pr-media-blog.co.uk

PR Media Blog, when it comes to religion, is at the very least agnostic and certainly non-denominational.

But when the venerable institution of BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day talks social media, quotes Mark Zuckerberg and namechecks YouTube, we simply have to listen.

There’s no doubt that TFTD has divided opinion, with Christians championing the need for religious broadcasting while humanists and atheists urging the broadcaster to do less, if any, God at all.

But, sometimes, the chosen TFTD speaker manages to harness the zeitgeist and build a meaningful connection between faith and a modern, technological world, seemingly indifferent to the church.

Read here or listen to here what the Rev Dr David Wilkinson says about social media and the importance of relationships.

Could social media be the saviour of religion or, ultimately, become its replacement? To paraphrase Karl Marx, could social media be the new opium of the people?

With 24 hour news channels we have instant access to the latest information when incidents like the Haiti earthquake happen. Within hours broadcasters have teams reporting from the front line.

But what we don’t often think about is how many people broadcasters like the BBC, Sky and others are committing to the story and how they are able to sustain themselves while all around there appears to be hardship and suffering. 

This was the subject tackled on Newswatch, a 15 minute weekly segment on News 24, where the public get to ask questions about the BBC’s news coverage.

It was interesting to learn from John Williams, BBC World news editor, that a team of 20 people including reporters, engineers and cameramen were providing coverage across the BBC news outlets. ITV News has 22 and Channel 4 News 14 while the figure from Sky is unknown. That is just from the UK and other news organisations from around the world are also on the ground in Haiti. 

Is there really a need for 56 people from different organisations to provide the UK with news about the earthquake and its aftermath?

You just wonder if in unprecedented circumstances like this if the news organisations should not have an agreement where they can pool resources, much as they do in conflict zones. I am sure there would still be opportunities for them to get their own ‘take’ on the story.  

What John Williams also revealed was that the supplies they need in terms of water and ration packs are brought in so not as burden the emergency aid. They had also been able to locate a hotel which was still standing after the earthquake to use as their base.

It cannot be denied, however, that their pictures have played a key part in driving public donations to the charity appeals.

Tweeting just three times in 24 hours @BillGates has amassed over 165,000 followers on his twitter account.  Twitter Counter is predicting that by tomorrow he will have reached the quarter million mark. 

The account was set up last June but was dormant until yesterday when the Microsoft supremo broke his silence with the words ‘Hello World’.  He also mentioned that he would be publishing a letter on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a few days. The missive from his philanthropic organisation will land on the 25th January.   We can only guess at the content but Gates has also tweeted his concerns about the situation in Haiti.

The Hollywood celeb Ashton Kutcher was the first to break the million follower mark on twitter.  He took three months and some active campaigning to hit that figure.   It looks like Bill Gates will reach a million within a week or so.   This puts paid to any notion that twitter can’t be a broadcast channel for certain individuals and organisations. 

Some quick twitter facts about Bill Gates first day of tweeting:

• He is using twitter.com rather than a twitter client
• No mobile posts as yet (not too suprsing from the founder of Microsoft)
• He has tweeted 5 times but two of these have been retweets (using the native function on twitter)
• He has already been ‘listed’ over 5000 times
• He has @posted twice - both to US celebs
• The first person he followed was New York Times columnist Nick Kristof

ITV may well have pulled off a major coup in appointing the towering figure of Archie Norman as the broadcaster’s new chairman. What’s more the £300,000 salary is 10% of what he was paid when he left ASDA.  This is undoubtedly one of the toughest jobs in TV.  Advertising revenues have been in free fall, audiences are down and the once coveted position on the terrestrial tuner is no longer that valuable.   Media experts like the Guardian’s Emily Bell have been foreshadowing the third channel’s demise for some time ”ITV looks like a basket case” she wrote earlier this year.

So why might Norman, an acknowledged powerhouse in retail and politics but with no media experience, change the game?   It is precisely because, unlike current chairman Michael Grade, he isn’t shackled by conventional ideas.  ITV has been quietly making progress of late and not because of the audience grabbing ratings winning X-Factor.   They are on the brink of doing a major deal with US video on demand venture Hulu which could see ITV holding a 25% equity stake in the UK operation of the Disney, NBC Universal, and News Corp joint venture.  Online TV delivery is the future for the medium and this could make ITV a major player.   Cutting deals with the Americans can be tough but let’s not forget that Norman is the man took ASDA to Walmart.

Some say that ITV’s only real value lies in the content, Coronation Street and X-Factor (and it doesn’t own the latter).   Archie Norman will restore some of the power balance from programme makers to the broadcaster.   He’s not a person likely roll over and have his tummy tickled by the likes of Simon Cowell.

After several years of doing my best to ignore it, about a month ago I was forced to watch an episode of X-Factor. When two adorable little girls ask if you will watch their favourite show with them, who can say no? An hour later, I was already looking forward to next Saturday.

Seems my conversion came at the right time, because never has the show attracted as many column inches, courted as much controversy or polarised viewers as much as it is right now.

So is this due to the higher quality of contestants? Being a newby to the show it is hard for me to say, but no one this year seems to be another Alexandra or Leona. No, this year it is not extraordinary talent that is pulling viewers in, but an extraordinary lack thereof in the form of John and Edward.

Now if we were to take a reality check on this, the only thing this pair should ever win is a Vanilla Ice look-a-like competition, but their gallant efforts and apparently unrelenting resilience to booing and criticism has captured the public’s hearts. Jedward are a draw, pure and simple, and it is perhaps because of the conspicuous lack of talent elsewhere in the X-Factor camp this year that these two provide a welcome distraction.

Simon Cowell, the proverbial Don Corleone of the X-Factor franchise, knows a thing or two about pulling in viewers and this year Jedward has provided him with a dream ticket. He needs to be a bit careful though – when it suited the papers for him to say so, he would proclaim they were terrible, awful, that they should have not come this far. But when he actually got his chance to vote them off….well he couldn’t do that could he, not with viewing figures up 1.8 million on this time last year and the value of advertising slots going through the roof.

Perhaps what Cowell didn’t expect, however, was that last week they would be in the bottom two against, arguably, the most talented singer on the show. If they were up against Lloyd, it would have been wrong to have kept them in, but at least justifiable. Against Lucie, however, it simply demonstrated that the show is no longer about talent.

In the short term, keeping them in was perhaps a shrewd move. The British public see and hear talented singers all day long on the radio, on the TV and on their Ipod. They don’t get to see a couple of lunatics making fools out of themselves every week. It isn’t all that hard to see their appeal.

But Cowell needs to remember what the show is meant to be about. It is meant to be, after all, a talent competition and as it begins to value novelty over talent, it will begin to lose its credibility. Once that happens, any show can begin to go downhill.

It may be hard to imagine that one day the X-Factor may be struggling for viewers, but remember how popular Big Brother was once upon a time?

If the show is to maintain its long-term future it needs to stick to its simple yet brilliant premise of turning an unknown into an international singing superstar, because talent does not go out of fashion nor is it a novelty. And while the papers are lapping this up at the moment, they could easily turn against the show if that suits their agenda.

For once, it was something on BBC Question Time that Britain’s three main political parties could agree on - they can’t stand Nick Griffin and the BNP.

Between them, some points were scored; but the true dissection of the country’s favourite political bogeyman came not from politicians, but from cultural commentator, Bonnie Greer.

Claiming to know nothing about politics, let’s call her, for a moment, the “product reviewer” of the BNP. And in that, she set about discrediting the most fundamental claims about the party’s “product”. Was she providing a critique of policy or the things Griffin has said in the past (many of which he now denies or claims he no longer believes)? No, she was concerned with the BNP’s apparent inability to get basic facts right about the origins of “the British”, which they seek to represent.

And with a predominantly calm demeanour, she was subtly raising the question: “If you can’t get your own story straight, how can you expect us to want you to govern?” And could be it be any more humiliating for Griffin to be invited to the British Library to sort out his knowledge?

And the basis of her “product review” came from - yes - that most ubiquitous of marketing tools, the party’s website. 

If Nick Griffin felt it was a PR coup speaking for his party on the BBC’s flagship political panel programme, he might think again. No PR can make up for a fundamentally flawed product.

Could the days of the traditional 30 second TV be limited?

As time-shift viewing increases with the penetration of digital hard disc video recorders (DVR), such as Sky+ and Virgin V+, it seems as if the commercials are being viewed less. According to the specialist research arm at TIVO, the US-based DVR manufacturer, the most popular TV programmes have the least watched commercials.

It seems as if viewers watching popular programme are so wrapped up in the programme they race through the ads to continue the watching the programme. By contrast, those watching the programme care less about the commercials as they are “Some commercials come on, you maybe a little distracted, they roll.”

This is a real issue for TV companies to overcome. I know that if I have used Sky + to record a programme that I can watch an hour’s programme in 45 minutes simply because I can skip the ads. With Sky having around 7 milllion households with Sky+ the potential to skip commercials that is a large proportion of the viewing public.

With the most popular programmes TV companies have of course been able to charge premium advertising rates but are they being noticed?

There just maybe some salvation with the recent announcement that product placement is to be allowed in programmes. Alternatively we could end up with a strategy like NBC in the US who, during the popular ‘30 Rock’ are blending advertisements in the show so it seems as if they are part of the programme.

The Internet will score a first when England takes to the pitch against Ukraine in the World Cup qualifier next weekend.  It will be the first time ever that a a football match of this import has been broadcast live to fans via the web rather than on a TV channel.

The situation has arisen because the broadcast rights had been picked up by failed sports channel Setanta.  Following the collapse of the broadcaster, fans will watch this weekend’s World Cup clash on their computers.  Media group Perform will  stream the footage on a pay-per-view basis at www.ukrainevengland.com at a cost of £4.99.

This is a critical moment for television as a medium.  What is demonstrates is that TV is no longer platform specific, or more simply you don’t need a TV to watch TV anymore.  In fact the hundreds of pubs up and down the country who usually pack the bar for this type of fixture must be considering wiring up the PC to the big screen, and if not next weekend then they surely will as this trend continues.   What is really significant is that this is a sporting ‘event’.  Live events were supposed to be the saviour of broadcast TV and the Saturday night schedule reflects this.  If live TV can find a home on the net then how long before content follows advertising spend and goes digital? 

Need media coverage - then hire your own reporter. That is what is happening in the US where newspapers are increasingly in the position where they can no longer to afford to send reporters to cover professional sports.

The New York Times this week highlighted the growing trend in baseball and hockey for teams to hire journalists who have previously covered their teams.

Newspapers have increasingly been using copy from news agencies, which tends to focus only on the winning team. It doesn’t necessarily tell the full story of the game and misses details that a newspaper’s dedicated reporter can bring to the story - particularly if his team has lost.  However, it is not just the match day coverage that has disappeared but the profile provided by non-match day stories and interviews.

To combat this, the hockey team the Los Angeles Kings have hired journalist Rich Hammond, who used to cover the team for the Los Angeles Daily News. He will travel to all the games and provide copy for the team’s local newspapers.

It immediately throws up issues of impartiality and potential conflict with the Kings’ PR team. Hammond has been quick to dispel concerns on his blog. He says that that his output will not need approval or interviews supervision and that his role is not PR.

He will be working as an independent reporter but can he? It is hard to believe that that the PR team will be totally comfortable with this as, in theory, he can write stories about the conflict within the club or how the manager may be about to lose his job. Compromise will happen somewhere along the line.

Could something like this happen with professional sport in the UK? Unlikely at national newspaper level but with the cuts being made in the regional media and the number of journalists that have been made redundant it is not beyond the realms of possibility. A media owner could jump at the idea to have a flow of stories about a football club without the cost of employing the journalist. But the nagging question would be how much input has the PR team really had?

As Steve Hewlett so succinctly put it in Media Guardian, “A major British media company with no effective strategy, no chief executive, an underpowered board and restless shareholders prone to interfering, facing the worst advertising recession in living memory, a digital revolution and the likelihood of a change of government. Splendid.”

As ITV reels, Ofcom is putting the finishing touches to its latest recommendations on relaxing the rules on commercial broadcast news in the regions, just a few months after recommending that the walls between regional print and broadcast ownership be torn down. 

In what used to be fondly referred to as Granadaland, you could be forgiven for feeling vaguely sorry for would-be media barons, what with all these exciting new opportunities and barely a sniff of profit anywhere to be found.

 Representing the old guard media owner, Trinity Mirror has pulled production of weeklies back to its Liverpool HQ, closed titles, moved printing to Oldham and laid off journalists and production staff.  It has set up its own TV studio, sees the logic of a shared newsroom with a radio station and says it would consider making a bid if Ofcom chooses the North West for its pilot plans for a de-regulated regional news service.

In the corner of the bright new owners, Ten Alps has been described as “one of the UK’s most exciting media companies” by Wayne Garvie, director of content & production at BBC Worldwide.  Based in Macclesfield, it has already said that it will bid for a Granadaland licence.

But where will the content come from?  Who has enough journalists left to provide a regional news service worthy of the name? 

Perhaps, whisper it soft, the time has finally come to stop treating PR professionals, and particularly those working in the public sector, as the enemy. 

There are enough of us ex-print and broadcast journos working on this side of the fence, hopefully with some news integrity still intact, for there to be a serious reappraisal of what regional broadcast journalism could do. 

Why shouldn’t people rely on independent local broadcast news, backed up by websites and a print title, for all that useful information that used to come in their local paper?  Is it really impossible to devise a format that will allow some funding for local broadcasting to come from local authority budgets for communications and consultation?   

Much as all PRs love the buzz of getting their story onto the local TV news, can we still afford the whole seduction process for public sector content?  Why can’t community broadcasting raise its game and its standards?

Time for some people who love broadcasting to show the accountants what can be done…