Public relations consultant /blog

Having been forced to delay its plans to erect pay walls, Rupert Murdoch’s News International appears to have floated a different, perhaps more innovative, idea: charge search engines to index its sites.

It’s an idea that turns search engine optimisation on its head. Most website owners are desperate for Google to include them in search results and do all they can to get in the top ten for popular search terms. And yet Murdoch is right when he points out that having millions of casual readers who generate no significant income is of no use to a profit seeking business.

This apparently simple idea would see Microsoft pay for the — perhaps exclusive — right to include results from News International properties in its flagging Bing search engine.

Sadly for Microsoft and Murdoch, the evidence is that News International content would be a weak USP, but given that users can switch search engines at a mouse click Google may still be vulnerable.

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) currently lurches from one crisis to another, with the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger finally giving up on its code committee (which, incredibly, is chaired by perhaps the least ethical of all newspaper editors, Paul Dacre), a prominent lawyer (with whom I once crossed swords) calling for its chair to resign and its ineffectiveness exposed by its failure to deal with Jan Moir’s attack on the late Stephen Gately.

Back in 2006 then chair Christopher Meyer made a nonsensical argument for PCC regulation. He claimed that blogs are too slippery for the law, but a voluntary code would be much harder to avoid.

In truth, only the law can regulate blogs, so the PCC’s ambitions are irrelevant.

Nevertheless, current chair Baroness Buscombe’s bid to expand her empire online has met with a typically robust response and the lengthy letter to her from the blogosphere will include my signature, if only because drawing the PCC out into debate will expose it for the totally useless organisation that it is.

The News International’s deadline has slipped for erecting the pay wall that will either kill or cure its newspapers online: it’s far more complex, ‘than it seems to all the armchair experts.’

That complexity, it seems, is not technological but arises from the revelation that the Murdoch pay wall is destined not to protect News International properties alone. In the UK the Telegraph is talking and doesn’t want us to know. The pay wall may be in danger of emerging as a vast cartel which competition authorities will not tolerate.

Nevertheless, the pay wall is coming.

Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Science column in The Guardian is worth the Saturday cover price alone, has directed his Twitter followers to a study on the effectiveness of educating youth on how to read health messages in the media. Fellow Twitterer Tim Ireland asks, ‘Why just health?’

This call to elevate the much maligned teaching of media studies in schools is all very well, but perhaps we should be addressing the more serious issue of why anyone should consider such education necessary. And why it should be addressed only at youth, as if all older people are health experts when they clearly are not.

Health is important and scare stories are dangerous. Earlier this month the Sunday Express ran ‘JAB “AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER”’ large on its front page. Ben Goldacre tracked down the expert who had ‘exclusively’ spoken to the Sunday Express and discovered the story was ‘fantasy’, disowned by the quoted expert who had complained to the Press Complaints Commission (the newspapers’ sham regulator).

Yet it is hard to see how media education can solve this, unless we teach the kids to assume all quotes from experts have been fabricated.

The answer is not that we should learn not believe anything the newspapers tell us. The answer is that the media must clean up its act.

Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir was only doing her job when she attacked former Boyzone singer Stephen Gately’s lifestyle on the eve of his funeral.

She knew her words would cause offence as she’s paid to be controversial, but is unlikely to have anticipated that more than 22,000 complaints would be made to the Press Complaints Commission. Nevertheless, the commission was initially reluctant to investigate as its rules prevent it from taking third party complaints, but a convenient loophole appears to have been found.

This episode supports the growing belief that the Press Complaints Commission is a sham regulator and the campaign to replace the commission with a public regulator: support the Downing Street petition.

As others have pointed out, this is not a free speech issue. Even if Jan Moir’s right to spread homophobia trumps the rights of gay people to live free from hate, such a right does not automatically extend to a column in a national newspaper.

But the issue goes deeper. Jan Moir is commissioned by her editor, the pornographer Paul Dacre, who also chairs the commission’s code of practice committee, to be controversial. She has done her job extremely well, boosting visitors to the Daily Mail website by 21 per cent. Job done.

Just as big business is increasingly accepting a need to conduct its affairs responsibly, so the media needs a strong ethical code committing it accurate reporting. Moir’s suggestion that Gately’s death was due to smoking ‘at least cannabis’ (a drug not been linked to deaths of this nature) rather than natural causes as stated by the coroner, should have been struck from her piece. She should not have been allowed to criticise Gately’s mother for ‘insisting’ that the coroner got it right.

If anything, accuracy is more important in a comment piece, as it is here that the newspaper attempts to bring the facts together and offer readers a conclusion. Moir’s conclusion that ‘Gately’s death… strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships,’ hardly stands on her fabricated evidence and merely reveals her prejudices.

Sadly, the newspaper industry has proved unable to regulate itself, the Press Complaints Commission is clearly not fit for purpose and should be replaced with a public body.

I’m certainly no fan of Fox News’s Glenn Beck, wonderfully profiled here by Charlie Brooker, but I’m troubled by the news that Waitrose has pulled advertising from his show all the same.

It seems that in the United States, attempting to influence news by targeting advertisers is an acceptable campaign tool and Waitrose is following the lead of many US brands in removing its advertising from the Glenn Beck show.

Here in the UK we work much harder to preserve the editorial/advertising divide. While we allow programme sponsorship, the rules on what sponsors get for their money are strict and mere advertisers get even less.

It’s naive to expect that advertising will not influence programme making at all. Profit seeking television companies need to deliver lucrative audiences to advertisers, which means they will tend to chase younger more affluent viewers the hardest. But this is a long way from allowing an advertiser a direct say — or veto — over programme content and that’s the way it should be.

The tabloids love Peeping Tom style pictures of even the most minor celebrities so the Daily Mail and News of the World are understandably gutted at being forced to apologise for publishing shots of England manager Fabio Capello and his wife mud bathing on holiday.

The shocking news is that even famous people are entitled to a little privacy, even on a public beech.

The Daily Mail hasn’t laid off Capello completely. Topless Photos have aroused Paul Dacre’s organ in the past and are still available on its website.

Nevertheless, the tabloids’ obsession with celebrity will be much harder to maintain if more high profile people follow the Capellos lead and lobby the Press Complaints Commission before departing for their hols.

The debate over whether newspapers will be able to charge for their online offers is little better infomrmed today thanks to a survey commissioned by paidContent:UK which reveals only five per cent of online readers say they are prepared to pay… but they would say that, wouldn’t they?

The last few years have seen the rapid development of a generation of newspaper readers who have quickly become accustomed to getting their news for free, but this is an aberration. For as long as printing presses have been commercially viable, people have been prepared to pay for their news. Even today, many thousands newspapers are printed and sold each day and their cover prices have been increasing. Sure circulations have fallen, but print is a long way off being dead.

More and more people choose to read their favourite newspaper online, but despite that apparent success free content shows no sign of making money. Newspapers that continue to give themselves away will either run out of capital and close, or find wealthy proprietors prepared to prop them up as vanity projects.

Ninety-five per cent of readers say they won’t pay, but when their favourite content really does disappear behind a pay wall most of those will relent, provided the fee is fair. And of those who really won’t pay… so what… let them go, they are parasites sucking the industry dry.

The real issue is not whether to charge, but how to charge. Fair payments for single articles means pennies; pennies that may disappear in transaction costs.

While many people have floated the idea of micropayments, Google appears to have a solution. They want to become the internet’s newsagent a place where you can go to buy any publication. This will happen.

And a raft of additional internet newsagents will follow suit. Hell, we may even see Murdoch open up whatever charging system he has in mind to the competition.

I imagine the response of Nigel Hughes, public relations professional and blogger, to shocking research published by the NSPCC is far from uncommon.

‘The survey of 13 to 17-year-olds found that nearly nine out of ten girls had been in an intimate relationship,’ reports the charity. ‘Of these, one in six said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse and 1 in 16 said they had been raped. Others had been pressured or forced to kiss or sexually touch.’

Quick to write off the findings as a piece of ill thought out PR trickery, Nigel warns this scare mongering will come to reflect badly on the NSPCC.

Sadly this is not a PR survey, as Nigel Hughes suggests, but a serious academic report by the University of Bristol funded by the National Lottery. Moreover, this study’s findings appear to be consistent with other academic research.

There is no rational reason to doubt these findings and Nigel Hughes’ suggestion that the NSPCC is guilty of spinning in pursuit of cheap headlines is offensive. Given that he admits his knowledge is limited – he’s shooting from the hip – his comments are all the more ill-advised.

Yet we are not rational beings and Nigel’s rush to denial is far from unusual.

The NSPCC must be aware that denial is a likely response to its news and this should inform its approach. Rather than headline the most shocking statistics, the charity may have been better advised to lead on the slightly less shocking news that so many teenagers view this sexual violence as normal or with some clear advice for girls who are still learning about what it means to have a boyfriend.

Those cold nasty numbers could then be revealed further down to a better prepared, and hopefully more sympathetic, audience.

Keira Knightley has always attracted unwanted attention from the Daily Mail, which is often quick to jealously condemn celebrities who have yet to sucomb to the obesity epidemic as anorexic. Some Daily Mail writers seem so obsessed that one wonders if they’re actually suffering from some form of denial.

Not so long ago, editor Paul Dacre’s team overstepped the mark and got themselves successfully sued by Keira Knightley. This is the kind of thing that really winds Dacre up and it so the knives are out.

This week Simon Cable, who appears to stare at celebrity nipples for a living, was deployed to investigate the size of Keira breasts: he decided she’s a little flat. Following Simon’s hard cop, flat chested columist Alice Hart-Davies was deployed to pretend to be Keira’s friend.