The question (darling of media courses world wide) came up because it occurred to me that the reason I’m not an instinctive blogger is because it still says journalist on my passport. 

What journalists are supposed to do (foundation PR course 1.01 coming up) is news.  They ask questions, take notes, ask more questions, establish the facts, gather representative opinions and present it back in their audience’s favoured style. 

Most reporters firmly believe that journalists are born not made.  Which is why they are generally badly-paid, are prepared to sit through council meetings and corporate PR events and will always swing the car round to follow the third siren.  After five years away from a newsdesk I was still excited that the tip off I called into my local paper turned into a front page story. 

Journalism is the fourth estate (look it up), a cornerstone of democracy, blah blah.  But at the heart of all the self-importance is the absolute belief that news matters and opinion is a totally different beast. 

Opinion has always been cheap; columnists increased in inverse proportion to the profitability of newspapers.  Nothing wrong with cheap (preferably with one of its usual companions: cheerful, chic, and best of all, dirty), but let’s not pretend that it has the value of a real story.

What blogging does brilliantly, of course, is gossip and the uncorroborated.  In the early days of t’internet, a news editor at the FT told me that from his perspective virtually everything online was unchecked and uncheckable - and a serious journalist should be very scared of it.

I think the point is that while some journalists may blog, very, very few blogs are journalism.   Whether or not they are PR is another story…

Here it is, a sneak preview of the new look FT.com.

Judging by the new format, there shouldn’t be any problems with accessibility compliance.

It makes me realise how much the FT online has been making me squint all these years.

The battleground between the big mainstream media providers, or newspaper groups as they used to be called, is well and truly online. The Guardian and then the Telegraph were the pioneers and it was between the two of them for a while. It all changed when Rupert Murdoch belatedly joined the fray, after previously ignoring the growth of the internet by sticking his fingers in his ears and saying ‘lah lah lah - I can’t hear you!’ whenever it was raised by staff.

The laggard was always the Independent, whose previous editor, Simon Kellner, never saw the point of providing a free product that would give regular readers an excuse not to pay for the newspaper. However that’s changed and Kellner poached Jimmy Leach from his PR company, Freud. Leach was a key player in the original Guardian online revolution, so it will be interesting to watch developments at the Inde.

One of his first acts has been to use a ‘pull’ strategy to serve audiences. Media consumption happens in different contexts now and its much more immediate. The Telegraph has responded with enhanced web content, video, podcasts, they even trialled an an electronic newspaper with a round-up of the day’s news. Almost like a newspaper looking to deliver itself through many different letter boxes.

They also have a very sophisticated Google strategy, flooding the market with search friendly news so that people will find them almost not mattering what they search for. So its never United, it’s always ‘Manchester’ United as that’s what people search for. References to Paris Hilton are squeezed in to economic stories, everything they can do to tempt Google.

The Inde is taking a different approach. The younger, metropolitan audience takes a more pick n’ mix approach to taking in media and does it throughout the day, so the strategy is to get into as many feeds as possible.

The feeds pick up relevant content, when its generated by the Inde’s news operation and distributes it automatically to the correct feed. Anything related to the US election will go onto their Twitter/US election feed and may also find its way onto their Twitter/news feed. As the audience grows it will be interesting to see if they experiment with a bit more personality to build more of a community and an ownership of the brand amongst users in the way that brands such as Starbucks and Dell are doing and Channel 4, which has a similar audience profile to the Inde, have started to do.

Batten down the hatches, most pundits are agreed, recession is here.  Forget the US rule of thumb that we have to register two successive quarters of negative GDP - we’ve already had one quarter of zero growth and all indicators suggest that contraction is underway.  That means that marketing budgets will be slashed and PR will be amongst the first to feel the chill. 

Well it’s not that simple.   Public Relations is not recession proof but it’s not usually the hardest hit either.  Companies that hold their marketing budgets in a downturn are the ones that fare best.  Harvard Business School professor John Quelch said in March this year that it is a well documented fact that brands that increase their spend in a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and the return on their investment.  There will be pressure on budgets but the smart money will still be there.

PR companies are going to play a key role in advising clients on how to navigate very difficult and for some uncharted waters.  There will be complex messages to deliver.   More than ever when times are taxing the media needs substance not fluff. 

I’ve always believed that PR thrives on the ideas and enthusiasm of its young.  It is a vital industry and the particular zeal of its youthful practitioners is a crucial part of every agency.  When the economy is in ‘bust’ business must turn to experience.  The UK largely escaped the 2001 global recession so the last time we were in a situation approaching the current one was nearly twenty years ago.   PR in the current climate won’t be seeing grown men and women running around city centres dressed as creme eggs.   Chief executives will need the knowledge and experience from PR people that were around the last time.  They will need strategic counsel and there will be growth in corporate PR and in crisis and issues management. 

When he was a young knife Matthew Freud, probably the world’s most well connected PR person said “there’s nothing sadder than a 40-year-old PR person”.  Matthew is chairman of Freud Communications. He’s 45.

A fellow blogger from PR Media Blog has, in the past, suggested I am unrepentant in using sex to sell this site.

Not wishing to disappoint, today’s Sex Uncovered supplement in The Observer is the perfect excuse to blend media talk and sex. But forgive me if I fall asleep somewhere in the middle. The British media (and overseas, but more of that later) are no strangers to sex surveys, and these often make for light reading over a cup of tea. But sex supplements???

Are they a way of winning the Sunday circulation war by getting Times and Telegraph readers to shelve their usual politics for a spot of salacious reading and persuading News of the World followers to feel they’re getting some sophisticated sex talk for a change?

After an exhaustive “history of British sex” introduction from chief leader writer, Rafael Behr - recyling the usual suspects of Philip Larkin and 1963; the Lady Chatterley case; the issue of sex = commerce and scaring us to death with the “tyranny of the ultra-sexual market” - the Observer supplement tries to prove its sheer stamina with several interminable features and pages of results from an ICM poll.

What these results tell us is a combination of the bleeding obvious (people aged 65+ are least promiscuous) and the completely inexplicable (people living in Wales and the South West have most sexual partners). The poll’s results are then trashed by some of the feature writers, in one case deriding the finding that men tend to have a higher sex drive by suggesting that everyone who took the poll is probably lying. So much for what our survey says.

Wondering whether sex surveys are a peculiarly British media phenomenon, a quickie search proved otherwise. But at least what’s out there in the overseas media is either funny or amusingly nationalistic. A survey of Italian men from the country’s edition of Cosmopolitan found the majority were turned off in bed by “vulgar language”, while another magazine flew the flag with a cover story about impotence problems under the title, ”Males of Italy - better than the Americans.”

The Germans are happy to make similar claims, care of a survey from “prophylactic giant, Durex”, which claims the Germans have “extended their Teutonic efficiency to the bedroom.” Not to be outdone, the International Herald Tribune brings in mathematicians to deal with the inexact science of sex surveys, debunking the “men have higher sex drive myth” with the ultimate passion killer - logic. But all very, very funny.

As an Observer reader it pains me to be hard on their supplement and one part of the poll did raise a smile: Is it typically British for 40% of people to rate their sexual performance as just “average”? How would that translate to a pre-coital conversation in the bedroom (or, in the workplace,  as 17% claim)? Might it go something like “Listen, don’t expect fireworks or any of that Latin lover nonsense, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The way we get our news is changing.  Just over a week ago I learnt that french actor (and son of Gerard) Guillaume Depardieu had died.  He was not well known outside France so it’s perhaps not surprising that I didn’t hear about it in the British press.  I didn’t come across it through the media in France either.  I saw it on Twitter.  A colleague Lucille Reynard in the Paris office of our sister company TBWA\ posted “Guillaume Depardieu est mort :/ suis triste” at 5.50pm on October 13th.

I checked on Google News there was nothing there.  I looked up his Wikipedia entry and it confirmed he had died that day.  The news reports started to appear about half an hour later. 

I already use Twitter as a kind of news feed; following the BBC, sections of The Guardian and the New York Times as well as a selection of media industry feeds. What was different about this was that Lucille (or @lovny as she is on Twitter) was aware of the news because Guillaume was a friend of a friend. 

Because Twitter limits its posts to 140 characters it is quick and immediate.   The responses on Twitter to event’s like earthquakes are well documented.  The value of Twitter in these situations is that it is instant and unfiltered.  When a moderate earthquake struck near Los Angeles in the summer official news began to emerge after just four minutes. That sounds pretty quick until you examine what happened on Twitter.  The first update said simply “Earthquake” and it was posted seconds after the Earthquake began.  After four minutes the word earthquake was trending on Twitter Search with several thousand updates.  

When NASA’S Phoenix Mars Lander found water on Mars there were Twitter discussions as to whether the story was true several hours before any major news organisation announced the story.  This speculation was fuelled by a Twitter feed called MarsPhoenix, clearly written by a NASA project insider as if it were the voice of the lander itself.  It twittered the news hours before NASA issued a press announcement.

As more people join Twitter we will hear more and more information direct from the source.  We already have citizen journalists perhaps this is the start of the citizen news-wire.

The first thing I hear when I wake up is the dulcet tones of BBC Breakfast as my missus switches on en route to the shower. So my alarm call is normally the state of the roads, the weather outlook, ‘My teenager survived on a diet of cheese on toast’. But no longer.

I can guarantee that whatever the time, the topic being discussed will be the credit crunch. When I get into work I scan all the mornings papers, all dominated by the chaos in the markets. Most news bulletins devote the first half to economic and political analysis of the ‘global meltdown’.

So, its a great time to be Robert Peston. He’s working sixteen hour days as he dials in from home on his ISDN line to comment on the Today Programme and BBC Breakfast and keeps at it through to Newsnight in the evening, maybe knocking off around 11pm. But its interesting to note how the shifting agenda is benefitting other media players;

 THE WINNERS

• BBC Business Unit - for years it was the Cinderella for a BBC news operation that was dominated by politics and was sniffy about money and the vulgar people that were interested in it. Greg Dyke started the shift towards a recognition that millions of licence payers had PEPs, ISAs and private pensions and that the economy was heavily reliant on financial services. Now it is increasingly called upon to translate this complicated financial stuff to the big beasts of the Today programme, World At One and Newsnight.
• The Pundits - There’s a small coterie of commentators who can be called upon for expert input or to fill a panel at short notice. Popping up frequently include Will Hutton, former journalist and now a think tank head; Gillian Tett, FT journalist, intelligent and very telegenic, watch out for her book; Diana Choyleva, Director of Lombard Street Research and can be relied upon to ruffle feathers amongst know-it-all economists.
• Whoever owns the copyright to that haunting, trumpety music at the start of every Newsnight report!
•  The FT’s Alphaville blog - has boosted its audience massively as people seek up-to-the minute insight into what the hell’s going on. Good mix of intelligence, speed, interactivity and a humourous tone. Traffic has boomed from in recent weeks as some users log on at 6am and are still on late in the evening. They can’t all work for the Treasury…

 THE LOSERS

• Possibly Peston - He’s becoming a hate figure on right wing blogs, who attribute all his exclusives to a cosy relationship with the Brown team and the Treasury. Peter Preston asks whether he could become the blog version of Andrew Gilligan.
• Stephanie Flanders - currently away on maternity leave at a time when she would be regularly leading the main news bulletins. Hugh Pym steals the show instead.

Oh Lord, BBC Business Editor, Robert Peston, is winding up the blogosphere.

OK, he’s become ubiquitous in recent weeks, but is it any surprise? If the most complicated piece of financial data you ever have to tackle is your bank statement, it needs someone good to explain what the hell is going on in the UK and world economy.

Now and then, a journalist comes along who polarises opinion. In the past, Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys have been equally lauded and lamented for their attacking styles.

I’m far from qualified to analyse whether Peston’s work has any part to play in fuelling the market’s current woes. But it’s good to see a business journalist with a slightly ungainly manner getting people engaged with the biggest financial mess in years. It affects us all and we need someone with the brains to translate it for us.

Despite the abuse hurled at the trade of journalism for some of its less appealing practices, there are times to be thoroughly proud of it.

The drug, Thalidomide, put onto the market in the late 1950s to help pregnant women tackle morning sickness and insomnia, caused appalling birth defects in thousands of children.  The drug company had failed to carry out adequate testing before releasing it and then offered paltry compensation to the Thalidomide children who survived.

The Sunday Times, under the editorship of Harold Evans (see pic) and the paper’s investigative Insight team,  took on the company in the early 70s and helped to secure a new compensation agreement, while losing advertising revenue and paying legal bills. As an article in this week’s Sunday Times supplement claims, the thalidomiders have an “almost holy reverence” for the newspaper team which fought their cause.

The 50-year anniversary of Thalidomide’s release in the UK is marked by an exhibition of portraits in London in October. And the work of Evans and The Sunday Times remains one of journalism’s finest hours.

‘Stand by for Black Monday’ screamed the front page of tonight’s London Evening Standard.  Then it hit me.  My mental image of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 is a newspaper front page.   

The market has been in need of a correction, of that there is no doubt.  Long term demand for oil is also a significant underlying factor.  But, the maelstrom in which we are enveloped is a massive over correction and one fuelled by fear and drained confidence.  We need to think about how the plug was pulled.   The ‘Credit Crunch’ is a newspaper headline; squeezing a profusion of complex economic causes and effects into a two word bawling banner.  

More than likely by the time you read this we will know if the markets have ignored the doom prophets or if we are in free-fall once again and the US Senate sees that the Paulson plan is the best worst option.  And what of this plan?  The media have called it a ‘$700 billion bail out’, more headlines, but it is really an attempt to put confidence back into the markets and underwrite the ‘toxic debt’, oh there goes another one.  This isn’t putting taxpayers cash into bank bonuses it is a plan for putting the confidence back into the system from someone that understands the financial markets as well as anyone can.   If it works it won’t cost the US taxpayer a dime, some commentators have even suggested the treasury could profit from the swap. 

If we have hit the bottom, and let’s hope we have,  it is time we put aside the big font fear forecasts in favour of cautious and considered copy.