Weeknotes 4 - When you see everything differently

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.