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August 31st, 2011 by Steve

Comments allez-vous?

Media never used to be two-way. Not really. You rarely knew what readers really thought. Yes there were letters to the editor, some of which were genuine. Yes there were the vox-pops, many of them highly selective.

Now media is becoming two-way. The audience can answer back, can contribute to the story, and is increasingly challenging how journalists work and what kind of content they produce. To an extent.

Most of us know this. Most PRs with half a brain also know that one of the main factors under scrutiny as media continues to digitise and modernise is the exertion of editorial control – we want the audience to get engaged and answer back, but there are limits on moral, ethical, legal and plain old decency grounds.

Which is why it is strange to see one of the first ways of mass audience (or readership) engagement - the comment stream at the foot of media stories published online – being something of a Wild West affair. Take a look at this comment stream from a MSN article earlier today, covering a Pizza Express silly season story about album covers recreated in pizza.

Genuine readers maybe, but looking for a different pizza action.

My point here is that media comment streams seem to be becoming a new form of online anarchy, as people have realised that there are typically scant controls on them yet a big audience reading them. Many media have pretty close scrutiny and will remove anything that breaches editorial policy, but most only get taken down once they’ve been seen by a lot of people and criticised, so by then the damage is done – and perhaps that’s part of an attempt to increase traffic anyway. Does it harm the brand/s publicised in the story? Not really; if anything it increases talk about the story. But it may dilute the impact of the story or deflect attention from the messages you’re trying to communicate.

There’s also the question of volume, with certain stories – typically those with strong political views one way or the other, like The Guardian’s recent forgiving commentary piece on the English riots - creating such a torrent of comments that the stream has to be shut down, so defeating the object.

The challenge for the media is how best to make comment streams a way of embossing their content, engaging the audience and driving eyeballs without compromising editorial quality or principles so that their brands are devalued. They can’t have someone sitting there hawking over every story, but equally need to find a way of both automating some aspects of editorial control while having human brains applied to more crucial considerations.

Which isn’t easy.

Just one of the many challenges the media and brands seeking publicity face as media changes and the potential of these new points of influence becomes clearer. And exploited.

And imagine what it’ll be like when comment streams become video files.

July 6th, 2011 by Steve

News of the Screws? Inside 80s-led newsroom machismo

There is so much that can be written about the revelations of phone hacking and other nefarious practices allegedly being rife at the News Of The World.

But one thing that has got my attention is the discussion about  the consequences of this episode for the proud and much-vaunted world of British journalism, and what the culture of the tabloid newsroom is really like.

On the one hand, I’ve been thinking that it’s a tad hypocritical for many of the people who regularly buy – and have bought for years – our national newspapers to suddenly decry tactics and apparent underhand techniques that, unless they’ve been living in a cave, they surely suspected went on all the while. The same goes for police and politicians. How else did you think they got those scoops, divine intervention? As Ray Liotta said with veiled menace in Goodfellas, “They knew what went on at that cab stand”.

Yet in the past 24 hours media commendators have been quick to point to an apparently maverick, cut-throat newsroom culture that took root in Wapping in the 1980s as the reason for such strongarm investigative journalistic tactics. Many have said it shouldn’t even be called journalism. Others have talked about the pressure journalists are under the deliver stories in an all-out war for higher circulation figures. Some apparently feel they can’t say no to requests for dirty tricks in order to generate stories because they fear they’ll lose their jobs. Some of this, to a degree, in my experience, rings true.

I by no means have inner chamber insight into the working of Wapping. But having trained as a journalist in the early 1990s, worked on a regional daily that competed with the nationals and been paid by nationals – most of the tabloids – to provide information and copy on a freelance basis, I have some experiences that may help people to understand the newsroom psyche. Here are 10 things I experienced in that time and have observed since:

1. The 1980s. I started my first paid newspaper editorial job in 1992, in the midst of a recession. Five days later I was offered voluntary redundancy, and politely declined. It was a brutal time, borne of the aftermath of Wapping disputes, unions being sidelined, a brave new world of colour (yes, colour!) newspapers with slicker production processes, and rabid competition for circulation and ad revenue. Combine that with the rise of 1980s ‘lunch is for wimps’ culture and recessionary job fears, and you had a recipe for an uncaring, dog-eat-dog newsroom mentality. You got in early, worked unti late, lied and cheated your way to break stories and lived in fear of being beaten to them by rivals. My employer was actually pretty responsible, fair and moralistic about how reporters were treated and demands were balanced. But many weren’t. And when the shit really hit the fan, it was a case of get in there with your tin hat on. I remember covering a plane crash in the early hours of the morning in winter, in a rainstorm, wearing a shirt and suit trousers, and being threatened at gunpoint. When I got back to file copy I was told off for putting my health and safety at risk, and asked to write the story within 15 minutes.

2. Competition. The newspaper’s editorial staff all want the front page lead to be theirs, every day if possible. They’re protective of what they’re working on. It’s the way to get ahead in your career, but it’s hardly teamplay. The good reporters would help each other out, but others wouldn’t.

3. Outside help. Staff reporters were implicity encouraged to try to extract information in the pursuit of stories by any and all legal means. Morals did come into it on a regional paper because it had a reputation to uphold in the local community. The tabloids would always push it further. But when it came to the real dirty stuff, news agencies were often a source of copy that staff couldn’t generate themselves. I remember one example of a young female news agency reporter having a breakdown after being pushed to knock continuously on the door of a bereaved family until she got a quote. She was practically assaulated in the process, and got nothing other than a dressing down from her boss for perceived failure. It was ugly.

4. Trampling on people. My newspaper didn’t sanction it. Others did. I once arrived at the scene of a teenage suicide (girl who had hanged herself from the bannister at home) to find a reporter for a national tabloid that shall remain nameless stealing rubbish bags from the back garden so they could be sifted for information and potential suicide notes. A queue of reporters were on the doorstep wanting interviews. This sort of thing was completely commonplace.

5. Trampling on journalists. While I learned more in a few years in journalism than I could have ever hoped to, got ahead very quickly (writing stories for the nationals at 20, head reporter at 21, night news editor at 22, still made the tea throughout) and wouldn’t change a thing, journalists were often put in personally compromising positions. I had already decided that PR was a better career for me (as had many hacks at the time) when I was asked to cover a story about a friend of mine killing himself. I asked to be kept out of it, but was told that as I knew the family I was the man for the job. The copy I wrote, as compassionate as I could make it, was dramatised before publication. It was a career low-point.

6. Surveillance. Nothing like the current allegations and previous revelations of course, but if a news reporter tells you that journalists didn’t and don’t listen to police scanners, they might not be being truthful. It got to the point where reporters would turn up at scenes before the police. What marvellous foresight.

7. Delusion. Working in this way, with this pressure and competition, and using techniques so get this close to information and incidents as they occured, it was perhaps inevitable that some journalists saw themselves as something of a frontline public service, and so had unwritten rights to know things, be places and talk to people in a way that the general public couldn’t. Legally, that’s not the case. But it didn’t stop it becoming a popular belief that ’they have to let us know, we’re the press’. 

8. Police relationships. Proceed with caution on this one. I won’t go into any of the current allegations, but suffice to say the relationship between police and the media, while often strained, was typically rooted in mutual understanding. They needed each other. Equally, most editors were perfectly happy to take the local police down a peg or two in their next story after one that trumpeted a bobby’s valour.

9. Identification. I was taught at journalism school that reporters are always under a moral duty to let potential interviewees know who they are and who they work for. Often, reporters went deliberately light on detail in order to avoid people clamming up. Or opaque when discussing how they intended to use the information. The same is often true today. It was seen as part and parcel of journalistic practice, and you risked getting fewer or no stories without it.

10. Bullying. Well, the workplace was very different back then, and I sometimes wonder how ‘the world owes me a living’ Gen Y types would fare in the world of 80s or 90s journalism. Was it bullying? Perhaps. Certainly it could be intimidating, rarely for the faint-hearted and ‘not for wimps’. Machismo to the fore. Most things, in the estimations of those I know working in journalism today and who worked in it in the past, stopped short of outright bullying. But other things were be borderline or, occasionally, classic bullying. For British journalists coming out of the 1980s hangover, caught into the ferocity of 90s media and yet to be hit by the rise of the internet, seeing colleagues in tears, strops or crisis meetings was a regular occurance.

From what I’ve seen and talk to journalists about since, some things have changed, but some remain the same. It will be intriguing to see how the News Of The World works to recover from this week’s headlines, and how the transparency expectations and two-way nature of digitising media may change the face of British journalism.

Oh, and we did care about the Press Complaints Commission. A matter that made the back page of UK Press Gazette because you’d pushed it too far was practiclly a badge of honour for young reporters.

June 13th, 2011 by Steve

Court short: social media, contempt risks and stupidity

Today’s news about contempt of court proceedings due to take place this week against a juror who allegedly communicated with a trial defendant by Facebook highlights several things about how media restrictions on reporting of legal cases are struggling in the wake of technological progression.

Firstly, the regulations governing trial procedure and media reporting continue to be put under pressure because technology is making the world a smaller place. Secondly, the courts need to remind jurors of their obligations and the consequences of their actions. Thirdly, a lot of people seem to be utterly stupid, so given jurors are supposedly a cross-section of society then we should beware.

Let’s take those, as a prosector might in outlining a case, one point at a time. The implications of information connected to live legal proceedings coming into the hands of jurors via the conventional media are long-established and rooted in common sense. The basics are that, once the trial is in motion, the media can only report what has been said before the jury – so for example, no deliberations between barristers and the judge while the jury is excused from the room – in case jurors should become privvy to information that should not have any bearing on their verdict. I learned this lesson as a court reporter when a colleague had covered the trial the day before, added a few naughty subjudicial bits to that evening’s article and I was then asked to stand before the court for a bellowing from His Honour.

Another important piece of legal procedure here is that in the event that media coverage about an incident or an arrest has been intensive, the defence can ask for the trial to be held in another part of the country so that the jury is less likely to have been clouded by the publicity. That’s an approach that has carried less weight for years as conventional media became more immediate and the likelihood of more people across the country ‘knowing’ increased. For years, keeping what is written about a case out of the hands of jurors has been becoming more and more difficult.

In the days before internet-based media, judges would typically stress to jurors when proceedings were adjourned at the end of each day (or earlier, depending on the nature of the lunch and the day of the week, in my experience) that they were to discuss the case with no-one. Not even their friends or families, although such requests may well be wishful thinking. Often, they’d also make reference to media coverage surrounding the case and that jurors should do their utmost to avoid reading it. Again, you can avoid reading an evening paper but as media proliferated, avoidance became trickier. Nonetheless, judges today do sometimes remind jurors of these obligations and make specific reference to social media – and the risk of them personally being prosecuted for contempt of court if they did wrong. The problem is that too many judges were eupehmistic about the consequences – you’ll ‘be held in contempt’, for example – rather than being more specific and illustrating what the consequences of naive action might be. Held in  contempt probably means held in a cell, for quite a long time.

Social media always had the potential to exacerbate that difficulty, but the extra ingredient that has the ability to make it a menace for legal proceedings. and potentially threaten the notion of all fair trials by jury, is simply human stupidity.

It is like this – if a juror were to discuss a case with someone in the pub, their chances of being caught doing so are fairly minimal. Broadcast something on Facebook and you may, depending on your privacy settings, be talking to the entire world about it. Despite the persistent stories about people getting tripped up by their failure to realise that the internet is a global communications network not just a thing that lives its own smiley existence inside your computer, people are still daft enough to commit their comments to the world’s view.

Yes the media reporting restrictions need a review to protect the integrity of jury trials given how media has changed. But judges also need to start from the raw assumption that every juror needs to have contempt of court explained to them as if they were a four-year-old.

May 9th, 2011 by Steve

Super-injunctions: social media, not the law, must change

I’d better be careful writing this one hadn’t I?

The furore surrounding the alleged, apparent and potentially utterly innacurate revelations of ‘truths’ behind so-called super-injunctions by the Twitter feed @InjunctionSuper last night (since removed by Twitter, but I saw it yesterday before its demise) poses the crucial question of how information released through social media can be controlled if it is of a sensitive legal nature.

The BBC went to town on the matter this morning. The revelations were the second lead on the Today programme, which is mildly ridiculous from an editorial standpoint but at least gave journalists something scope for speculation around what response we might see from the courts.

Having apparently breached a series of super-injunctions, the tweets in question were held up as an example of why changes to the law may be necessary given that while conventional media have to abide by rulings, the ability of a person or persons registering a Twitter account and spilling the beans highlighted major legislative flaws.

This misses the important point though – the law it stands is perfectly (well, largely) adequate for dealing with illegal information disclosures – or, come to mention it, defamation and libel -  providing the author of the content is known. That does not mean I agree with super-injunctions. It’s just that to suggest legal chages are needed is sniffing in the wrong spot.

Every conventional media publisher in this country identifies itself in its product. You know who wrote it, so you know who to sue or who to prosecute. The problem with social media is that, despite the declarations of identity and purpose during sign-up, it is so easy to masquerade as someone else or cover your tracks when registering an account with naughty intent that my cats could practically do it.

The powers that be should be working out how to ensure that every person using social media can ultimately be tracked, identified and whalloped if necessary. There is no such thing as power of the press, so there should be no such thing as power of the social press.

Celebrity tittle-tattle and personal reputation soiling is one thing. But if social media goes on like the Wild West then we risk something of genuine public interest or national security being dribbled out or tossed around like playground banter.

Meanwhile, has anyone got a social media analysis tool to tell me how much Imogen Thomas’ net worth has increased in the past 24 hours?

May 4th, 2011 by Steve

When print beat the internet to the story

3.05pm weekdays means one thing to me – it was the final deadline (front page) for the last edition of the day when I worked on an evening paper. That’s five past the hour, not on the hour. Every minute, let alone every five minutes, counts.

The internet, starting with the OJ Simpson trial verdict in 1995, began to take precedence over conventional media for breaking news (or, at least, ‘information’) and today first alerts of an event or an apparent incident tend to break online. The death of bin Laden being communicated first by Twitter is the latest example.

So I had a wry smile when I read that my old media stomping ground was the first in the world to get still pictures of (the then) Kate Middleton’s wedding dress and the couple at the altar out to the world – in print. Yes, on paper. Yes, a newspaper. Yes, for sale in the newsagents. Yes, people went out in the middle of the Royal Wedding to buy it. That’s the Black Country for you.

And not just the dress, but the first photos from inside Westminster Abbey of the ceremony itself. Think about this:

- 11am, wedding begins (quite rightly too) at precisely 11, the same time as the front page deadline for the Express and Star’s first edition

 - Within a minute, the first picture at the altar is taken by a staff photographer and sent back to Wolverhampton, where presses are warmed up ready to roll (yes, presses in the same building, yes it shakes)

- Within a few minutes, the first newspapers are bundled and thrown into vans

- By 11.35am, so about half an hour later, they are on sale in newsagents in the Cannock area, seven miles away

How did Midland News Association, the family-run owner of the Express and Star, pull off such a first? Well it does stuff like this all the time to be fair. It’s a very well-drilled editorial operation with well-established processes. Everything is timed to the minute, major news coverage that can be planned in advance is mapped out like a military operation. Everyone knows their place and knows their deadline. The van engines are switched on as the first batches of papers are bound, the presses are warmed in good time to get them up to optimal speed at the first front page deadline hits. It runs like clockwork, most of the time.

The paper’s coverage of the Royal Wedding was impressive, with a 20-page supplement being updated throughout the day for later editions. The nationals, from a local readership persective, didn’t get a look-in. How glad the news editor must have been when it was announced the wedding would be at 11am. It covered the event live via Twitter too - a proper reporter doing the job, rather than a dosy amateur.

So were the pictures ‘the story’? That day, they were. Tweets and TV coverage about the dress and the couple being at the altar were one thing, but we were all waiting for the first published shot of the couple in the abbey and print did it, using discipline and editorial nous that has made it the best-selling UK evening paper, as well as covering events live online with proper editorial intent.

Not so much a case of tortoise and hare, but professional shows amateur the prowess of real editorial and the ability to work as fast as the medium will allow. Which is still pretty fast.

April 6th, 2011 by Steve

Easter puns that may make you cross

If there’s one thing that instantly marks out the British media compared to the press in other countries, it is the pun.

And after a quick straw poll in the Speed office about what topic offers greater scope for a bountiful harvest of puns than all others, we reached the conclusion that Easter provides all manner of eggs-tra opportunities for editorial ‘mirth’.

So, a bit early, here’s a list of some of the Easter puns you’re likely to see over the coming couple of weeks:

- Shelling out

- Egged on to do it

- Not what it’s cracked up to be

- It’ll be all white

- Choc-a-block

- And that’s no yolk

- Hopping mad

- Hare today, gone tomorrow

- It’s a bunny old game

- 24 carrot

- Anything to do with chickening out

- Eggshell-ent, and many variations on this theme per the below:

- Eggs-treme
- Egg-citing
- Egg-stravagant
- Egg-speriment
- Egg-splosive
- Egg-stortionate
- Egg-static
- Eggs-traordinary
- Eggs-tra terrestrial
- Egg-sotic
- Egg-sactly
- Egg-stracted
- Eggs-cavation
- Egg-saggerate
- Egg-saust
- Egg-xam
- Egg-samine
- Egg-ceed
- Egg-cel
- Egg-cept
- Eggs-change

All very basic, few very funny, but see how many you spot in the press. Omlettin’ you know so you’re forewarned.

March 22nd, 2011 by Steve

Big blog syndrome: where churnalism meets egotism (or doesn’t)

The media is under pressure, they say. Standards are slipping, quality is dumbing down and content is suffering. The internet has democratised publishing and led to the rise of citizen journalism in which everyone can be a journalist.

Just play those words back again: everyone can be a journalist. No they can’t. If they could, publishers wouldn’t still be turning away entry-level job applicants in their droves and offering such paltry starting salaries because there’s such intense pressure to get into the profession. Bloggers are not journalists just because they blog. But they are starting to show some daft traits.

This is a quick post about something that has been niggling me for a while. Yes like many I find churnalism particularly sickly, even if it is a quick route to output for lazy PRs. But the rise of blogger egotism is an equally damning facet of how media fragmentation is causing weak spots to bubble up.

Hypocrite, I hear you cry! Here he is on a blog that is plainly all about driving web traffic poking the finger at bloggers over editorial flimsiness. Well, I ask for nothing from writing a blog other than that anyone who reads it and agrees or disagrees with the points it raises has the gumption to come out and say so.

What I am increasingly taking objection to are the bloggers getting an over-inflated opinion of themselves to the extent that they think they have a right to throw their weight around and make crass demands of the organisations that they write about. There are, of course, many bloggers who do an excellent job with informed commentary, sound analysis and pithy copy that is every bit as readable as mainstream media. Others, though, seem to have let their egos get the better of them.

Take the examples of several approaches I’ve had recently from bloggers wanting to write about certain things. The approach may be commercially sound, citing reader numbers, site traffic and the like. But the pitch can be so heavy-handed they read like a naive journalist who has just arrived at a national and been given a taste of what they perceive to be the power of the press. Yet much more brazen. The inference, rarely subtle, is that if you pay me to write something or treat me well, it will get in front of a big and valuable audience because I and what I write are so desperately important. And please see below for the cost structure.

Such bloggers need to calm down and wise up. Blogging has emerged as an important part of a changing media landscape. But if you throw your weight around to this extent, it will be a road to nowhere. Media has to be respected and trusted, not just ‘consumed’, to be influential.

Bloggers need to avoid egotism.

Journalists need to avoid churnalism.

Bloggers should avoid falling into the trap of having egos as big as journalists and journalists should avoid shoving out tatty cut and paste copy just because they have a forum for doing so.

Please do take issue with this, leave comments or post your own views. Even if they’re of the ‘oooh look what you’ve done, you’ve upset some bloggers’ variety.

January 13th, 2011 by Steve

The virtual and human press office touch

I was asked some questions recently by Holly North, a journalism student at Cardiff University, as part of some research she’s doing into virtual (i.e. online) press offices.

I thought this might interest some people; not that it’s a new issue, but because creating and maintaining the best type of press office for today’s media requirements is a constantly moving feast.

Her questions were what content should feature on a virtual press office, whether any guidelines are available, whether simply calling press officers is a better way of doing this and whether automation has made journalists lazy.

Response below:

“Firstly, the list of requirements recommended by Rainier in the past (typical content: company information, backgrounders, biographies, product information, press releases, image libraries and contact details) was right for its time, but things have moved on quite a lot since then. The reason is the continued digitisation and fragmentation of the media. All of those points are still valid, but the agility of media requests to press offices these days and the diversity of content required have increased. But there are no guidelines about what to do and what not to do, to my knowledge.

Why are virtual press offices (and by that, I mean a service that fulfils many common press requests online by automating the process to some degree) better than the old fashioned phone? Well often, they’re not. The challenge organisations have is that the volume and diversity of enquiries has increased, as has media expectation about how quickly a response should be received.

What many large organisations have tried to do is automate their answers to many of the common media requests, like facts and figures, policy statements, stock images and so on. That is good, and in some cases the media respects the ability to get the content quickly without having to talk to a press officer (or wait for a call back from them).

But this is all about getting the balance right. More complex, personalised or sensitive information requests will invariably need human intervention. It’s better for the journalist and for the PR. What organisations need to do is better understand what the media requires, across the board, and that’s not easy. Asking them is a good start, but even then requriements are continuing to evolve.

Has putting press resources on the internet made journalists lazy? Lots of them have always been lazy, just like many PRs are lazy. I don’t think press office formats have made them any more lazy. The main issue for the lazy journalism debate is that some ‘lightweight’ media rely overly on reusing content without applying any editorial nous. It might help your search ranking to have your content cut and pasted content all over the internet, but the influence of editorial upon your audience won’t necessarily increase (in fact it’s likely to do the opposite).

PR is all about getting people to buy you because they heard they should. Virtual press offices should be about automating the routine things that are done by organisations to help the media to develop content, creating scope for more time to work with them on the more influential elements of their editorial.”

January 13th, 2011 by Steve

That alleged nazi sex thing and the right to comment

Max Mosley, as well as being a potentially high-tempo dress code for a dinner party, is a man who’s been on a mission to reset the parameters by which brands and individuals are able to comment on – or quash – media stories.

You’ll recall the story no doubt. Editorial with words like nazi and sex in the headline tends to have that effect. The former FIA motor racing president was the subject of a News of the Screws sting (copy now tucked safely behind the firewall) in 2008 that alleged the rumoured occurance all sorts of potentially pleasurable domestic shenanigans.

This week Mr Mosley, who was given airtime by The Guardian to state his case, took the matter to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Central to his privacy campaign is his belief that the media should be forced to notify individuals and organisations about stories that feature them before they are published, as not doing so is, he claims, a breach of human rights.

Now most PRs might think that something which compels journalists to call and run through a story’s contents before it even hits the subs desk would be fantastic. We’d get the inside track, be able to integrate other marketing tactics to further the impact of the editorial, and gain a greater sense of command (if not control) over the whole editorial process.

Or would we? If such circumstances became required, surely the media would only enable us to comment begrudingly, late in the process, in a formulaic way, with little room for brands to apply clever thinking to what they say and how they’re looking to influence their audiences.

To reinforce that point, think about how the British media works when it comes to seeking comments on editorial that it plans to publish. If journalists are actively seeking your expert input on their editorial in order to embellish it, validate it or add greater colour, then they tend to give you as much scope and time as possible to do so.  It’s in their best interests.  If a competitor, for example, has made claims about you, they tend to give you a ‘reasonable’ amount of time to comment and typically are hoping there are some tit-for-tat claims made by both parties in the run-up to deadline.

But if it’s a dirt story, particularly one that they think you’re likely to want to try to block or undermine in some way, they tend to give you as little time as possible, to narrow your window of opportunity to an arrowslit. Any comment will require you to think on your feet (or on one foot) and make what, the journalist hopes, is a token gesture, even defensive, comment. Legally, and by most written and unwritten press codes of ethics, you need to be given the opportunity to comment, but therein lies the issue. As a hack, my newsdesk would normally encourage me to give most people about 15 minutes to have their say, by which time the presses were already getting fired up to roll. Or 10 minutes if the guy was a real arsehole.

Should a judge be the person to decide on how editorial practice should be undertaken, rather than an editor? Well yes and no, in my view. The whole notion of ‘opportunity to comment’ does need some form of legislation so that it is better defined. But in the age of diverse and fragmented, one-way and two-way, conventional and social, media, the window of opportunity afforded is unlikely to be extensive.

But if we allow individuals and brands to stick the boot into any negative editorial concerning them that they do not like the look of, recruiting armies of bloated lawyers to mass in a pincer formation in order to nullify any threats, we’ll end up with a flacid, handcuffed media unable to deliver the potency of editorial that the world of PR lusts over and can ultimately thrive on.

And yes I am aware that that previous paragraph contains some sexual and nazi undertones.

January 7th, 2011 by Steve

British PRs: (un)officially the best in the world?

So according to The Economist (disclosure: Speed client), the British media market is the world’s most savage. The competition for compelling editorial is at its most cut-throat. Newspaper development (or rescue) strategies require balls of steel.

We’ve long known that it’s tough out there for the media. In Britain, as in many parts of the world, there’s unprecedented change because of digitisation and the resulting fragmentation.

The article makes the point that despite the much-heralded demise of British media fortunes and influence, newspapers are everywhere and cunning strategy is coming to the fore.

Now then: if British media is the toughest and smartest in the world, and PRs are a conduit to the media and its editorial influence and must mirror the way it works in communicating succesfully, does it not follow that British PRs are the toughest and smartest around too?

Ask most agency PRs in this country and they may well agree. Those of us who began our PR careers pitching the tough hacks out there (yes, you know the ones I mean) and have experienced media around the world may well concur. Work successfully with the British media and you can probably do so anywhere.

We need sharp writing skills, quick thinking, thick skins, analytical powers and the nerves required to deal with constant change. Just like the journalists.

It’s just a shame our budgets are tied largely (as they should be, to be fair) to market opportunities rather than media difficulty. Or I’d be off buying a yacht rather than sat here writing this.