That's what we do in PR. Right? Not if you're Mike King, MD of Johnson King a self proclaimed "leading European B2B PR consultancy specialising in the technology and telecoms sector". So I guess ZDnet is a key market target for his clients such as Alcatel (I would tell you more clients but the fancy scroll box they use to list the clients on their website doesn't appear to work properly).

So what to make of this story from Rupert Goodwin's diary on ZDnet?

I would expect that all PR people would agree that truth is absolutely fundamental to our profession. And never more so than in crisis communications.

So why did self-proclaimed crisis communications media expert John Stonborough tell PR Week that he had "decided against renewing his media relations contract" with the House of Commons? What on earth possessed him to say he "wished to leave on a high, having handled PR for the first ever publication of MPs allowances, a story that was splashed across the front pages last month"?

Why didn't Stonborough realise that in a crisis the truth will usually come out, so it is much better to be honest up front?

Thanks to Recess Monkey for tipping me off about this story in The Times.

I would have thought that this would have a serious negative impact on Stonborough's business and career. If the allegations are true then I really can't imagine reputable companies such as Shell, Clifford Chance,  Provident Financial and Asda wanting to risk their reputation and confidential company data.

His error is not so much how he has handled his own crisis communications badly but that he appears to have deliberately not acted in the best interests of his clients and betrayed client confidentiality by leaking information for party political purposess.

This could be deeply damaging to the PR profession. Especially so since Stonborough is not just a member, but a Fellow of the Institute of Public Relations. I await developments with interest.

Excellent two thirds of a page article in today's Guardian about the forthcoming CPL qualifiers. We've been handling the PR for Game Frontier since earlier this year and finally the competitive gaming scene is beginning to get the media coverage it deserves. Game Frontier is the exclusive UK partner of both CPL and ESWC, the world's two biggest competitive gaming organisations.

We've still got a long way to go to get it established as a mainstream 'sport' but I think audiences and coverage will continue to grow. There's lots of other exciting stuff happening that we can't talk about yet, but if it all comes off then we should start to get some serious attention next year from both the general consumer press and broadcast media.