24hourlondon

"I'm not a twenty-something blonde girl," Chris Osburn tells me in his soft American accent. He's right He is responding to a question about where he fits in to the rapidly developing digital landscape and explaining – odd as it may seem – his unique selling point. We have met at The Dove pub on Broadway Market in Hackney because much of the advice I have been receiving about how to market 24hourlondon has included intriguing references to co-opting "social media influencers". Which is all very well but my ideas about them come nearly entirely from reading arch articles in the Guardian about jet-setting glamourpusses wth vlogs. Whereas, to the naked eye at least, Chris seems more like one of the guys who would write about them in print and I find this oddly reassuring. So I'm trying to find out more about these exotic creatures and what they do? How can Chris – exotic on the inside – help me and how can I help him in return? I'd found him ...

Right you hairy lot. Call this a late conversion to the art of marketing. For at 24hourlondon we need to grow our app downloads. To this end we have devised a competition - or at least a clever man called Rishi Lakhani , whom we met on the London Startups site, has - which we are hoping will do the trick. We're hoping it will be *even* better than this trick Yes! You can win £500 and a crate of craft ale brewed by 24hourlondon's very own Dr Dean – at his microbrewery in Cornwall  –  by following this link , downloading the app, telling us the name of your favourite late-night London haunt that is currently missing from our database. Then email us with its name and say what you like about it. Some delicious Tremethick ale, my lover The winner will be chosen on October 1 by an independent judge and informed on October 2. Then I'll blog about it so the whole thing is seen to be completely transparent. What could possibly go wrong? Tell your friends. Pleas...

Tonight's been memorable for me and for nearly all the wrong reasons. I was doing a shift on the night news web desk of the Guardian in King's Cross, which is not most people's idea of a day job but I've been doing it for a while now. And I'd gone on my break early. So at about 10.15pm, when Twitter began to light up with horrible news from London Bridge – shortly after a false alarm along the same lines from Turin – I was at my desk. My colleague and line manager Paul Gallagher was initially the only other person there but by the time our three other colleagues returned from their breaks a few minutes later – propelled back to their work stations by an online news alert – he had already fielded messages from several senior editors, including the editor-in-chief, pitching in or offering to come in to the office. In the next few hours the web desk filled out, reporters' offers of copy from Borough Market a mile or so down the road were accepted and the d...