Phone hacking reverberations - rising media wariness

It's only personal, anecdotal evidence - nothing scientific here - but over the past two or three months, we at Hatch have noticed a marked difference in the level of wariness people have in dealing with the media. I'm wondering if other PRs are noticing this, too. Furthermore, I'm wondering if this is an immediate effect of the phone hacking scandal - the extent to which has only been exposed in the same time period - and has emerged as one of the most egregious attacks on privacy the media has conducted in nearly a decade. Of course, it was only one publication committing offense, hardly the whole sector - a publication that, sadly, people are still buying - but the effect seems to have reverberated across journalism as a whole. (But the question obviously still lingers, was it really just the News of the World, or is this typical everyday practice at the tabloids?)

It used to be that people in the tech sector (where Hatch mainly does business) were chomping at the bit to talk to me about what their technology was, what it did, whom it did it for, etc. In 2011, people are extremely quick to jump to the default "none of this can go to the press, by the way," line, glancing at me nervously as if I'm going to email my notes of the conversation to the BBC or the Financial Times the minute he or she turns her back. (And as if these world-class publications had been holding their front page for said notes.) They then drop their tone to a whisper and start giving me yes or no answers to innocuous questions such as, 'how long have you been using the technology?'

Obviously, I'm used to some level of wariness, and believe all media spokespeople should have an amount of it, particularly when dealing with the UK press. But lately it seems like a deep-seeded fear that innermost secrets will be exposed, jobs will be lost, and all hell will break loose if a PR goes anywhere near valuable information.

We're interested if other media professionals have noticed this increasing wariness, and whether you have other explanations for it. Further, what impact will this have on our industry, when we are paid to talk about stuff, and no one wants to talk?

FT trying to teach an old dog new tricks

Old habits die hard and everyone knows it is pretty impossible to teach an old dog new tricks.

But the FT isn't past trying.

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber predicts that within a year most news sites will be charging for content. He's bedded in with Rupert Murdoch in their stance against 'free' and they are both (now) very outspoken that the free online newspaper content model is broken.

The trouble is, there is a world of difference between being annoyed at a business model you yourself had a hand in setting up, when you find it doesn't work, and changing that model when you've already trained your audience to expect something else.

Freesheets are marked by crappy, poorly researched journalism and they're, on the whole, bad for the media scene. If you want proper intelligent journalism you should need to pay a small fee and enable the journalists to eat. I get that side of the argument, I do, and I often make it myself. I also get the 'give bits away for free and then charge for heavy usage' model that the FT claims to have invented. Although I read lots of stories on the FT's website and never seem to have to pay.

And so the fact remains that only 1 per cent of users actually go on to pay for journalistic content. If the newspaper industry is serious about this battle against 'free,' they need to make that 1 per cent their worst enemy and do something very clever indeed to increase it. With the (very free) blogosphere breaking every major news story, the (very free) Google enabling access to news stories at the touch of a mouse, the (very free) digital media sector enabling news at a glance and making it possible to read nothing beyond headlines for your daily news diet, and kids in our societies being brought up on a diet of free, this is not a job I'd want to handle.

Furthermore, dare I say it, but in countries like the UK with socialised media (the Beeb's online news site) giving great content away for free to the taxpayer, and probably rightly so, it's never going to work. In the US, I think there is more of a fighting chance with independent regional papers leading the newspaper scene.

And at the end of the day, no one feels that bad for Murdoch or the big papers at the loss of their profit margins. But everyone mourns the loss of their local paper and the horrible impact that has on unwatched politicians free to play with information at their choosing, unmanned regulators and all the implications of the loss of an investigative press. It's the small, local papers that suffer and we suffer with them. And the primary reason for their downfall is not free content being available online, but the free classified advertising marketplace the internet creates.

What do you think?

Are we politicians, or are we PRs?

This entire blog post (which I fear will drag on) can be summed up with one observation: my, I have noticed a lot of nepotism in PR lately. I am wondering whether Twitter has increased nepotism in our industry, by giving us the ability to create virtual cliques. We roam in packs, we do. Or it could be that Twitter just makes those packs easier to identify.

This is something that politicians have long been accused of. Nepotism is the easy road – hire those you know, and you know what to expect. But is it in the interests of your constituents? Obama was practically elected on the back of taking the anti-nepotism high road. His book The Audacity of Hope took me about three hours to read, I was so hungry for someone that ‘got this’ after Bush - who recognised the damage and wanted to reverse it. And he's no hypocrite; by appointing Hillary Clinton he let a valuable lesson sink in.

In PR, we tend to give exclusives to journalists we’re friends with. We are more likely to pitch ‘good’ stories to journalists we’re friendly, even chummy with. Increasingly, as journalists cross over to the ‘dark side’ of PR, and as PRs try to make a name for themselves as, ahem, ‘social media experts’, we are not just chums, we’re also business partners.

Is this making nepotism even more prevalent in our industry? What's the real impact? For some, I think it limits the ability to meet our real objective: raising visibility amongst new influencers for our clients.

I raise a specific example: creating a new 'award', and then giving it to yourself. People in other industries would probably find that incredible, but in PR it seems the norm.

Awards aside, editorial is far more important. Yes, PR is all about personal relationships and retaining professional connections. It's more important in some countries than others; the UK being high on this list. But if a PR agency simply gives stories to its business partner journalists, and the journalists tell people in the market this PR agency is the best at what it does, is that PR agency really achieving anything other than slapping itself on its own back? What do the clients get out of this situation?

When you ask people in the media scene their views on ‘key influencers’ the list is sometimes so nepotistic, it makes me feel queasy.

PR gurus – do you have a formula for avoiding this? How do you ensure your pitching is democratic enough? There are plenty of agencies out there that aren’t guilty of being overly-nepotistic. How do you ensure you’re not, as social media blurs the lines between PR and journalism?

I appreciate any thoughts on this matter and I’m not pretending I have all the answers. I just try to always meet new people to pitch and I try to spread the love of exclusives around as best I can. My first priority with granting exclusives is the audience of the publication, not who I know and like, because after all, serving my clients has to be my first priority. Is there another way?