Well, wasn’t it just — and by public life I really mean the bit where the twitterverse and the real world collide.

If you go to the home page of TheGuardian.co.uk today (pictured) there are two stories that probably wouldn’t be there if not for Twitter — and the power the ‘gossiping masses’ now have.

I imagine most of us were blissfully ignorant of Trafigura until earlier this week; when their slightly mis-judging lawyers attempted to stop a newspaper reporting on the goings-on of our government. Maybe sometime back in the 20th century there was a point where this may have covered something up or contained it for a while.

But really — had they not heard of Twitter? Or Facebook? Or… email? Did they really think a big corporate attempting to hush up free press in such a public way wouldn’t cause one or two problems? Whatever they did or didn’t do — I think it was time to PR your way out of it.

And then came yesterday. The lovely Ms Moir of the Daily Mail and her (ill) considered piece on the demise of Stephen Gately. The woman is either very very blind to the modern world. Or she’s got a book coming out.

I’m not going to comment on the article as plenty of other people have done so. But really, Jan, do you expect us to believe, even for a second that you weren’t aware of the strength of feeling when diatribes are published seemingly against any minority? And did you miss the Trafigura tweetfest? REALLY? And — Daily Mail editors — if you’re to promote a food writer to moral overseer can you please at least have the stomach to stand by material already published or retract it. Changing headlines and pulling advertising just reeks of the lowest behaviour.

The world is changing — the people don’t need to resort to arranged protest or a media campaign to make themselves heard. If you are in the public eye it would do you well to learn this and not to misuse your position by trying to suppress or subvert these views.

And for sanity’s sake — please don’t for one second imagine those of us out here in the real world are so lacking in things to do that we’re sat planning campaigns to bring about the demise of fairly low ranking journos.

We’ve better things to tweet about, Jan