startled Labour MPs by inviting Lady Thatcher to tea in Number 10 in what critics said was an attempt to reinvent himself as a "conviction politician".

Since then a succession of disasters have seen Labour's poll advantage wiped out, leaving MPs predicting defeat for Mr Brown at the next election.

Referring to his support of the Spice Girls, the Schools' Secretary said: 'They are clean living and they were about girl power.'

But Mr Balls said the Premier would emulate the comeback staged by Lady Thatcher with her election win in 1987, just a year after her popularity was rocked by the Westland affair.

Mr Balls said: "Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to be a woman in our country [sic].

"And whatever you think of her - and I dislike many, many things that she did - the fact is that she was a role model for women to see that you could reach the highest job.

"The Spice Girls delivered 'girl power' which inspired a generation of young girls to believe that they could do it."

It's a boom time for publications and the online world.  Today it was revealed that the Economist has delivered a 25% rise in operating profit for the half year to the end of September, on the back of strong readership gains both online and in print.

Operating profit for the Economist group was £20.85m for the six months up to September 30, 2007, up from £16.63m for the same period the year before.

Chairman Robert Wilson said the gains were the result of increased efficiencies and a 4% rise in turnover to £124.6m for the period.

The Economist has been investing heavily in its website, with innovations including country briefings, an Oxford-style debate series and podcasts.

Monthly unique users have increased on average by 39% year on year, reaching 2.6 million in September 2007, the company said.

Electronic advertising revenue has increased 15% year on year and is now worth 17% of total Economist group revenue.

Print circulation was up 11% year on year to 1.26m globally, according to the January-June report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

News also hot off the press today is how the internet is set to overtake magazines to become the world's third largest advertising medium in 2010, according to a new report.

Media planning and buying agency ZenithOptimedia's global advertising report estimates that in 2010 the internet ad market will be worth almost $61bn (29.5bn), compared with the magazine market at around $60.5bn (29.3bn).

By 2010 the internet will account for 11.5% of global ad spend, trailing just TV, at a 37.5% share, and newspapers with 25.4% of an estimated $530bn (£257bn) total spend, according to Zenith.

Now I am not an avid fan of the Royals but tonight I think it may well be worth tuning into BBC One's long awaited programme 'Monarchy - The Royal Family At Work' at 8.30 pm tonight.

This is a candid insight into the Queen's duties over the course of a year, opening with Palace preparations for a state visit to the US to mark the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown landings in Virginia. A reception for British-based Americans is also organised, and a private dinner for prominent US expats at Buckingham Palace, along with the now-controversial photo session with Annie Leibovitz.

Jana Bennett, now crowned the most powerful woman in British television, survived the furore over the manipulation of film of the Queen. In her first interview since the affair, she tells Ian Burrell why it was not her fault.

The most powerful woman in British television, with creative and leadership responsibility for all the corporation's channels, has had the year of nightmares. She has seen the sullying of such virtuous BBC brands as Blue Peter and Comic Relief, tainted by the sin of viewer deceit, and she has had to implement the deepest of cuts on her staff. More, she has had to bid farewell to Peter Fincham, the controller of her flagship channel, who departed over the shambles that has become known as "Crowngate", an affair that shocked those within and without the corporation and prompted the author of an independent inquiry to castigate Bennett, 51, for her "lack of curiosity" in acting to limit the damage caused to the reputation of the BBC.

The sequence at the centre of the affair, manipulated for a promotional film to show the Queen huffily stomping out of the photo-shoot, will form part of tonight's first episode of the newly-titled five-part series Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work. Bennett now describes it thus: "What I will say is that the photo shoot is completed and the whole shoot is from beginning to end done fully and professionally and obviously that's a very different story from the one that was regrettably originally edited. But this shows the thing, the exchange, properly and shows there's a mixture of quite a lot of good humour."

So "done fully", "professionally" and with elements of "good humour". Yet on the evening of 11 July, when news organisations were up and running with the storm-out story, Bennett was told by Fincham during a 20-minute telephone call that there was a problem but failed to grasp its potential impact. A draft statement prepared by the BBC, Buckingham Palace and the production company responsible for the distortion, RDF, was emailed to Bennett but she did not see it.

No correction was issued until the following day and even then Bennett appeared unaware of the extent of the deception, believing there merely to have been a "compression" of material.

In his report into the affair last month, Will Wyatt, himself a former senior BBC executive, wrote of Bennett that "given the information she did have, she displayed a lack of curiosity in not getting to the bottom of what exactly the BBC was apologising to the Queen for."

He added: "No one at any level in the Vision or Marketing Communications and Audiences department seemed to spot that a series with unprecedented access to the royal household had the potential to explode in the BBC's face."

Fincham's departure, as soon as the report was published, prompted headlines such as "BBC's top woman faces growing pressure to quit over 'Crowngate'" and "Critics calls for more heads in BBC 'Crowngate'". So did Bennett consider her position? "There wasn't ...the big discussion ...Peter Fincham took a view, took responsibility. He made those decisions and that was really the end of that. I think he took responsibility because he was BBC1 controller and saw this as something very much within his responsibilities. He was a fantastic colleague but that subject of me didn't come up."

So she didn't even contemplate the issue, even after those headlines? "Peter took his decision and took it very rapidly so it wasn't a material question." Clearly, Bennett felt that she had the backing of the director general Mark Thompson, a long-standing colleague. Nonetheless, she was sufficiently aware of the gravity of the matter not to consider Fincham's departure surprising. "I wasn't particularly surprised, no. Because, as I said, he saw that this was something very much in his orbit. This was a big launch and the events have been looked at in great detail by many different commentators but I don't think it was subject to lots of group discussion and I don't think such a decision would be anyway."

Bennett has brought in experienced producer Denys Blakeway to supervise the "specially-composed team" making the revised Monarchy. "They can look at any material they like but they have basically taken the rough cuts and are working to bring them to what you might call fine cuts," she says.

The Palace has been kept closely informed of progress of a film that was formerly called simply The Queen. "We have editorial control and are absolutely responsible for delivering this as a high-quality project, but we've made sure that they are aware of what we are doing because this has a bit of a history, obviously, and it is something we all want to be proud of. The whole point is to show not just Her Majesty but the monarchy at work, which is also why we re-titled it."

Bennett accepts that 2007 has been a "year of going through gauntlets and that's not just me individually but for the industry". Though she expresses doubt that the press industry would stand up to the same scrutiny of standards, she accepts that "there may be things to be learned from [print] journalists when it comes to things like corrections pages" and that the television industry has learned that "it's really important for the audience and contributors of any sort to be dealt with fairly". Nonetheless, her overriding message is that "it's really important to not sit and dwell on [past problems] but to move ahead".

The Montage team have been busy over the last few days working with the regional and national media.

Children’s author Tanya Landman shared the magic of reading with pupils from Two Mile Hill Junior School in Victoria Street Starbucks coffee house in November to launch the fifth annual Starbucks Bookdrive in Bristol.

The Walker Books writer, who read from her latest book, Flotsam and Jetsam and the Stormy Surprise, is one of eight well-known authors, including Anthony Horowitz, who are helping launch the annual Starbucks Bookdrive. A partnership with the National Literacy Trust, the Bookdrive runs across the UK and aims to drive imagination and literacy in young people by collecting books for local school children to take home and keep.

The Starbucks Bookdrive is run in partnership with National Literacy Trust (NLT) and has donated more than 200,000 books into communities since its launch in 2002. Starbucks and the NLT have been working together for over seven years with the aim of supporting communities by promoting the value of reading and sparking the imagination of children from a young age.

Last year, 100,000 books were collected, which included a donation of 27,000 books from Walker Books.

Last week the team also headed down to the prestigious Duke of Cornwall Hotel to manage the latest press conference for a lucky syndicate at Plymouth University. The syndicate of administration staff at the University of Plymouth’s Faculty of Science are still celebrating after a winning £8,829,737 share of the Lotto Triple Rollover jackpot on Saturday 3 November 2007.

Syndicate manager and Senior Administrator for the Faculty of Science at the University of Plymouth, Susan Haley (44), found out the group had won when she went to check the ticket at her local newsagent as usual. Susan, who has worked at the University for 21 years, was surprised when the shop owner told her that she needed to contact Camelot directly because it was a winner.

Susan said: “I was shocked when I found out the ticket was a winning one! The syndicate has had the odd £10 win here and there, but this is the size of win we have always dreamed of – we are delighted. I rushed home and then started calling everyone to let them know, most of them thought it was a wind up! It took a while to convince them that we had won over £8 million.”

TV crews, photographers and local and national papers all attended the conference and the coverage has been brilliant! 

Popstars are now jumping on the new media bandwagon and singer Kylie Minogue has launched her own social networking website for her fans to communicate with each other.

The KylieKonnect website enables fans to create personal profiles and upload images, as well as keep up to date with all the very latest news on Kylie.

They have variously been called pointless, a waste of time and a passing fad. But social networking websites could be with us for a long time, according to the man behind Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg, the popular website's 23-year-old founder, suggested yesterday that the true advantages of using social sites might take decades to become fully apparent.

The website has become one of the darlings of the latest internet boom, growing rapidly and attracting more than 34 million users worldwide since it launched in 2004 from a dorm room at Harvard University.

Last year Mr Zuckerberg reportedly rejected a bid from Yahoo! for around $1bn, but a series of reports in recent weeks have suggested that a number of investors are in negotiations to buy a stake in Facebook that would value the company in excess of $10bn.

He suggested that the company was preparing to launch its own advertising platform within the next three months, throwing into doubt its relationship with Microsoft – which has an exclusive deal to provide advertising on the social network.

It’s great to welcome a new B2B title to the South West – Business Insider. It’s the fifth regional Insider title with a mission of giving the South West business community a forum and a medium that reflects its aspirations and voices their concerns.

This month’s first issue was a cracking read and featured the first ever Rich List for the South West.

Business Insider’s readership figures are shaping up nicely with circulation in its first month at 8,000 and a readership of 24,000.

As an agency we look forward to watching this title flourish in the region and think that it provides an insightful, passionate and motivating read!

Find out more about this title by clicking here.