Posts Tagged ‘New Zealand Herald’

1. Where do some of the big issues sit on your Relevance Index?

   Published on Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
   Even without realising it, relevance dominates our thinking every day.  The more relevant the communication, the more likely we are to first become engaged and then respond.

   My personal Relevance Index (RI) is based around

   • Do I have a choice in the matter? Who ignores an IRD letter or one from the Ministry of Transport? 

   • Is it something I need or want? Not always in that order either.

   • Is there something in it for me?

   • Should I be paying attention to this? Which is influenced by my values, beliefs and ‘norms’.

   Human nature means there are also a mass of confounding factors that influence where something sits on the RI , and some are ranked well outside what common sense suggests. 

   Look at Princess Beatrice’s wedding hat which offers no benefit other than entertainment, but there it was again on the morning news and featuring in today’s Herald cartoon. 

   Given the host of different demands on our relatively short attention spans, the ability to establish relevance is one of our greatest challenges. For example, for those of us who don’t live in Canterbury, how long will the rebuild be top of mind. 

   As we go about our lives we should make a conscious effort to ensure some of the big issues facing the nation (such as child abuse or the fair sharing of the pain caused by the global financial crisis) make it on to our RI.

   And if we are in the business of communicating we should take every opportunity to put the big issues up the rankings – just as I have done here.

2. There’s news and views. Is responding to an issue with an ad the way to go?

   Published on Thursday, August 5th, 2010
   Are big bold ads now the immediate way to address real or perceived injustices thought to have been perpetrated through the columns of newspaper?  On July 2, the New Zealand Herald ran a story stating that an investigation found a couple of eco-friendly laundry powders had high pH levels which could pose a health risk. One of these was an Ecostore product.  The very next day Ecostore ran a full page ad in the NZ Herald claiming, There’s no Dirt on our Laundry Powder.

   Advertising your side of the story in response to editorial coverage is not new, but until now it has normally been used when a publication has refused to run a ‘correction’ or adequately covered your side of the story.

   Basically Ecostore ‘s response was: yes we did have some laundry powder that was found in May to register a high pH level, but that “honest mistake” was remedied in four days. It insisted the out-of-spec powder was never unsafe, and for that reason no recall from the market was warranted, although Consumer NZ thought it should have been.

   The Newspaper Advertising Bureau thought Ecostore’s response to the Herald article was pretty cool, and awarded it “ad of the month”.  The judges commented: “The ad’s got topicality. That’s how a newspaper should be used to make a statement.”

   Putting aside the issue of how Ecostore’s agency managed to secure that much advertising space in the NZ Herald the next day (when those of us who’ve tried unsuccessfully to get recall ads placed within a couple of days), was this full page a sound strategy?

   Yes and no.  Ecostore did address the issues raised in the same paper the previous day, but not in the same medium.  And people who read news items do not always read ads, even the full page ones.

   From its point of view, Ecostore may have put the record straight. We don’t know what effort Ecostore made to redress the issues raised through the editorial columns and/or whether the NZ Herald lost interest in the issue.

   We do know Ecostore did not meet its own expectations – it made a mistake with the product specs – but they did not recall the product because it did not represent the danger alleged by Consumer NZ. When building and protecting a brand, surely product integrity is as important as disputed issues of safety.

   I’m not convinced that the ad adequately resolved the issue at hand, i.e. mistakenly high pH levels. 

   There’s news and there’s views. The ad was a view.  I’m sure Ecostore recognises that news can and does shape opinion more sustainably than views.  On this basis I would counsel an editorial response, rather than an advertising one.

   And there is also the issue of whether a precedent has been set where newspapers might deny a person the right of reply on the basis that they can ‘take out an ad if they want to correct the content or tone of coverage’!

3. Danger money

   Published on Thursday, June 4th, 2009
   I never thought that I’d end up working as a journalist. In fact I vowed I wouldn’t. Like many of us, as a teen I lost a dear friend and his untimely, accidental death became the front page lead in the New Zealand Herald. I was livid and so was his family.  It seemed so unjust and invasive that his dying was the business of anyone else. My friend had drowned in a known danger spot and the story, although painful and in this case reported inaccurately and sensationally, was news. It was news because it brought home the very real danger of swimming on a treacherous beach on a day when the beach was closed due to massive seas.

   I often wondered if the reporter who trudged out to the west coast that day ever knew how the family felt, how much the presence of a news team in their private grief was despised. But reporters have to be where the trouble is, that’s their job. In a new media environment littered with stories of closing newspapers and shrinking circulation it’s easy to forget that everyday journalists, photographers and cameraman put their lives and well-being on the line to bring the rest of us the stories and the pictures.

   Keeping us mindful of this is Jim Macmillan, a US photojournalist who became so traumatised by his 30 year career that he had a crippling breakdown. After decades of forcing his way into the nightmare zones like the Oklahoma bombing and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina it was finally the experience of being one of the first on the scene after a second plane hit the World Trade Centre that unwound him. Jim Macmillan had to acknowledge the deep psychological distress he was suffering in a journalistic culture that admires hard bitten bravado above all else. He now lectures on the effects of post traumatic stress and was recently in New Zealand addressing a group at Auckland University. What is of particular note is that it is often the young reporters who are sent out to gather the news of crimes, road accidents and disaster without the experience or support to temper the everyday brutality.

   As communication professionals we shouldn’t lose sight of fact that the news gathering process is done by people. People in the frontline, at the crash scene, in the war zones, who can be harmed by what they see and hear and what they need to make palatable for us at home.  And while we comfortably discuss in what medium we like to receive our morning news messages there are thankfully still people on the ground making it so.