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By Will Sturgeon, 29 November 2000 09:15

NEWS Snook, who the papers all pitch somewhere between colourful and eccentric, steered the company through its founding days and periods of massive growth and then into the arms of France Telecom who paid £25bn for the UK mobile operator in May. Snook will take an advisory role within France Telecom after Orange is floated on the Paris stock exchange early next year, and he is reportedly looking forward to dedicating more time to an extensive list of hobbies and interests that includes alternative health remedies, feng shui and colonic irrigation. Snook denied his move was due to infighting within the company... Another Anglo-French company who may also be sorting out a P45 in the near future is Sema. The Times reports that the board of the IT services company is considering the future of one of its number due to share trading irregularities. Non executive director Hartmut Lademacher sold 1.8 million shares during a closed period - directly in breach of UK listing rules... On more light-hearted matters, many of this morning's papers have reported on last night's 'music event of the year' which saw 'Queen of Pop' Madonna perform to the largest internet audience of all time. MSN broadcast the groundbreaking half-hour show at London's Brixton Academy to a global audience of over 450 million, the Mirror reports eclipsing a previous record held by ex-Beatle Paul McCartney... Less inspired by the entertainment capabilities of the web were readers of a novel by US writer Stephen King, who was serialising an unpublished work on the internet. The readers stayed away in their droves forcing the eventual abandonment of the project and leaving the few readers who stayed faithful to the scheme with no ending to the novel they had been reading. The Times quite rightly points out that the failure of such a high-profile and mainstream novelist doesn't bode well for the future of digital publishing. Readers were able to download the novel for free - with nearly 80 per cent making an 'honesty payment' that was requested of them - but the falling numbers of those returning for each chapter began to dwindle - suggesting such technological advances are no substitute for a good book...