Posts Tagged ‘news’

1. Radio Stands Tall When Canterbury Earthquake Hits

   Published on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
   While TVNZ proudly proclaimed that 2 million Kiwis tuned in to its coverage of the Canterbury earthquake, the run-away winner story-teller in the first hours of the disaster was radio.

   By 7am on Saturday morning National Radio and Newstalk ZB were bringing us eye witness descriptions from people – professionals and the public – who painted images of the devastation for us with their verbal accounts.

   On ZB anchor man Larry Williams was superb – seamlessly ensuring listeners understood the big picture, bringing us the personal tragedies while sending out a steady stream of civil emergency messages to those that needed vital information.

   It was compelling, and radio at its very best.

   Compare that to TV1 and TV3 at 7am. What earthquake! We were being served up reruns of ‘entertainment’ programmes. Not even an on screen caption mentioning our largest ever recorded earthquake had occurred.

   Naturally BBC and CNN were telling the world about it. What an indictment of our own television news services that we had to go overseas to find out what was happening in our own country.

   Some time after 8am TV1 finally woke from its slumber and started to bring us excellent coverage, and we were able to ‘see’ what ZB had been describing brilliantly for an hour. TV3 had roused itself to putting up an onscreen caption under its entertainment programmes telling us it would bring us news of the earthquake from 11am. ‘News’ – by then it was ‘history’.

   Social media also found the going tough as a communication medium through a combination of overloading, civil defence requesting people to restrict cell phone use to reserve capacity for emergency services, and the battery back up to power cell sites running low.

   The other standout was Mayor Bob Parker. It was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man. Authoritative and calm, he exuded all that you want from the person in control when disaster strikes.

2. Probing whether the media is observer or creator

   Published on Thursday, June 10th, 2010
   A question those of us involved in communication often debate is whether the media reports news, or creates it. It’s one of those circular discussions, as we all have countless examples we can table that support our point of view.

   I was intrigued therefore when a report from Media Monitors* crossed my desk which sought to answer the question “what role the media played in creating or reinforcing” views around the global financial crisis.

   While the report drew no clear cut conclusion, what it did demonstrate was that media in different countries throughout the Asia/Pacific media put a different emphasis on the crisis during the critical months of April to August 2009.

   For example:

   • In New Zealand, 25% of our coverage focused on ‘excessive greed’ in proportioning blame for the crisis, compared to 5 percent for the Asia/Pacific region.

   • The Region saw the blame lying squarely at the feet of ‘weak regulations’ (close to 30 percent) whereas we rated it in second place, with 18%.

   • When focusing on the main indicator showing that the economic downturn was continuing, our measure was GDP (26%). The Region focused on exports (30%).

   • When looking for signs of recovery, our coverage focused on retail sales (18%), the Region on economic growth (22%).

   • Our media was the only one to that saw rebalancing the global economy as the main future challenge, whereas across the Region the main future challenge was seen as unemployment.

   My conclusion was that the report clearly shows that nationally the media collectively forms a view, and that its coverage then focuses on aspects that it believes are the most relevant.

   It would have been interesting if a parallel piece of research had run at the same time to measure whether the public bought into the media’s views, or held different opinions.

   Armed with that we would have been able to get closer to answering the question as to whether the media reports, or creates news.

   *The Global Financial Crisis Report, Media Monitors, v5, January 2010

3. Embargoes are a convention not to be dabbled in

   Published on Friday, August 7th, 2009
   Earlier this week Australian security services and Melbourne police rounded up a group of alleged terrorists.  The raids occurred around 6 am, but at 1.30 am a newspaper was published reporting on matter relating to the raids.

   Security services believed they had an agreement with the media to not publish or broadcast information on the raids until after they had occurred.

   Clearly someone was not aware of this situation.  The newspaper’s action could potentially have resulted in a deadly outcome.

   In its own way, this issue raises the uncomfortable matter of embargoes and how they are used. 

   Embargoes are a convention that may or may not be honoured by the media.  They have no legal standing, and there is no real recourse if an embargo is broken.

   There are some embargoes like the release of Honours Lists that are always respected.  These lists are released under embargo to allow time for the media to prepare meaningful news items. It is an arrangement that suits both the Government and media, and the key to its success is the knowledge that a news group that breaks this embargo will be out in the cold and potentially at a commercial disadvantage next time around!

   So, embargoes are more likely to be honoured if they represent part of regular supply of information that the media genuinely want to use.

   Embargoes should never be used as a mechanism for manipulating the timing of a release so to suit a company or organisation. 

   Companies wishing to release material under embargo should do so with the support of professionals like us.  We will counsel their use only in situations where we know the receiving party will respect the arrangement.

   The alternative is to dabble at your own risk.

4. Are we under or over hyping economic news?

   Published on Thursday, January 29th, 2009
   Over the holidays the only way I could feed my daily need for news was to watch either BBC or CNN. This diet of television news produced for a world audience left me with two lingering impressions.

   The first is that these iconic news services are depicting the economies of North America and Europe to be under far greater stress than our media portrays. It was not a case of the media dramatising the negative, rather a grim daily roll of rescue packaging to prevent fundamentally sound businesses being sucked under through the troubles of others.

   Commentators, whether European or American based, were of one mind. The world economy will not start to turn itself around until the American economy gets traction, and what has been done to date represents only the first tentative and superficial initiatives that will ultimately be taken.

   It seemed every new authoritative report or study published made the point that previous predictions around the extent of the situation, or the time required for a turn around, were too optimistic. The after shock would appear to have the potential for more bite than the initial onslaught.

   On the positive was the single minded determination and focus of world leaders to do whatever is necessary to kick start the world’s economies.

   My out-take was that while we need to be cautious about talking ourselves into making things worse than they really are, conversely we need to be just as cautious about hyping the positives to the point where we don’t see an advancing tsunami. On balance, I’m now more cautious about the coming 12 months than I was previously.

   On a lighter note, the other big impression was the extent to which international news presenters have ‘loosened’ up in their delivery. Rather than staid talking heads, presenters were using their hands, voicing opinions, being animated and coming out from behind their barriers.

   It was more akin to someone being in the room with you chatting about world affairs. No doubt, a sign of things to come here, in time!

5. Who’s really reading the news?

   Published on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
   The objective of news is to inform an audience.  Yet what happens when the audience has no desire to engage with the news?  According to a recent study about news consumption in the US by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, 34 percent of Americans aged under 25 say they get no news in a typical day.

    

   Despite our 24/7 news culture, this figure is up from 25 percent in 1998.

    

   The study calls this group the ‘disengaged’ and can be generalised as those who have a low interest in news and news consumption.

    

   Perhaps this is because there are so many media channels out there to choose from and so much information to digest, that they choose to become disengaged. However, we also need to keep in mind that while people may say they do not listen to or read news, they take in enough information from a variety of sources to remain informed.

    

   Interestingly, while social networking sites are very popular with young people, they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites.  Maybe an opportunity exists to ‘network and news’?

    

   As PR professionals, a core part of our business is supporting clients’ news opportunities, but are we sufficiently familiar with the needs of their target audiences and how they get their news?  How do we engage the disengaged? 

    

   The Pew report shows that trends in US news consumption continue to move rapidly towards online news usage and away from traditional news, especially newspapers.  That trend is less pronounced in New Zealand.

    

   “Net-newsers” are the fastest growing group, depending on online sources for all of their information.  Usually male, affluent and well educated, they read political blogs more than they watch network news and have a particularly strong interest in tech news. 

    

   At Network PR we have always known that relying on one high reader or viewer channel is not the most effective way to get to core audiences.  Identifying and using the myriad of channels and developing customised approaches are far more effective.

    

   For example, while hundreds of thousands might have read the Herald today, did every one of them read your story in the health section on page six?  And if they did, was it really your target audience?

    

   The term ‘target audience’ clearly needs to be examined carefully and their real life media consumption understood in order to reach them. 

6. Interpreting the political polls in the final week

   Published on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
   We tend to suffer from poll fever in this part of the election cycle with individual news organisations falling over themselves to bring us breaking news of the latest snapshot to reveal what voters are thinking.  All stand by the accuracy of their own poll and tend to regard it as the oracle, neatly ignoring polls published by their competitors.  This is not very helpful to the interested observer who is trying to figure out what all this means.

   Political polls present a number of problems for those trying to interpret them.  They all use slightly different methodology, there is a necessary delay between the questionnaire going out into the field and the results being announced, and they are just a snapshot in time.

   Political scientists prefer to talk about trends over time rather than the significance of a single poll result – which introduces the concept of a ‘poll of polls’.  This is where individual poll results are averaged out and tracked over time and is probably the most useful way to attempt to discern meaning from political polls.

   Curiablog is currently doing a sterling job demystifying the polls.  It’s running an up to date public poll average which weights the poll results according to factors such as sample size and the date it was taken. 

   This is a good example of the blogging fraternity filling a hole left by the competitive sensitivities of the mainstream media and doing all of us a favour by making sense of the numbers.