Tag Archives: pr week

Hack vs. Flack: Journalist reports back after week on the other side

The relationship between journalist and PR officer is one of the most valuable – but often one of the most difficult – to foster and maintain in the media world. But there are often valuable lessons to be learnt from understanding the tensions on both sides.

PRWeek decided to let its deputy features editor Kate Magee find out what these could be, by setting up a job swap with Bite Communications‘ account executive Mat Gazeley. They would spend a week in each others shoes, documenting their experiences and hopefully learn a trick or two for dealing with the “other side” in the future.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk after the swap, PRWeek’s Kate – now safely back in the world of journalism – said life on “the dark side” was not such a far cry from the newsroom as people may think.

There were actually more similarities than I had expected. Throwing around ideas in a brainstorming session was my favourite part of the job. I found it similar to my role as a journalist; working out what is interesting about a topic and translating this into something that will engage an audience. The work was also a far more collaborative process than journalism, with team members reporting back on which calls they’d made and even what was said. In my role, I am quite independent, coming up with ideas and being able to run with them myself. As a journalist there is also a far greater individual pressure to hit deadlines. The blank print page or online space is waiting, and you have to fill it. As a PR, it felt like more of a group effort.

But for journalist Kate, the pride of a byline still draws her back to the day-job.

I won’t change my approach dramatically, but I will have greater empathy for a PR trying to find out whether a story will be used or not. But certainly for now, I still want my own name, not my client’s name, at the top of an article.

Watch an interview with Kate and Mat below, courtesy of PRWeek’s video podcast produced by markettiers4dc.


Read the final PR Week feature here…

Who will be the first bloggers to get lobby passes?

So, as Matt Wardman noted on this blog today, bloggers are soon to be allowed into parliament. But who will be the first?

Mark Pack says he hears that passes are “on their way” to the Guy News TV team: “It’s an off-shoot of the Guido Fawkes blog though, unlike the blog, the online TV show becoming legally based in the UK. Even so, given its very irreverent attitude to politics, this is a move that isn’t being met with universal adulation from the existing lobby members.”

Journalism.co.uk dropped a line to Guido himself: “I have not applied for a pass,” is the quick response.

Who’s your money on? Widdecombe show side-kick Iain Dale, or as PR Week’s David Singleton speculates, ConservativeHome’s Jonathan Isaby? Who else?

PR Week: CIPR president on the NLA’s backlink charging plans

The latest response to the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s (NLA) proposals to regulate hyperlinks to newspaper content for commercial agencies and aggregators – this time from president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), Kevin Taylor.

“I want newspapers to be successful and profitable. I want good standards of journalism and I’m prepared to do my bit: buy a quality daily newspaper and not rely on the free sheets. I hope advertising and online revenues pick up and our best newspapers survive and thrive,” writes Taylor.

“But these latest proposed NLA charges are not the way to fund the newspaper industry. They are nonsensical. The Government needs to be strong enough to stand up to the newspaper owners and impose some regulation on the NLA.

“They are simply a commercial organisation trying to make a living – but they can’t invent a parallel universe in order to justify their charges.”

Full post at this link…

FIPP 09: E-readers and digital editions: what’s the future for magazines online?

Yesterday, the first panel at the 37th FIPP World Magazine Congress, which looked at the economic situation for the magazine market, had acknowledged e-readers as significant, but not as a direct threat and a show of hands from the audience indicated their limited uptake.

In fact, despite gloomy advertising revenue predictions, time was devoted to preserving and celebrating print, and pointing out that magazines did not necessarily face the same catastrophic fate as their newspaper counterparts. Much was made of the ‘feel’ of the printed product by several of the speakers, for instance.

But magazines are investing in digital editions – so what do they look like?

In yesterday’s session entitled ‘Digital Editions: Opportunity or Blind Alley?’ President (Europe and Latin America) of Zinio Global, Joan Solà, emphasised the importance of structural change, ‘a major change, moving from analogue into digital’: “If the publishing industry adopts the right measures to make structural change to industry, it will avoid getting caught in the middle of the ropes,” he said.

We’re moving from a system with a big ‘logistic cost,’ he said. “We all know that paper, printing and distribution has an impact, an environmental impact. In the US 35 million trees have to be cut down each year.”

We ‘move to a new scheme in which content can be delivered in new forms,’ Solà said.

Kevin Madden, publishing director for digital publishing at Dennis Publishing, is not convinced a digital product will replace the role of magazines:

“Ultimately the web is a dipping medium, but I don’t ascribe any loyalty to the sites I visit.”

Publishers should cater for this ‘dipping audience’, whilst also providing a ‘feast’ for those who want it, he said.

Managing director at Menzies Digital, Sarah Clegg outlined her vision for the digital product, in her case, as she has told Journalism.co.uk in the past – includes digital editions of 140 magazine titles, with a look to e-paper developments for the future.

“Slowly the tide is turning,” she began. “In a lot of cases we [the digital product] are still the outcast,” she said. But, she emphasised, ‘the media landscape has changed, and it’s changing at the rights of knots’.

‘How are you tapping into that child of today – who is reading electronic media?’ she asked, using as an example her 13 year old niece, who picks up a range of digital tools on a daily basis.

“We know consumer habits are changing, people are choosing when they want to consume and when they want to consume. Everybody is after their instant fix,” she said.

“These aren’t questions anymore: there’s a market to take advantage of,” she added.

“They present an opportunity, along with economic necessity. We must find a place in the digital publishing model – I don’t think we’ve had our day,” she said.

Clegg wants to see lower prices for the digital product and more cooperation from publishers. She was aggrieved she said, to discover that having negotiated a 25 per cent discount for digital subscriptions, the publisher had offered a 60 per cent reduction on the print edition.

Another annoyance is that on one of their publications, it takes eight clicks to get through to digital edition, she said.

“Publishers should adapt and cater for the consumer – it [the digital edition] is not for everyone but it’s for someone,” she said.

“I think we’re heading towards a golden era for publishing,” she added, optimistically.

Following Clegg, Mark Payton, digital editorial director for Haymarket Consumer Media, described how his company has a contract with Menzies Digital and he’s ‘very keen for it to work.’

Recent digital innovations at Haymarket include:

  • Autosport launched a tiny flash page turner, which received ten per cent of the site’s traffic during the weeks that it ran.

“I no longer have colleagues around talking about web 2.0 – it has become the web,” Payton said.