pr-media-blog.co.uk

A few months ago I wrote about discovering via twitter that the French actor Guillaume Depardieu had died.  Six months ago it seemed an oddity that ordinary individuals would break news ahead of the major media sources.  It appears now that this is an established phenomenon.  The sad news of Natasha Richardson’s fatal skiing accident was spread via twitter, blogs and social networks long before the strictures of the established media allowed them to confirm the details.

At around 4pm UTC today (19th May) twitter started trending with the news that actor Patrick Swayze had died of pancreatic cancer.  But within half an hour or so the story had flipped to a denial.  The actor it appears is alive if unwell and continuing his battle against cancer.

Whilst trending topics on the web add a new dimension to breaking news inaccurate rumours can take hold.  The established media brands adhere to a largely common set of journalistic conventions that moderate the motivation to break news fast with the imperative of accuracy.  That’s why they are trusted.    

There is something very fishy about about the news that Sainsbury’s is to rebrand the pollack as ‘colin’ (that’s with a heavily accented French pronunciation by the way).  Apparently their shoppers are fighting shy of asking for a “pair of fresh pollacks” at the fish counter.  

The story has made quite a splash today but much of it doesn’t hold water.  Firstly the French for pollack is lieu jaune and ‘colin’ is a hake.  Secondly we are very close to April Fool’s day (that’s Poisson D’Avril in French).  Is this an April Fool idea that Sainsbury’s thought would grow legs and get more coverage?  If so they weren’t wrong.    

There is also new ‘Colin’ packaging designed by Wayne Hemingway and based on the work of Jackson Pollock (please note not ‘Jackson Colin’).  Furthermore this initiative is also only being taken in 10 stores - so what of the blushes of the myriad of bashful fish fanciers in the other 750+ Sainsbury’s outlets?   Is this an old fashioned bit of PR puffery?  Will we see that after a trial period the ten stores get their pollacks back? 

Has the media fallen for this hook, line and sinker? (OK that’s enough puns….Ed.)

I’ve been stupidly busy the last few days so my only real info on the G20 summit has been from the radio and occasional glances at news websites and Twitter feeds, until a rather sleepy view of the BBC 10 o’clock news last night. So I took time this morning for breakfast and a proper read of the paper.  (Guardian, but the other broadsheets gave a similar spread of coverage and comment.)  It was a joy. 

The reporting was clear, the breakdown of the communiqué a good mix of fact and analysis, the comment pieces pertinent (these with a clear Guardian standpoint of course, but with Simon Jenkins to leaven the mix). There was a nod to the fashionistas with the provenance of Michelle Obama’s outfits, and a suitably laconic piece on the politics of the official picture. I enjoyed it so much I’m going to find time to read it all again in one of the other broadsheets tonight. So what does this say for the future of newspapers? 

Well, it confirms that in my house at least (which is a very average establishment, I like to thing) Monday to Friday papers have the same status as the weekend ones - best enjoyed at leisure with a cup of tea.  The actual reading of them is the point.  I found time because I wanted to see a real spread of coverage of a story which I had skimmed but needed a longer shot. 

A full fat latte version, if you will, rather than the expresso. There is a crucial difference, though, between that and traditional feature fare - this was current, grounded in real news, hard working and focused. I really felt the passion of the journalists who had been involved.  

Can they replicate this on a daily basis?  Perhaps not, but it will keep me paying the newsagents bill for a bit longer. Will it be enough to sustain their future?  I’d like to think it will.  I think people are rediscovering the joy of a good read, and I think they are likely to be prepared to pay a premium for it. And where does PR fit in all this?  Well someone has been writing all those media information packs…

Exciting news from the Guardian where they’ve announced they will make their content available on an Open Platform. Great, but what does this mean??!

Essentially the Guardian are saying they see the future for news brands as content providers, making themselves useful to readers on the web by allowing other content providers eg online niche news sites, bloggers, forums to repackage Guardian content by making their code widely available.

But wouldn’t the Guardian lose out by losing control? I don’t think so. The best place to come for Guardian content in one place will be the Guardian’s site and its articles will still rank very highly in search - much more than most other sites. But where users have a close relationship with a particular blog or forum then it makes sense for Guardian content to appear there, with the potential for online publishers to innovate with that content to produce something even more tailored. 

The Guardian are ensuring they have a place in audience’s networks in a way that keeps pace with their viewing preferences. 

UPDATE - Jeremiah has a great post on what innovation may result from the Guardian extending control beyond the walls of their site.

All details are here and a summary of what is planned is below: 

The Open Platform is the suite of services that make it possible for our partners to build applications with the Guardian. We’ve opened up our platform so that everyone can benefit from our journalism, our brand, and the technologies that power guardian.co.uk.

The Open Platform currently includes two products, the Content API and the Data Store:

1. The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content. You can query our content database for articles and get them back in formats that are geared toward integration with other internet applications.

The Content API is a free service. We have some limits and restrictions detailed in our terms and conditions, but we hope that you will use our service for whatever needs you have, including commercial applications.

2. The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Data Store has a range of different uses for different types of partners. We will include relevant terms and conditions along with each service.

Our aim is to make the Guardian Open Platform a useful environment for anyone who creates for the internet. We will offer more services in the future such as an ad network and an application platform.

This initial release is a beta trial that will help us identify the ways our partners want to work with us. Access will be granted on a limited basis.

If you want to use the Content API, read the Getting started guide and apply for a key.

It seems that someone in the online team at the Express has become just a trifle disillusioned with their quality of journalism.  If you look closely at the URL one the digital types has left little doubt as to how they viewed the story about the dangers of drinking copius quantities of coffee.  “Too much coffee can make you hallucinate and sense dead people say sleep experts….” apparently. 

Whilst the digi-wonks at the Express have changed the URL the original page still exists if you want to see for yourself.  

It reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story that I heard many years ago in the days of hot metal printing presses about a disgruntled typesetter at the Knutsford Guardian. 

After reading Julie’s recent post on new men’s magazine Buck, I felt compelled to pick up a copy. Emblazoned with the title in a font reminiscent of a million UCLA hoodies and t-shirts seen around the UK recently, it is accompanied by a primary colour palate and a student lookey-likey on the front cover.

These facts conspired to convince me that I was actually looking at the latest copy of my old university’s monthly mag.  Inside, contrastingly, we are bombarded with adverts for high-end, aspirational brands. The back page for example carries an advert for Bombay Sapphire; the drink of choice for much of Britain’s upper-crust if there is no Tanqueray available.  

I was at this stage wondering who Buck was primarily aimed at. It concerns itself solely with the beautifully alliterative ‘food, furniture and fashion’. I presumed that due to this content it would be the affluent, fashion conscious city-dweller, in his mid-to-late twenties or early thirties. Indeed you would need a fair amount of disposable income to purchase most of what is advertised. The product reviews are along the same lines; £45 moisturizing balm anyone? £423.50 Cube lamp? Lemon and Coriander deodorant?

In my opinion the only place lemon and coriander should be combined is in a Thai curry.  Despite my misgivings, apparently Buck is aimed at me; the 20 year old male. Ok, I’m 21, but let’s not get pedantic here. All was rather baffling, as very little appealed to me. 

Things made a little more sense when I considered the fate of the current generation of men’s lifestyle mags, or as they have been known since the nineties; the lad’s mag. No matter whether you look to the top of the scale (GQ and Esquire) or at the bottom (Loaded, Zoo) they all follow essentially the same formula of cars, interviews, reviews, columns, gadgets, the odd recipe and a few nipples, and they define their originality and message by simply offering these joys in varying amounts and contexts.  

But declining sales figures across the board for men’s lifestyle magazines have shown that this formula is no longer working. It is not because men’s base desires are changing. Rather, that due to the new environment of media saturation and the ubiquitousness of internet access, we don’t have to lug around a 400 page magazine, and wait a month for the pleasure.

Nearly anything you would find in a mag you can get on the net, and most people now have a full web browser on their mobile phones.  Perhaps based on this realisation and the fact that a new generation of more discerning consumers expect a magazine to offer something more than a monthly summary of manliness, Buck’s limited, more focused remit, could be the way forward. 

This bold new direction is admirable, but still, if people of my age – apparently its core demographic – can’t relate to the magazine, is it doomed to failure? Not necessarily. Apart from the terrible front cover, this magazine would be damn good coffee table fodder. It would fit in, opened at a random page, in a Harley Street waiting room or the First Class airport lounge I used to work in.  It might not sell like hot cakes at a local newsagent, but I bet within a year Buck has a hell of a lot of subscribers, even if they are companies and not individuals.

My summary? I wouldn’t buy Buck to read something cool, but I could always buy Buck to look cool.  

THE NEW MEN’S MAGAZINE WITH MORE THAN NAKED LADIES

Only the other day I was asking my male colleagues if they knew of any credible male fashion/lifestyle websites… Welcome Buck, a new lad’s mag and website aimed at the modern dandy, with food features, fashion and interiors in place of topless women.

The brainchild of Steve Doyle, a 26-year old with a background in fashion and publishing, as well as a year working in the City, Buck strives to carve a niche in the men’s magazine market, bridging the gap between high-end fashion titles such as Another Man and established mainstream publications GQ and Arena.

Refreshingly different, over a quarter of the magazine’s content is food-related.  Restaurant and bar reviews, recipes, debates and good old fashioned cookery tips that guarantee you’ll be able to serve up a good Sunday roast are a plenty and feature alongside a healthy smattering of fashion and style, Buck’s primary focus.

In an interview with The Independent Doyle describes the target reader: “He knows his own style.  He’s very confident with dressing the way he wants, cooking with friends, living his life the way he wants to.  He doesn’t want to aspire to a lifestyle, or to be told by that magazine what to do.”

A secret follower of men’s fashion and avid supporter of any new developments in the men’s magazine arena, I really hope Buck manages to succeed where so many others have failed, but does it really stand a chance?

Launched in November 2008, in a year that saw many of the men’s titles struggle - Maxim’s sales were down 59.6 per cent year on year, FHM down 10 per cent and Loaded down 20.8 per cent - the magazine has certainly taken on a challenge. It’s one, it appears, the ten-man Buck team are prepared to take head on.  With its third edition currently on shelf and a full year’s themed issues planned and in progress, Buck means business.

Buck is available at WHSmith, Borders, Tesco, and all good newsagents.  Or visit http://www.buckstyle.com/

Interesting chat with a senior news contact at The Times about future direction of the paper. Seems to be disquiet over the emphasis being placed on news versus comment within the paper, to the extent that some journalists estimate that the actual reporting of news has halved in recent months as new editor, James Harding, concedes that the internet ‘does’ news and reasons that newspapers should become more reflective.

In common with many other nationals (especially Will Lewis’ Telegraph), Harding is looking to the Daily Mail, pinching staff and essentially treating the audience as ‘consumers’, looking for more planned news and features (I recall Harding nicked one of the Mail’s best planners) and piling resources into the Saturday paper.

It’s not news to say that papers are investing in high-profile comment writers but it’s interesting to note the extent that middle and junior ranking news journalists are asked to write comment-type pieces, often being asked to offer technical insight into topics they knew nothing about until that morning’s news conference! 

Has important implications for (good) PRs. Need to think ahead more, rather than just ringing the newsdesk at 9am and saying ‘I’ve got a story’! it also means a greater demand for trusted experts who can translate issues well enough for a journalist to write that insightful comment piece, especially stock market and banking experts in the current climate.

When the story broke on the terror attacks in Mumbai there was much talk of news spreading through blogs and social networks like Twitter.  Details of the siege were reported minute by minute by people who were there.  There is no doubt that the rise in citizen journalism and the availability of these channels has provided a new layer of news sourcing where information comes fast and direct.

It was the medium of radio however that brought the events into vivid and immediate focus.  As the siege was taking place Jim Naughtie on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme conducted an extraordinary interview.  Business lawyer Mark Abell was barricaded in his room inside the Oberoi hotel whist the murder and mayhem was taking place.  “As I entered my room there was a massive blast …and the gunfire has been going on throughout the night” he said, ”there is no escape and we haven’t heard anything from anybody.”  The immediacy and reality of the situation along with Mark’s stoic bravery was evident throughout.Mark escaped and was interviewed again on Today, 24 hours later.  He described his release and the full horror of the carnage he saw when he was escorted under armed guard through the lobby of the hotel.

Radio can deliver insight that text or still image based channels never can.   I have always been persuaded by the views of Gary Carter of FremantleMedia who argues that so called ‘old media’ are not replaced by new they continue co-exist.  He argues  ”The only mass communication medium in history to have been replaced by another is the telegraph and …arguably, of course, the telegram was not a mass communication technology.”

We need to stop thinking of media in terms of “newness” and think more in terms of “richness”.   We can be seduced by something shiny and new and but we must still celebrate that which we already have.

There’s been some comment on the web about a dossier put out by Labour’s new improved spin machine. It’s a very detailed research document put out by Labour to act as material for the media to ‘balance’ any reporting of Tory economic policy and announcements that come out of Osborne’s office. Juicy red meat to be used in the ‘baiting game’ so eagerly pursued by the lobby.

What’s interesting here is that this dossier is the SEVENTH to be put out by Labour but only the first to be picked up by the press. There were others on tax, crime and health with a strong media relations campaign undertaken by Party HQ during Party Conference season. But no interest, not even a side-bar against various shadow ministers’ policy pronouncements.

This tells us that the atmosphere is changing somewhat. There’s an appetite to scrutinise Cameron now and the press, which hunts as a pack, is after Osborne.