Yes, I missed a week.
A trip to Madrid threw my schedule into a bit of a state and my last
week’s notes were sacrificed. However,
I’m back and this time I mean business. In
fact, it’s the very business of PR and media relations that’s been filling my
mind with questions.
This week, I travelled down to Sussex to meet a client
for dinner. He’s someone I’ve worked
with for years and he’s shared many words of wisdom that have influenced
how I’ve run my own business as well as a heap of insight that can be shared
with the media. We had a great chat, as
expected, however as the bill came and the last coffees were quaffed he
questioned me about the significance of media relations. With fake news, alarmist reporting, clickbait
and the ocean of comment out there, was any of this getting through to the
right people? And wasn’t it only going
to get worse as people stuck within the small circle of opinion that they found
comfortable and avoided press because it just ‘didn’t help them understand the
full story’. I argued the case for my
industry. I used the usual lines about
credibility, building a comfort factor amongst people who don’t know you,
shareable content. Maybe it was the
caffeine, consumed too late after a very long day, but I wasn’t completely happy
with my answers and thought about them as I surfed the net in the hotel room
later that night.
This discussion with a strategic heavy-weight, someone
who I admire and have always listened to and believed, showed that I need to
dust off my arguments but, more importantly, it showed I needed to take a
closer look at how the PR industry and Wordville in particular is responding to
the media weariness that is very real amongst so many professional people.
Radio 4’s Media Show had a discussion about Jeremy Corbin’s
reaction to news stories about him this week and about how the younger
generations were not engaging with the media.
Trevor Kavanagh, political columnist of The Sun, assured us that the
press ‘still has a place, the ability to delve into things in depths which
social media doesn’t’. It wasn’t very
convincing. If the national press that
he works in is still relevant across generations, then surely people shouldn’t
need reminding of that. The power of perception has shifted and his argument did
sound a bit old-school.
At Wordville, we’ve often taken an original approach and work frequently outside the usual media channels to get clients noticed.
It feels like it’s more important than ever to question all the
outreach. I don’t have any answers yet,
and I’m certainly not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A good night’s sleep and a hotel fry up was
what I needed to recognise that this offers an opportunity for Wordville not a
death knell. The game’s a foot. And the
game’s changed.