News Just Gets Faster

Sitting in a pew in St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street at a Memorial Service for an old friend there was time to reflect on how the media has changed.

On the walls of this London church are countless memorials with “journalist”, “printer” or “publicist” proudly displayed alongside the names of those – both well known and not so well known who have brought news to people.

As I sat in a pew proudly displaying an OK! Magazine logo I remembered how Fleet Street used to be the heart of journalism. This month saw the 97th anniversary of the Titanic and it was from offices just yards from where I sat that writers first broke the news of this momentous event to the shocked nation – days after the ship had hit the ice-berg.

Many of those news reports told how lives had been saved because of the Marconi wireless system installed on the Titanic, which alerted others to its plight. Little did they know that they were reporting on a development that would revolutionise their own industry.

By the time of the events of 9/11 in New York the media had changed so fast that the second plane hitting the second tower was viewed live on television and computer screens across the world – it was just 17 minutes after the first plane had struck.

Our means of receiving news is getting slicker and slicker, which means it travels faster and faster. There is little time for a journalist to consider their words; no time for the printer to present the article beautifully and the publicist has to be ever faster with an answer or an idea.

Back at the Empica office a story we had released on plans to hold a Titanic Memorial Cruise in 2012 was attracting national and international interest. Within a few hours a national newspaper in Norway was on the telephone to me wanting quotes – they had read our press release on-line.

Hits on the cruise website showed that people from 84 countries had not only read the story but had then gone to the trouble of looking up more information on the website. The press release had circled the globe in hours.

Fast reactions are required frequently if you are to engage with the media. But buying time can be more precious if you are to make the right call and present a story with clarity and quality. Time is a resource that gets rarer every day. We need to use it wisely.

Good Bad And Ugly Stories

Probably one of the most frequent questions I get asked by those trying to get their story into the media is: “What kind of coverage do you think you can get?”

Of course if I knew the answer to that every time I would have one of the great secrets of publicity and the job would be a lot easier for all of us.

In fact the best way to gauge whether a story will attract the interest of the media is to ask yourself whether it is the sort of thing you would ever start telling your mates or your family about in the evening as simply an interesting story.

March dawned with some major stories all hitting on the same day: terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team on the same day that Gordon Brown and Barack Obama invited the media to their first historic meeting as world leaders; there was a harrowing court case over the death of a two-year-old in Scotland and a building collapsed in Cologne causing deaths.

So which story was the one that was most e-mailed by viewers of the BBC website? Which one did people read most and want to view on video online.

Well, actually it was none of these major stories. It was a story about a cat called Ugly Bat Boy that was left at a veterinary hospital in New Hampshire, USA under the headline “Is This The World’s Ugliest Cat?”

Stories do not have to be important to sweep the world and grab attention – but they do have to be interesting and entertaining. Sometimes we forget why people buy newspapers, read magazines, watch TV, listen to the radio and surf the internet.

Rarely they do these things because they want to be lectured at and hardly ever because they want things sold to them. Mostly they want to be entertained, fascinated and inspired.

Ugly Bat Boy may have been a bit of light relief but even I now know that there is a veterinary hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire (well actually I have learned there is another Exeter a long way from the one I know so well in Devon!); I have learned that it has a chap called Dr Stephen Bassett, who will care for an animal even if it is ugly and unwanted and there is a welcoming receptionist.

Some good key messages to get out to an audience and I’m willing to bet that lots of people will suddenly want to take their animal for a check-up just so they can take a peep at Ugly Bat Boy!