Oi, SPH! Neck it, or wear it!

The journos from Alphabet traipsed over to the Old Parliament Building yesterday to help our friends at Hill & Knowlton celebrate the PR company's 80th birthday. I have increasingly less and less time to go to these kind of things, but a last minute email from Raoul Le Blond persuaded me that my specialist skills might be needed for the party's sculling competition.

Sculling is a venerable and honourable test of mental endurance, fleet footedness, teamwork and strategic thinking - and something which my alma mater used to take quite seriously. Basically it entails sinking beers in quick succession so that your team empties their glasses before your opponents.

The last time I sculled competitively was in 1993, but I remember being on the winning side at that Pan-Oxford Sculling Championship, and had high hopes for yesterday's test of skill. Sadly I reckoned without having to accommodate lesser talents within our team. Alphabet's Jianggan and I were forced to partner with a lightweight from SPH, who seemed to think that he was at a winetasting function.

This confirms my many suspicions that the prospects for mainstream print media are bleak, and that the future belongs to niche, trade media. You can read my earlier musings on this subject here.

Anyway ... it was a good evening otherwise, and I am now inspired to pressgang an Alphabet Media sculling team to challenge any bunch of media or PR types brave enough to cross swords with Jianggan, myself and the rest of us here at Evershine & Century Complex.