pr-media-blog.co.uk

No doubt there are many out there who would scoff at the fact that today’s politicians, in the run up to the general election, are making a beeline for women’s mags and daytime TV.

Ok, so being questioned by Kate Garraway might not be quite the same as being grilled by Paxman but, argues Mike Girling, Nick Clegg’s press officer: “Those interviews can be quite tough in their own way.” And Martin Frizell, former editor of GMTV, agrees that being asked left-field questions about X Factor or what they’re doing for their wives on Valentine’s Day can be “shit scary”.

It’s strange to think that a “comfort zone” could include the likes of Paxman or Frost, but for steely politicians, an interview about emotions, mainstream culture and even favourite biscuits, as recently demonstrated by Gordon Brown, can be way more harrowing than being quizzed on the state of Iraq.

Women’s glossy magazine, Red, is currently gearing up for an election special for its May edition featuring interviews with Brown, Cameron and Clegg. According to research carried out by the magazine, nine out of 10 of Red’s 225,000 readers will vote in the general election yet 48% say they haven’t decided who they’ll be supporting.

And it’s not just the party leaders who are being advised to focus on women’s media. Sarah Brown guest edited Fabulous, the News of the World’s female-focused supplement, last year but reviews were mixed.

MediaGuardian deputy editor Vicky Frost, commented that there was too much of Wellbeing for Women, of which Brown is patron, and too little of Brown’s life:

“I’m not saying she needed to star in the fashion shoot - although that really would have been fabulous - but what about a one-pager about life with her own kids, or healthy dinners she cooks,” Frost said.

Perhaps Brown and Cameron should sit tight in their comfort zones and let their wives spill some election winning gossip. With neither Sarah Brown or Samantha Cameron having ever given an interview, they could well clinch it for their steely loved ones…

The Manchester Evening News and its associated titles have been acquired by Trinity Mirror for £45 million in a deal announced today.  It spells the end of the long association between the Guardian (once The Manchester Guardian) and the MEN.

Sly Bailey, Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror , commented: “GMG Regional Media is a perfect strategic fit for our Group. This acquisition, which includes the Manchester Evening News with its proud and rich journalistic heritage, together with the weekly titles and associated websites extends our reach across print and online and is a further step towards our strategic goal of creating a multi-media business of real scale.”   The deal doesn’t include the TV station Channel M. 

If you drill down into the detail of the deal, £37.4 million is to realease the papers from a long term printing contract - but it is still a lot of money to pay for a regional title when the sector is under so much pressure.   The deal may be good news for the title because it moves from a group that does not really believe in the future of regional print to one that is committed to it.   For that reason it probably ensures a longer future for the MEN but whether Trinity can stem the flow of advertising and readers away from regional newspapers in the long term is quite a different question.
 
 

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.

Football fans were devastated by rumours appearing on Twitter last weekend that football star John Barnes had died of a heart attack. Thankfully, the former midfielder is alive and well; no doubt blissfully unaware of the thousands of die-hard football fans lamenting the sad loss of a legend.   

As the news first reached me on the way home from a party on Saturday night, Twitter users were already tweeting “John Barnes died tonight, just a rumour at the mo” and “you heard about John Barnes rumour? Heart attack? Someone at Arrow Park leaked”, even a local journalist at the Liverpool Echo was tweeting for clarification.  

Naturally, those first to hear the whispers spent Sunday morning checking online and broadcast media for official news. As Twitter emerged as the sole online source of the rumour, Liverpool Supporters’ Twitter feed Empire of the Kop quite rightly tweeted to its 57,000 followers: “The John Barnes rumour first appeared 4 hours ago, if it was true it would be all over the media by now.”

The tweet: “John Barnes is fine. Heard from someone who has spoken 2 him this morning. Whoever started the rumour should b ashamed” put the final nail in the coffin for the rumours. Empire of the Kop confirmed on Twitter: “John Barnes dead rumour started by a Leeds fan” and identified his user name for all football fans who had been duped to vent their anger directly.

Although Twitter can be a fantastic source of breaking news, the micro-blogging site can be used by anyone and is not always accurate. To say someone is dead may not be defamatory but if inaccurate reports such as these were published in a newspaper, there would be a clear breach of the PCC Code of Conduct. 

Twitter is not devoid of defamation and privacy laws but if the ‘tw-eath’ of John Barnes proves one thing, it’s the frightening speed at which inaccurate rumours can spread online, whether they’re about people, businesses or organisations.

Another reason why brands need to be more aware than ever of what is being said about them online. Mis-information needs to be identified and corrected at the earliest opportunity, before people begin to treat what they read as fact, by which time, the damage to company reputation is already done.

Long live John Barnes!   

An interesting piece of research by broadband provider Talk Talk has revealed that due to high speed internet access, we’ve become a highly impatient nation with 70% of us “losing it” if we have to wait any longer than one minute for a page to load.

And this somewhat inflated level of impatience is also apparent in the offline world where in a restaurant, we’ll demand our meal after just eight minutes and 38 seconds, we’ll wait only 10 minutes and 43 seconds for a tradesman to show up and we’ll allow 10 minutes and 1 second for a friend before we burst with annoyance.

It’s clear that patience, once a Great British trait, is slowly wearing away as we embrace an era of high speed internet activity and that’s not just down to the advent of broadband. Twitter, for example, offers a unique feed of real-time conversation and sentiment with news being delivered faster than any other medium, providing us with an immediate global sense of events.

And gone are the days when journalists conducted a quick vox pop to gauge opinion, now they simply use the Twitter crowd as a source of immediate information and push out headlines and blogposts to Twitter via RSS and TwitterFeed.com.

A recent fault with Virgin Media which left many customers without TV and broadband, displayed not only consumer impatience (understandably) but infuriation at the fact that Virgin had not considered using Twitter to inform their customers of the problem, regardless of the fact that a number of people were tweeting about Virgin’s service issues which suggested a major outrage was brewing.

Clearly a massive oversight from Virgin and one which other service providers should take note of. Twitter is a critical vehicle for communicating information, instantly, and could quite easily have dampened the fire that was raging amongst its tweeting customers.

It’s clear we want speed. We thrive on being the first to know and unsurprisingly, it’s the 18-24 year olds who are least prepared to wait, which questions just how impatient future generations will be.

Public transport operators, call centre workers…. you have been warned.

A quiet revolution started this week in the small Yorkshire town of Whitby.

The Whitby Gazette became one of three newspapers from the Johnson Press stable to start charging for content. Readers of the Gazette as well as Northumberland Gazette and Southern Reporter now have to pay £5 for a three-month subscription - or 40p a week.

While it has been Rupert Murdoch and his News International titles that have caught the headlines about when they will charge for access, it is regional newspaper publisher Johnson that has taken the first bold step.

What is interesting is that this move covers local rather than the national and international content that Murdoch’s titles provides.

Johnson’s chief executive John Fry said that he felt that local newspapers offered a “unique” service for which readers may be prepared to pay.

According to HoldtheFrontpage it has seen an internal memo circulated by senior managers in one Johnson division that says “Customers are used to paying for content in-paper and we are simply transferring this thinking online.”

Is this all a bit of reverse psychology with the ultimate aim to drive people back to buying newspapers? Michael Woolf writing in Vanity Fair last month hinted that Murdoch’s aim in charging for content is to drive people back to buying newspapers. Certainly an interesting thought from a newspaperman through and through.

The issue of charging form content also surfaced at the recent Society of Editors’ conference where the editor of the Newquest title the Worcester News, Kevin Ward felt that local newspapers had: “more opportunity to charge for the web” than their national counterparts. He added:  ”What we produce is niche. Nobody else sits in our courts every day. Nobody else scrutinises our public bodies.

One thing that is for sure is that newspaper groups will be watching the latest move from Johnson Press with interest.

Update: Tiger breaks his silence - is he right in what he says? 

Until now, Tiger Woods, the world’s number one golfer, highest paid sportsman and global icon, has built himself a wholesome, clean-living reputation.

His brand, the success of which is the result of his apparent honesty and integrity, has earned him a massive income from sponsorship deals with the likes of Nike, Gatorade and Gillette.

But unlike the bad boys of sport, whose antics are a regular fixture in the pages of the Sunday tabloids, the actions of a clean cut sporting hero seemingly brought low have far more mileage for the media.

With the recent car-to-hydrant incident, the world is becoming incredibly suspicious and wants answers. Perhaps a little unfair, and some may think his private life should be respected, but there’s a price to pay for being the world’s biggest sportsman.

What’s more, the entire situation has become almost embarrassing with not a trace of crisis management about it.

He appears, to his detriment, to be saying nothing, no explanation whatsoever, despite the rumours of an affair with a New York showclub hostess and his Swedish model wife who allegedly rescued him from his Cadillac SUV by smashing a window with a golf club.

Not only that but the opportunity to clear the air once and for all was laid on a plate at his very own golf tournament in California this week which he declined to attend, with no real explanation.

Tiger needs to be very wary, the Gillette curse is taking its hold. First Thierry Henry handballs in a World Cup play-off, Roger Federer crashes out of the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals and Tiger’s 2am dalliance with a fire hydrant remains a mystery.

US celebrity PR crisis expert, Gene Grabowski, recommends that those who find themselves in the eye of a media storm should take a leaf out of talk show host, David Letterman’s book and come clean early in a supposed scandal and take control of the information flow.

As the American’s would say; “Tiger, take a Mulligan.”

If Jesus turned water into wine, is it too much to ask for newspapers to turn soda (US: fizzy, sugared drinks) into the same stuff?

The analogy is the work of Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, and recent guest on a Harvard Business Ideacast. In this, he talks about how the future of the news media hangs on turning what he depicts as their homogeneous product (the “soda”) into something of greater quality (the “wine”). It also, he says, depends on news producers focusing more on people and what matters to them than the product itself.

Maybe this is a uniquely US perspective, as the various news sources that make up UK media - in one way or another - have worked to recognise their audience and generate the material it wants, whether that’s endless X-Factor coverage or sprawling, in-depth features on climate change. 

Sure, there have been price wars between newspapers, but that doesn’t stop the Sun, Mail, Guardian and Telegraph knowing what brings back their readers. In the case of the Telegraph, for one, I understand that page views online - an unequivocal measure of reader interest - are now used to influence the content of the printed edition.

The reinvention of news for the web is covered at length by Julio Romo, in his latest post following a recent CIPR Greater London Group meeting which heard from Nic Newman, the BBC’s Future Media and Technology Controller for Journalism and Digital Distribution and Laura Oliver, Editor for Journalism.co.uk.

As Newman is quoted as saying, journalism is undergoing a “quiet revolution” with the advent of social media and user generated content; this, in turn, has meant focusing less on breaking the news than on “verifying and curating” it.

Maybe this is the “wine” referred to by Haque.

Bottoms up!

pic: Jeffrey Barnard, former columnist at The Spectator and actor, Peter O’Toole, pose in The Coach and Horses pub, Soho.

There is an interesting line tucked away in an interview with John Fry, the chief executive of Johnston Press, which may offer some hope to the future of local newspapers. And boy does the sector need it after the ravaging it has had in the last 18 months.

On The Times’ media page on 6 November, which for some reason is not online, Fry highlights the ‘modest’ circulation rise seen for the Peterborough Evening Telegraph.

The reason for this happening is put very simply: “We’ve invested in pagination because cost cutting went too far. We have made the paper more newsy - with a focus on local content.” The fact that the newspaper costs only 37p is highlighted and that the cover price only contributes a fifth of revenue from sales.  

Fry sees the strategy of having more news as one which can drive circulation so more newspapers can be sold to ultimately reduce Johnston’s dependence on volatile advertising.

Fry does try to caveat the sales increase by saying that Peterborough is “the sweet spot of local publishing” where competition is modest and sales resilient.

I wonder if Johnston have had a ‘eureka’ moment and has finally realised that the reason people buy their local newspaper is for local news.

Johnston’s newspaper titles are on the whole in towns like Peterborough and so we could see increased local news pages in their other titles.

It can’t be forgotten that is a tough market and there are now a number of other avenues for readers to get their news. However the Peterborough template could show that there may be hope that local newspapers do have a future. 

Associated Newspapers has announced that the London Lite – part of its free division which also includes Metro – has entered a period of review which could place 36 jobs at risk. 

The announcement follows the closure of rival evening free-sheet TheLondonPaper. The possible closure places the whole concept of the free newspapers in the balance as Steve Auckland, Managing Director of Associated Newspapers admitted concerns of ‘commercial viability’ – the same reason TheLondonPaper closed its doors. 

The London Lite, however, does not seem to have suffered any decline in popularity. It distributes 400,000 copies a day and appears to be widely liked – the mix of short, light news, gossip and sports, along with popular sections such as ‘Get if off our text’ have proved popular with commuters who want to switch off from a hard news agenda and unwind on the journey home from work. The short and snappy approach lends itself very well to those with a short journey as you can read most if it in about 20 minutes. 

This is quite different from the Evening Standard where one may struggle to read more than a couple of articles in 20 minutes. It is simply a different concept and although great if you have an hour to spare, it is hard to get through it in a short period of time. It is also far more opinionated, the stories are far more drawn-out and analytical and there is a stronger focus on hard news such as politics and finance. While I’m not criticising the paper itself, it simply appeals to a very different demographic than the London Lite. 

While those at the Evening Standard may indeed be rubbing their hands together at the thought of a monopoly on London evening newspapers, it is worth pointing out that if two evening free-sheets have already proved to not be financially viable, how will the Evening Standard fair?  

Perhaps more interestingly from a consumer perspective, how will it move forward? Will it adapt itself in order to satisfy those of a more ‘London Lite’ persuasion and risk alienating its main readership or, due to its monopoly, will it bank on Lite readers switching to its harder news agenda because there is really no alternative? 

I believe red-top newspapers such as The Sun or The Mirror could stand to benefit from this. The Sun in particular has recently dropped its price to a paltry 20p and those in search of a softer news agenda may be happy to actually pay for a newspaper again. That said, these are obviously morning papers which go to press earlier, so they are not as up-to-date in the evenings.  

The possible closure of the London Lite, as you can probably see, appears to pose more questions than answers. One thing is sure though: with TheLondonPaper gone and The London Lite looking like it will go the same way, opportunities for PR people with London-based stores are certainly going to become more limited.