Public relations consultant /blog

Having closed Manchester listings magazine City Life at the end of 2005, the Manchester Evening News is to reinvent the title – whose brand was given to the paper’s existing entertainment supplement and a local TV programme – as an online magazine… like Manchester Confidential, perhaps.

A rare new media success story, Manchester Confidential has developed a unique voice and loyal readership – even if it seems a little heavy on the advertorial – occasionally outflanking the Evening News itself. However, it may well struggle against an aggressive competitor cross promoted in the MEN and on community TV.

But let’s hope Man Con does manage to face down the competition; it makes for a small island of independence in the midst of Guardian Media Group’s local monopoly.

‘One of the most common insults thrown at the union is that we’re all Luddites – opposing technological change because of our innate conservatism and fear.’
– Donnacha Delong, new media representative on NUJ national executive

Donnacha Delong, who represents new media on the National Union of Journalists national executive, mounts a reasonable defence of Ned Ludd in this month’s Journalist, the NUJ’s house magazine.

We should beware of simply writing off the luddites, warns Donnacha Delong, lest we go the same way. The luddites had worked hard to acquire skills that gave them access to relatively well paid jobs and fairly decent working conditions. The machines that were automating the mills would make those skills redundant and see the luddites’ children condemned to work in sweatshops at a much reduced wage.

The fear of journalists is that new media will be deployed in a way that devalues their skills. Citizen journalists seem more than happy to supply their words and, more often, their photos just for the buzz of seeing their work in print.

Yet while nobody voted for the industrial revolution, it came anyway. The luddites understood their plight and could see the path history was taking, but their sinmple tactics of crude opposition were always doomed to fail. And this is why Delong is wrong to embrace the luddites; getting the analysis right is the easy part.

The real challenge is to craft new business models that continue to reward professional journalism.

Manchester Withington MP John Leech has expressed outrage at the leaking of what he believed to be a private letter to a university students’ union women’s officer passing on – and apparently endorsing – the view of one of his constituents that noisy students compromised their own and others’ safety.

Controversially the constituent set these concerns in the context of the rape of a student; residents had alleged become so used to late night shouts and screams they would not have responded to someone in genuine distress, they alleged.

Leech, a preacher’s son with a reputation for promoting puritan values, appeared to not just endorse this view but to request that the student body accept a degree of responsibility for the crime: ‘I appreciate that this is a small minority of students that are responsible for this noise and… I am sure they would not want to be responsible for compromising the safety of their fellow students and residents.’

Challenged by the South Manchester Reporter and I, Leech has refused to distance himself from this remark and has instead, by way of vague references to data protection legislation, claimed that the letter was private.

This is the kind of crisis public relations professionals come up against all the time. It is not uncommon for a senior person, working under pressure perhaps, to fire off an ill thought out email that drops everyone in it. Leech has almost certainly gone with his gut instinct and having seen how his views have been received regrets the exposure.

I’m not a lawyer and so can only make general observations, but it does appear that in situations like these the piracy argument is unlikely to get us anywhere.

A right to privacy is enshrined in the Human Rights Act, but it is hard to see how this matter could be regarded as an intrusion into John Leech’s private or family life.

Throughout the affair, the South Manchester Reporter has respected the constituent’s right to anonymity and so it’s hard to see how their rights might have been breeched.

It’s worth knowing that journalists are largely exempt from the Data Protection Act, so that route is almost certainly out. The MP might instead attempt to demonstrate a breech of confidence, but this area of law is complex and it would be necessary to demonstrate, amongst other things, that an obligation of confidence had been established. That seems unlikely to have been the case.

And then there’s the public interest defence to think about… what a minefield, nothing seems to point in the MP’s favour!

The general rule for anyone facing the kind of scrutiny MPs are rightly subject to, is never to write or say anything you’re not prepared to stand by in public… and given that John Leech MP stands by his letter it’s hard to see the source of his outrage.

‘American Magazine described it as “so inferior [that] St Louis rowdies were known to project mouthfuls of it back over the bar.”’
– Philip Van Munching, Beer Blast

News that Anheuser-Busch is to rebrand its Budweiser as an authentic quality beer will surprise many as Budweiser is a tribute to great marketing rather than brewing craft.

This is why the brewer created Busch Gardens and not Anheuser Gardens.

According to Van Munching’s excellent history of brewing in the US, Eberhard Anheuser (the brewer in the Anheuser-Busch partnership) stood up in court and admitted he’d never actually tasted a Budweiser (which is a beer type, akin to Pilsner). Beers are brewed to the same basic recipe (although Anheuser-Busch chuck some rice into the mash) and the brewer must constantly tinker in order to match each brew to the last. Anheuser could not have brewed an authentic Budweiser, as he had never tasted one. But Adolphus Busch was a truly great marketing man.

Much better to stick to the fresh ‘born on’ message that truly differentiates Anheuser-Busch Budweiser from the many products with genuine claims to a brewing heritage and tradition.

Diana Appleyard, a freelance feature writer regularly commissioned by the Daily Mail has been caught off guard after turning to Response Source, an online service that connects journalists and public relations people, in search of ‘horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear’ et cetera.

I know of a village shop that went bust after a staff member stole more than £10,000. The thief was Welsh, but if I lied to Diana Appleyard that they were Polish, say, she’d know no better and pay me £100 along with a promise to protect my anonymity.

Perhaps inevitably, the Response Source email soon fell into the hands of Labour bloggers, where it was published to illustrate the Daily Mail’s racist political agenda. Allegations of racism failed to surprise a former Diana Appleyard colleague and the story has been slowly spreading across the internet.

Sadly, political debate is too often defined by anecdotes with a human interest, rather than cold and boring facts. And so much public relations activity revolves around finding – or less ethically fabricating – stories that support viewpoints that may not be as common as they seem. Here Diana Appleyard is working to create the impression Eastern European workers are more dishonest than others.

This incident does expose the techniques used by writers like Diana Appleyard to help the Daily Mail promote racial divides in Britain today; though in future she’ll probably stick to ringing around trusted friends for her racist anecdotes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Diana Appleyard is not responding to emails on the matter. But fortunately, her piece has yet to appear in the Daily Mail and rumours Diana Appleyard is to widen her search to include Liverpudlians who steal, Welsh who renege on bets and Scots who don’t stand their round down the pub, have as yet proved to be unfounded.

China’s first Olympic Games to be held later this year in Beijing has always promised to be a controversial event, thanks to the country’s abysmal human rights record. Arguments that politics and sport don’t mix look increasingly naïve and the calls in China’s official media to boycott Steven Spielberg are just silly.

Sadly the Olympics always has and always will have many deeply political dimensions. And for the Chinese the Olympics is a fabulous public relations opportunity; a chance to shine on the world stage and shake off some of the stigma attached to being a developing country.

But it is more likely to prove a brutal lesson in how to take criticism and face up to broader responsibilities. Spielberg was right to call China on Darfur; while the Chinese argue against interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, they supply many of the weapons used to prosecute genocide. And just as corporations are learning to take responsibility for the wider impacts of their business, so must China.

Fortunately, for all their complaints, China is slowly moving on Darfur. All the more reason for those of us working with the free Western press to support the World Association of Newspapers campaign to free journalists, like Shi Tao – betrayed by Yahoo! – who has been imprisoned for exposing the authorities’ restrictions on reporting the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

To many of us the humble fax machine seems terribly archaic, but I remember the first time I used a fax machine. It felt like magic. A printed document instantly transmitter anywhere in the world… with a telephone line of course. Faxes were great. But fax was always destined to be an intermediate technology. Email was already on the horizon.

But still some hang on to the humble fax and if a client wants to fax rather than email, who can say no?

Fortunately, nobody need go to the bother of a giving over office space to a dedicated fax machine wasting paper and ink on endless fax spam (which is worse than email spam as it costs you money) and takes up a whole phone line. Wow your old fashioned friends and clients with MyFax. With MyFax you’ll get a unique fax number to be used just like any other fax number, but faxes are converted into email attachments that you can receive anywhere, just like any other email. And is if that wasn’t enough, MyFax lets you send faxes by email too. That old fashioned client or friend need never know you’re using email to fax.

Rumour has it that Roger Alton, the editor some credit with saving the Observer, is to take over at the Independent. Brand Republic’s Gordon Macmillan reckons he might find working on the Independent’s shoestring budget a strain, but I think it will suit him well.

As Observer editor, Alton often broke with his traditionally left-leaning readership to run headlines that would have sat comfortably on the Daily Mail. In July 2007, the paper was forced to withdraw a front page splash that scare mongered over MMR in a very tabloid style and failed to stack up. Roger Alton really should have fallen on his sword at that point.

Nevertheless, the Independent has made its name as a views paper, rather than a newspaper, so if Alton can move his perspective leftwards he’ll do very well there.

While Steve Brauner’s editorship of the North West Evening Mail had its unfortunate moments, it’s hard to fault his stewardship of Crain’s Manchester Business and in particular today’s editorial on the pub companies that treat their houses as mere commercial properties.

This trend took hold in the early 1990s, when I found myself up in Ulverston on behalf of Robinson’s. This was a strange experience as I was used to speaking for the small local brewer everyone loved, but in Cumbria things were different. Robinson’s had bought and closed Hartleys, an even smaller brewer, and all of a sudden I was the enemy.

Anyway. The Hartleys pub I visited was next door to a pub owned by Grand Metropolitan, which having sold off or closed its breweries was then the country’s largest pub company and a trailblazer for the businesses Steve Brauner now blames for the destruction of the pub. Today it earns only the slightest mention in its successor corporation’s official history. The Grand Met pub was about a third of the size of the Hartleys, but the rent was three times greater. Grand Met’s business model was a reaction to the 1989 Beer Orders, which limited the number of pubs a brewer could own and so led brewers to sell off their estates or stop brewing.

For a traditional brewer like Robinson’s, the pub is a brewery tap. They take the large part of their profit from the sale of beer to their own estate and leave the tenants to run their pubs as they see fit, so long as they stick to Robinson’s products. It’s a nice business model: should sales fall you go out and buy more pubs, when sales rise you expand the brewery.

Yet for businesses on the model Grand Met pioneered, the pub has to be the profit centre and life is much harder for licensees. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) found that 20 pubs closed each month in 2005; a figure that had risen to 56 in 2007; the beer orders where repealed in 2003, but the industry remains too damaged to reverse the trend.

‘On April 12, an 18-year-old blogger with the handle ntcoolfool posted a brief, unexceptional tribute to the deceased American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for which he received three equally unexceptional responses. On Monday, ntcoolfool’s blog became a scrolling newsreel, providing harrowing details, replete with photos and video footage, of a massacre unfolding below his window.’
– The Times, 18 April 2007

The Press Complaints Commission’s probe into the ethics of media using material published on social networking and other websites dominated by user-generated content, is unlikely to produce guidance that will significantly reduce its use.

It’s simply too easy – and too tempting – for newspapers to concoct an excuse to publish. Up in Barrow-in-Furness they’ll run you out for town for a comment on MySpace on the grounds the good people of Barrow have a right to know what a temporary shop manager thinks of their town.

Much of this debate is defined by the naïvety of social networkers. That temporary shop manager never dreamt his MySpace profile was being read by anyone other than his friends back home. Interestingly, a Flickr search reveals 3,777 celebrity photos available for commercial use at no charge. And that’s growing daily. I reckon few of these photographers realise a big corporation could use their offerings to help sell newspapers without paying them a penny.

Some people will be more careful about what they say on their blogs, but most will find it hard to believe their everyday musings will ever make headlines. So social networking sites are set to continue offering the media background on the so-called ordinary people – non-celebrities and non-politicians – who suddenly find themselves in the news.