mediations

It's Excellence, Jim - but not as we know it! Grunig revisited

When David Phillips and I wrote Online Public Relations 2nd Ed (2009) we confidently claimed that the digital media revolution had changed PR forever, and that such changes meant that scholars needed to rethink the theoretical paradigms that have dominated academic conceptions of the discipline.

We still do.

We were therefore delighted to read that James Grunig, the driving force behind the hugely influential Excellence models and the general theory of PR which underpins these models, used our book as a prime focus for a significant PRism journal article, Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation.

Although beginning by appearing to lump in social media with other 'fads' that have momentarily distracted some from more fundamental matters, Grunig declares:

If the social media are used to their full potential, I believe they will inexorably make public relations practice more global, strategic, two-way and interactive, symmetrical or dialogical, and socially responsible.

Clearly, David and I agree. But for me, the interesting point is that the areas in which Grunig sees social media as having significant impact are framed within contexts drawn from Grunigian "general theory". These are the very assumptions from which we asked one of our key questions:

The issue now for those trying to understand the changes being brought about by the internet society is to determine whether the developments outlined in this book are sufficiently dramatic to challenge the Grunig model. Let’s try.

I have been arguing for several years that social media has flipped what I call the vector of communication through 90 degrees and that the significance of this change - or perhaps more accurately, this potential change - is a long way from being understood and embraced by PR theory.

So I am agreeing with Grunig that digital media makes no fundamental attack on many of the principles of his team's general theory, but I do maintain that the aggregation of individual opinions that is empowered by the searchable web is transforming conceptions of reputation. I am not convinced the general theory does or perhaps even can, accommodate this change.

Yes, we are in truth challenging what Grunig characterises one of his middle range theories, in particular the those elements which deal with conceptions of publics, persuasion, engagement and relevance.

But, for me, these are the most important aspects of public relations. I think writers like David and myself have only just begun to consider the implications of the changes we are trying to identify.

Meanwhile, thank you Professor Grunig for many valuable insights. Like the dutiful and dilligent students I try to nudge along at Sunderland, I will go away and spend the festive period in critical reflection.

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Spinning with Sixsmith: PR in Fiction

The best novels for PR in Fiction or Scoop! are not necessarily romans a clef but if you buy into the (very) thinly disguised plots and characters of Martin Sixsmith's 2004 novel Spin it would be hard not to be tempted to believe it offered meaningful insights into journalism and public relations.

Sixsmith, if you remember, was  the BBC man turned government adviser who got caught up in the Jo Moore good-day-to-bury-bad-news debacle. Spin is payback time, set in a rapidly approaching future with a few judicious tweaks that must have made the lawyers a little less twitchy.

Squeaky clean Andy Sheen is the New Project Party PM who has led the UK into the Middle East Wars and is about to launch into some pretty unpleasant "we know best" social engineering, through the new-fangled Department for Society. Sheen's success is a triumph of style over substance largely attributed to the lying, cheating and bullying of a comms team led by Charlie MacDonald. (Be aware that New Project's MacDonald is big, black and worked in Brixton, so should in no way be confused with New Labour's Alastair Campbell).

Charlie was even credited with suggesting the Party's Procter & Gamble-esque brand New Improved Project... and the PR campaign that went with it.

Few people in those days realised how powerful the New Project spin doctors were to become, how much influence the imperatives of presentation would soon have over the substance of party policy-making.

Under streetwise, no-nonsense MacDonald, and abetted by former NUJ PR Geoff Maddle, the Downing Street operation has become 'the most efficient, most revered and most feared PR outfit in the whole of Europe.'

Foreign governments sent their Charlie MacDonald wannabes to study at the court of the master: to learn how carrots, sticks, black eyes, blackmail, saccharine and smears, seduction and schmooze can all be deployed to keep the government at the top of the news agenda; how the media could be flattered and cowed into submission; how difficult journalists could be neutralised; and how inconvenient stories could be killed be killed by kindness, by cunning or by cutting some bastard's balls off. 

It is Maddle who does the much of the hands-on dirty work: "Success for (him) was when a story did not appear, when a dog did not bark."

This is an area of PR that, as some of its more persuasive critics point out, gets very little attention. The official definitions promoted by the CIPR and the 'professional project' simply don't talk about the art of suppressing information, but it is as much at the heart of Spin as it is the heart David Michie's Conflict of Interest (2000). Here, MacDonald and his crew draw on a computer system called Lancelot to provide ammunition for blackmail, just as the Lomboids of Conflict owe their success to a hugely successful (and hopefully entirely fanciful), supersecret and murderous media surveillance unit.

I can't say I particularly enjoyed Spin - it is far too clumsy and self-serving to work as decent novel.

But it is interesting that the cynical Sixsmith and Michie have far more direct experience of the operations of which they write than most of the authors so far covered by PR in Fiction.

The Saint Who Loved Me: PR in Fiction

To succeed in PR you have to be flexible, versatile and creative, qualities needed in abundance by Maggie White in Mimi Thebo's excellent 2002 novel, The Saint Who Loved Me.

Maggie needs some to employ some fairly sophisticated PR skills for her day job, working on a £1.4m tampon launch, but that's a doddle compared with the brief outlined by a freelance client, Saint Peter who wants her to come up with a repositioning campaign for his boss, Jesus.

Daytimes involve trying to rein in creatives who don't understand the subtleties of sanpro communications, night-times revolve around rather earthy descriptions of the less than honest propaganda tricks employed by Jesus and his gang. Oh, and while she is working all hours against the biological clock her wine business husband Simon is having an affair with this secretary.

Saint is a better book than a sketch of the plot might suggest, and Thebo uses a reasonable amount of insider knowledge to create a realistic and well-realised working environment. Maggie's agency, Blues, feels real and her PR work is rather more than the usual loose vehicle for suggesting glamour, vivacity and a decent income.

I am deep in a meeting with Creative... We are an intergrated agency which means that the PR and the advertising are under one roof. Usually the direction of a campaign is led by advertising and I am more or less told how to approach a product. With this one it is the other way around, and I can tell that they are uneasy about it.

 

Advertising have a problem with the tight parameters of the brief. I am trying to explain that it is the target market which is closed, not the client.

 

You can't break out a big splashy television campaign because you are aiming at people who are squeamish. And so I am spending this part of my life, really, making some poor sad women who are obviously completely repressed a little less sad by saving their dignity and their panties.

She decides on a softly-softly approach, discreet mailouts, advertorials, and one-ones at a Claridge's launch party...

...it'll just be me and Celia behind the teapot and sandwich trays. She'll be serving and I'll be smiling and showing slides on the highpower laptop all day... I'll see fifty people, maybe fifty-five. I will have taken the important people aside earlier. It's softly-softly with impact... meant to get the concept of discretion into the heads of journalists...

 

There's so much to hammer home into (their) gerbil-like skulls 

   

micromediations

via publicsphere.typepad.com

Inspired by Kimbofo's Duckspeak, I am experimenting with Typepad Microblog, MicroMediations, comparing it to lifestreaming with Posterous... Confessions of a carbon fibre sloth.

A long way away, a long time ago...

Billy Liar on the Moon: PR in Fiction

"You'll have to stop telling all these lies, Billy," my mother used to say, all those years ago. Yes mother, it's just that I am a slow learner."

I suppose it was inevitable that the late, great Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar would end up in Public Relations. In the 1975 sequel, Billy Liar on the Moon, disgraced undertaker's clerk William Fisher, 33, is eight years into an undistinguished career with Shepford Council, somewhere in an equally undistiguished part of Midlands suburbia, presently working in Information and Publicity.

And it is pretty grim, 1970s stuff - Life on Mars without the action, but with plenty of casual sexism, drink-driving and a general feeling that modernism is making everything worse. Although Ambrosia is behind him, Billy is still prone to flights of fantasy, but mainly confined to adding colourful flourishes to a celebratory guidebook he is writing, Pageantry with Progress: "Shepford leads the way, ta-ra! Exports up by eight point five percent on some figures we have just made up."

He is half-heartedly plotting to 'step into the gin-soaked shoes' of his boss RVO 'Reggie' Rainbell - known as Pisspot - and become Information Officer and Director of Publicity. Tellingly his main rival is Purchase, a crushingly dull man who works in Finance and shaves his 'nasal organ'.

Pisspot drinks, he calls Billy 'Arsehole'. He is of his time: "...a pipe repaired with insulating tape smouldering in one tweedy pocket and a copy of the Guardian, looking as if it had recently wrapped lettuce, in the other."

Are you a rotten director of publicity Pisspot, or a very good one? I suspected he was a better one than I would ever have been... a better one, anyway, than the town deserved. If he didn't give a toss, it was only because there was not much in Shepford worth giving a toss about, but he had a kind of exasperated, exasperating integrity that I admired, and looked in vain for in myself.

Eventually, Billy is co-opted on to the Council's Festival committee.

They had all got copies of some balls Pisspot and I had slung together, largely concerned with fictitious plans to flood the world media with invitations and press passes. In reality we had long ago stopped bothering, for no-one ever came. A man from one of the Birmingham papers had arrived one year but only, it turned out after we had givem him lunch, to visit his sister. 

Billy's moment of glory as a publicist comes when he suggests holding a children's dog show, offering prizes for the ugliest mongrel and spottiest spotted dog. Naturally, it ends in disaster.  

And he had been warned. As Pisspot said: 

"Don't fool yourself that this is a plum job, Bill. It's not a plum, it's a gooseberry. If you had any sense you would turn it down. This is not, repeat not a town with a future, and if you ever fall for that expanding Shepford crap I will kick you up and down this opffice until your arse turns blue - its a glass and concrete excavated ruin we're living in and if I were your age I'd be out of it on the next train."

Ther trouble was, that from Waterhouse's mid-1970s perspective, wherever in England he got off the train, it would be just as bad.

Where is PR's Mikael Blomkvist?

One of the differences highlighted by my PR in Fiction and Scoop! Journalists in Fiction projects is that PRs are seldom at the heart of plot-driven novels. In a way, it is the difference between information and investigation; reporters provide a useful narrative focus because they dig for the hidden, and can be natural seekers of truth.

Mikael Blomqvist, one of the two central characters in Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, typifies this role. In his Observer review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Nick Cohen writes:   

"Blomkvist smiled. He had never met Svensson before, but he felt at once that he was the kind of journalist he liked, someone who got right to the heart of the story. For Blomkvist the golden rule in journalism was that there were always people who were responsible. The bad guys."

As a left-wing reporter who had investigated neo-Nazi gangs, and lived in fear of murderous reprisals, Larsson had learned to mistrust non-judgmental pieties about there being "good and bad in all of us". Hard-won experience taught him to avoid the shades of grey, which reduce so much contemporary fiction – and political thought – to a formless blur. Specifically, Larsson believed misogyny to be an unpardonable evil, and wove a feminist argument through the trilogy with enormous skill. All thriller plots are ludicrous when you to stop to think about them, but Larsson uses male hatred of women to make his uncomfortably plausible.

If you haven't read Larsson yet, a review of book three which contains plot references probably isn't the best starting point but, for me, Cohen nails his strengths and weaknesses. He is not good on sense of place, and some of the plotting is almost cartoonish in its need to up the tension, but the clarity and raw emotion that fuels the narrative is compelling. 

Teaching Social Media: Stirling21 & EuroBlog Bucharest

Here is the presentation of a paper on Teaching Social Media, written by Richard Bailey, Gareth Thompson, and myself. Richard presented it at the Stirling 21 conference and I used it as the basis of my contribution to the panel I chaired at the Euprera Congress in Bucharest.

As part of Euprera's EuroBlog project, Richard and I are now working on a generic module to help academics who are meeting the challenge of teaching social media. This will be developed through a wiki - please contribute!

Teaching Social Media

View more presentations from Richard Bailey.

Scoop! William Boyd on why (PR) fiction is true

One of the premisses on which my PR in Fiction (Stirling21) and Scoop! projects are based is that authors must depict the disciplines and their practitioners in a way which resonates with the reader's preconceptions.

Perhaps he is thinking more about emotion that accurate description, but here is William Boyd talking to Mariella Frostrup on Radio 4's Open Book (Sept 17, 2009, 14.30 into the podcast).

"What is the truth?

".... Everything is subjective and one person's lie is another person's true story and, funnily enough, the more I have written, the more I think the power of the novel, the power of fiction resides in the fact that even though it is completely made up, we actually guarantee its versacity thereby.

"So if you want to know how people react, or how people feel in certain situations, it maybe in time of war, or in a love affair, funnily enough, the place to go is a novel or a short story because everything in that depiction has been made up, but made up in a way to achieve absolute authenticity, Whereas if you go to a memoir, or a biography, or a work of history, or a work of reportage it is selected and shaped by the author in a way that cannot possibly replicate whatever that truth was.

"So it is one of those strange paradoxes that to find out what life is like in all its complexities, read fiction."

I am not sure I can sustain the argument that Confessions of a Shopaholic is "made up in a way to achieve absolute authenticity" but I was pleased that quite a few people at Stirling 21 seemed to find some value in my approach. None would admit to having read Shopaholic, which I think is rather a shame, but I did pick up a couple of very promising titles for PR in Fiction.  

Scoop! Online media claims first fiction victim

Crime correspondent Laurie Lane, the central character in Duncan Campbell's amusing If It Bleeds (2009), is the first fictional journalist I have come across to face career oblivion for not adapting to the demands of the online world. I suspect we will see many, many more in the next few years.

If It Bleeds is destined to feature strongly in Scoop!, not least because Guardian reporter Campbell knows what he is talking about and writes with an entertaining and perceptive cynicism.

News editor Stark, "all white shirt ...and spray-on" smile is discussing the future with Lane, a veteran of 22 years on the crime beat.

"It's just, as you know, with all the challenges we now face in -"

"An integrated, multimedia, internet world.."

"That sort of thing..."

Laurie has a good idea where this chat is going.

"We do really need people who are happy to make full use of all the new tools at our disposal. You know, producing podcasting and blogging, taking the old camera out on a job. Look, to cut to the chase: we just feel that maybe now there's a window of opportunity both for you and for someone more digitally, you know, savvy.."

"Sounds more like a defenestration than a window of opportunity," said Laurie. "Are you sacking me?"

Not quite. Stark wants him to become the motoring correspondent...

On the road

Kuriren

Kuriren
Originally uploaded by OneStepBehind

One Step Behind

Kurt's jacket
Originally uploaded by OneStepBehind

Eat your heart out Kenneth Branagh!

With One Step Behind (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediationspix), I am experimenting with Flickr and a few other social media tools in a project that explores Sweden through fiction.

The Press Officer: Exit, Orange and Yellow

Connie Amory, the journalist at the centre of Martyn Bedford's Exit, Orange & Red, is based in a "Hallam" shopping mall so not surprisingly she has regular dealings with the Urbopark press officer:

"Warren Bartholemew was consumately adept at managing information to Mall Admin's best advantage without alerting reporters to the fact that he'd steered them away from a more fruitful line of inquiry. Having recently returned from a Mediterranean holiday - Greece? Malta?, she couldn't remember - his boyish broad face was freckled and the eyebrows were bleached blond, lending him a startled expression ..... His southern accent (my italics - in Hallamshire, southern means shifty!) sounded bland and insubstantial after DCI Pink's Hallam."

Naturally Warren is a former reporter...

The press officer spread his hands "OK, OK, you're an independent newspaper, you have to cover stories without fear or favour and so on. I accept that Connie, I've served my time on local newspapers, as you know."

Fictional press officers almost always make stupid mistakes...

Among the press releases to spew from the Mall Link printer ... were two from Warren Bartholomew, head of Mall PRO... The first, a formal announcement that bids were to be invited for Mall Secure when the present in-house agreement expired at the end of the year. The second, purporting to be a statement from Mall Manager Roy Dobbs, warned of the iniquities of the minimum wage and EU edicts on workers' rights... Under the heading Mall Chief Hits Out At Threat To jobs, was a diatribe a perceived assault on management's right to manage (etc)...  What aroused Constance's curiosity about the press release was that she'd been sent a draft copy... wherever a paragraph in quotation marks required attribution, it was followed by the instruction [insert your mall manager's name here]...

When Contance phoned Warren Bartholemew (he didn't seem to appreciate) her observation on the remarkable fact that not only did all six Mall Build UK managers share identical views on these issues but they chose to express their opinions in exactly the same words.

... Send in the Clones was the headline on the diary piece about the mall manager's statement.

And Bedford - once a journalist himself - adds a nice touch at the end...

The Crucible also carried a news story - based on a reissued version of the press release.... and reproducing (the manager's) quotes as though they were his. Justifying the decision in a leader column., the editor said he regarded it as a valid and timely contribution to the general debate... He concluded: It doesn't matter who said what, it is what is said that matters.

 

Here lies Eric Ambler....

Just finished reading Eric Ambler's Uncommon Danger, partly for Scoop! (central character Kenton is a journalist) and partly because Ambler was admired by Greene and Hitchcock. In his introduction to the just released Penguin Modern Classics edition Thomas Jones notes that Ambler's writing career took off in the late 1920s:

 

"He was asked to compose a press release extolling the bogus virtues of a batch of dodgy bulbs for car headlights. They sold so quickly on the back of it that the company even thought about making more. As for Ambler, the experience may or may not have given him a taste for concocting plausible fictions with a pseudo-technical bent, but it certainly showed he had a talent for it. Before long he was working full-time as an advertising copywriter."  

 

Splendidly, the author called his autobiography Here Lies Eric Ambler... 

 

You can read a version of Thomas Jones's essay in the Guardian.

CIPR NorthEast Conference presentation

One of the aims of my contribution to the North East CIPR conference was to try and pull together some of the ideas and themes devdloped by an impressive line-up of earlier speakers, beginning with Robin Hamman, of Headshift, followed by Stephen Davies talking about Twitter, Simon Wakeman on social media and local government and Mark Payne from West Midlands Police.

My contribution was about encouraging delegates to think more carefully about the implications of the growth of social media on PR practice. Clearly, I was preaching to the converted in that they wouldn't have attended if that was not their intention, but I thought it would be useful to highlight some of my sources and suggestions for further reading.

I used three core themes. Firstly, I tried to illustrate the way in which the very rapid adoption of social media technologies has changed the "vector of communication" (see Online Public Relations 2nd ed, by Phillips and Young). Suddenly, almost everyone can pass on their views to almost anyone else, and these views are linked and searchable; reputation is the aggregation of individual opinions, and this aggregation is empowered by social media. At a micro-level do a Twitter search on #necipr and see what views were expressed in real time by a significant percentage of delegates; searchable reputation, or the doing it because we can twitterings of a small, self-selecting group of technophiles - you choice!).

Secondly, I used the CIPR's own eyes-ears-mouth logo to stress the importance of listening and watching as well as speaking, and suggesting the two to one ratio expressed visually is actually at the top end of talking. To varying degrees, I think all the other speakers made similar points.

My third theme was ethics, based on my optimistic belief that the reach, transparency and porosity offered by digital communication (see Gregory and Fawkes 2000 JoCM paper Applying Communications Theory to the Internet)  brings the work of PR into the public gaze in a way in which we have not seen before. In one sense all this is saying, bluntly, is that you have to be more honest because the internet means that if you try to deceive you are much more likely to get caught. More importantly, social media forces PR practice out into the open; it is harder to be the invisible hand shaping messages when the communicators are tangible and named.

I used a video made by the United States Air Force to examine how it sought to enlist social media in the battle for truth in the propaganda war on terror; lots of explosions cast an intriguing light on the notion of a PR offensive. The video is helpful in showing how the USAF tries to harness new techniques, and the importance of storytelling as communications tool, but at the same time showed little willingness to create dialogue - more shoot first, ask questions later than a Grunigian attempt at two -way symmetrical communication.

I also used the USAF guide to responding to adverse blog posts. It is very rigid and formulaic but worth careful consideration - especially if, as many delegates were, you are communicating on behalf of an inherently conservative and inflexible organisation.

Having talked about dialogue, we thought about who we need to talk to. Like the final speaker, Robin Wilson, of McCann Erikson, I used the ladder developed by Groundswell, and also drew on analogies linked to discovery developed by David Jennings in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll. Maybe I should have said more about foraging, crowdsourcing and social bookmarking....

To put all this effort into context - remember it is effort, and it therefore must mesh with the organisational plan - I looked briefly at David Phillips' visualisation of a Grunigian view of PR.

My things to think about included Steve Rubel on lifestreaming with Posterous and the growth of services such as Audioboo - see Neville Hobson for up to the minute exposition.

        

PR in Fiction: But how does he know?

Although Mark Mills seems to present a credible picture of a British Information Officer working in 1942 Malta, how can the reader tell if it is in fact accurate? Here are a few excerpts from an apparently straightforward explanation of Max Chadwick's role. He is talking to Lilian, the half-Maltese, half-British newspaper deputy editor, trying to persuade her to run a picture of an old man who shot down an Italian plane with a rifle; it's a good story but it might be seen to promote illegal behaviour.

The Information office and the only Maltese-language newspaper... might make for natural bedfellows but Lilian's loyalties were not always served by the British policy which Max was bound to promote. This made for an uneasy collaboration, a tentative trade of services. Lilian advised Max on how best to pitch the tone of his publications and in return she received the kind of of information she could not get from anyone else.

(Max) crushed out his cigarette against the sole of his shoe, anything to avoid her eyes. "There are a lot of things I don't tell you - can't tell you - you know that."

Before the war, Max was an architect, with no inclination of his future role.

"...it was still strange to him that the task of manipulating minds came so naturally to him. He had always regarded himself as something of a loner.... yet here he was, deep in the minds of the masses, second guessing their reactions to events, guiding and enlightening them, a high priest at the altar of the great god Morale."

The question is, how does Mark Mills know that an information officer and a journalist would have had this kind of relationship? Conceivably, through careful research - the newspaper is real and there presumably was someone doing Chadwick's job. But how much comes from Mills own preconceptions of what the relationship was? Does Mills have direct experience of such a relationship?

These are questions that could be asked and possibly answered, but do they need to be asked? It is the author's task to persuade the reader that the setting for his fiction is credible, not to prove that it is accurate or true. In this case, Mills does not need to be accurate, rather he must create a situation that is believable, that resonates with the conception of such a relationship that shared by his readers.

In terms of the representation of PR, this resonance allows him to explicitly refer to Chadwick's work with the phrase 'manipulating minds'.

Maybe Mills has read Bernays...    

PR in Fiction: Through a journalist's eyes... (again)

One of the reasons many PRs feel their discipline enjoys a poor reputation is that its public image is largely shaped by their natural foes, journalists. And they are probably right, at least insofar as the practice of PR discussed in the media is almost always confined to media relations - and usually media relations done badly.

It is not much different in fiction. Information and press officers often crop up as official spokespersons (but not as often as they do in real life - how many times have you read a crime novel in which dialogue with the police is via a voicebank?). The role of the spokesperson in fiction is almost always to thwart the free flow of information and when this resonates with the author's previous experience as an oft-thwarted journalist the depiction of PR is likely to be yet more unfavourable.

Former financial journalist Sophie Kinsella amplifies two potent prejudices in Confessions of a Shopaholic. The dashing anti-hero Luke Brandon, boss of Brandon Communications, is handsome and rich (journalists always believe PRs make much more money than for doing much less work) and PR practice is personified by the awful Alicia who treats Shopaholic journalist Becky Bloomwood with a lazy contempt. Towards the end, as Becky is asking valid and perceptive questions of her client, Alicia holds a parallel and more important conversation with an assistant about the precise make-up of her lunchtime sandwich.

"So, Rebecca, any other questions? Tell you what, shall I send you our latest press pack? That's bound to answer any other queries. Or you could fax in your questions."

Stupid patronising cow. Can't even be bothered to take my questions seriously.

PRs will say this kind of thing never happens; journalists will point to today's huge pile of ill-targeted and unwanted press releases.

And don't get them started about those annoying follow-up calls.... 

    

PR in Fiction: First thoughts

Where to start with my Stirling conference paper on PR in fiction? Partly because I am reading The Information Officer by Mark Mills, I am thinking of a chronological sequence, beginning with its narrator, Max Chadwick, the eponymous information officer who is working in wartime Malta. Naturally, with Malta being pounded by German bombs (apparently much worse in tonnage than the London Blitz) his job is closer to propaganda than "information PR".

I will then move on to Roger Buckley's in John Christopher's 1950s novel, The Death of Grass.  In both novels, the narrative is driven by the characters' access to highly confidential information, and examines the ethics of exploiting this knowledge for private purposes. Straightaway, this points towards what I see as one of the most challenging framings of ethical PR - to whom should the practitioners' loyalty lie? To him/herself? To the client? To society? 

I will definitely be using Confessions of a Shopaholic's Luke Brandon's dilemma over representing dodgy finance firm Flagstaff Life when my MA PR Ethics class tackles this subject next year...

The chronological approach is of course problematical. Although it is set in 1942 it was published in 2009 and Mills' account is necessarily coloured by perceptions shaped over the ensuing 50-plus years. (It will become even harder if I decide to include 1984's Winston Smith in the paper!!!)

       

Fancy a free copy of Online PR? Then help me help Barnardo's

On Saturday I am doing the Northen Rock Cyclone challenge, a hilly 101-mile cycle ride through Northumberland, and am hoping to raise money for children's charity Barnardo's.

If you would like to support me, go to my Just Giving page. I'll put the names of everyone who sponsors me for at least £1.00 (that's less than a penny a mile!) into a draw to win a copy of Online Public Relations 2nd ed...

Please Tweet this (I am @mediations), post to Facebook, or do anything else you can think of that will help a very good cause.   

Want a career in PR? New Sunderland MA will open doors

Sunderland's MA in Public Relations was officially approved by the University this week and we are looking forward to welcoming our first students at the end of September.

The new programme is aimed at journalism and media students who are looking to use a communications degrees to build a career in PR, at ambitious PR practitioners who want to broaden their understanding of theory and learn new skills by studying part-time or full-time, and at CIPR Diploma holders who want to move up to the next level.

Naturally, social media will be at the heart of the programme (if you need convincing why this is importnat read this post from Kristina Summers). 

Here's what we will do:

Stage 1 – Postgraduate Certificate
MACM27 Public Relations: Theory & Practice 1 (30 credits)
MACM28 Media Research (15)    
MACM29 PR & Marketing Communications (15) 
    
Stage 2 – Postgraduate Diploma
MACM49 Public Relations: Theory & Practice 2 (30)  
MACM69 Social Media & PR (15)    
MACM70 PR and Society: Ethics and Critical Contexts (15)    

Stage 3 – Masters
MACM88 Dissertation (60)     
    OR             
MACM89 Practical Project (60)   

Those with a CIPR Diploma will join at Stage 2.

If you want to know more about MA Public Relations please contact Programme Leader Philip Young (philip.young@sunderland.ac.uk).

     

Why I love eMusic.com

Although I have been enjoying mp3s and downloaded music for quite a while - I still have my Diamond Rio PMP300 which held SIX whole songs!!!! - I have only recently become a iPod convert, and started to buy tracks from iTunes and Amazon.... and part of me still doesn't think it is real. This is partly because I like to have things I can hold and partly because I don't particularly like headphones.

Big leap forward number one was finding I could play my iPod through my car system. Big leap three will be finding a way to playing digital music in my house. I am thinking that a Logitech Squeezebox might be the answerr? Has anyone tried one?

Big leap two, was discovering www.emusic.com. For just £11.99 I can download 50 tracks a month, so about £2.50 an album. Not bad, but it is the selction that thrills me...

If you go to eMusic searching for chart-topping bands you will probably be disappointed, but if you like jazz, reggae and world music there are some real treats to be found.

I would have happily paid the month's subscription for Esbjorn Svensson Trio's Live in Hamburg double CD, but it cost only 10 of my May 50... leaving space for Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy and new discoveries like Lars Danielsson, Ted Nash and In The Country.  

I've also topped up with albums from Television, Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, Joe Strummer, Peter Bjorn and John, Royksopp, David Byrne and Brian Eno.

If you want an invite, let me know (that way I get 50 free tracks if you sign up...). 

PR in fiction abstract: Can you help?

Delighted that my abstract for Everywhere and Nowhere: Public Relations in postwar British fiction has been accepted for the Stirling 21 Public Relations Professional Project Conference, at the University of Stirling in September.

I have been working on this for a while but I would be very grateful to hear of any suggestions. As well as major characters (of which there are surprisingly few) I'm looking for quite fleeting appearances by people who are described as PR practitioners. 

I am aware of quite a number of novels which feature political spin doctors but not so many that include characters who work inhouse or in small agencies. Can you help?

Anyway, here's the abstract:

Everywhere and Nowhere: Public Relations in postwar British fiction
 
Commentators and critics frequently claim that ‘PR is everywhere’,  that its shaped messages pervade all forms of media. But at the same time it is readily acknowledged that most ‘ordinary’ people will struggle to name a PR practitioner or provide a definition of the discipline that could be readily accepted by its professional.

This tension routinely exercises those who seek to drive forward the professionalisation project. Many suggest that such development is made more difficult by media representations of PR. As in documentary, so in literature; although manipulation or distortion of message and truth is a mainstay of novels across many genres, there are relatively few developed characters in British fiction who are located within the practice of culture of Public Relations.

This paper suggests that the framings of fiction help us to identify and interrogate iconic and consensual constructions of public relations. Most novelists will strive to create of images and behaviours that resonate with public expectations; (usually) for a character or a plot device to succeed, the writer must have respect for parameters that are acceptable to the reader.

Often, a work environment or work role provides a vehicle for narrative expression and direction; certainly it can act as code or shorthand which both reflects and illuminates popular perceptions of that discipline or function. If the novelist is successful, fictional creations will reflect what is held to be an ‘accurate’,  certainly a plausible portrayal of the function and, in some cases. reinforce and amplify compliant descriptions to iconic status (an example might be Dixon of Dock Green, which became an accepted if unrealistic portrayal of a golden era of policing).

This paper draws on concepts developed in a similar study of journalism in fiction to examine at representations of Public Relations in a range of UK novels published since 1945, taking in genres ranging from crime and thrillers, popular and literary fiction, to fantasy and science fiction. Key texts include Christopher (The Death of Grass, 1956), Bedford (Exit, Orange & Red, 1997) and Kelly (Crusaders, 2008) but it is often passing references to incidental characters in novels with little structural connection with Public  Relations which offer the most resonate associations.
 
It gathers together these appearances under a variety of themes, some amusing, some trivial, which give an insight into how the public relations is held to operate, and how this is seen to impact on our society.  This in turn encourages critical reflection on the perceived worth of public relations and, in particular, its relationship with public interest.

 

A good time to say 'Thank you'...

Mediations will have been online for five years this week and it was great that this coincides with getting an email from Kogan Page to say that Online Public Relations has arrived from the printers. So, I am now awaiting a parcel... with an unsettling mixture of anticipation and anxiety. I am pretty sure David Phillips and I have had some good ideas over the many months it took to write the book but how many of them made it in to the final version in the way we would have wanted remains to be seen.

Anyway, as the big day approaches, I thought it would be appropriate to post my contribution to the Acknowledgments page of Online PR. As ever, there are lots of people who deserve to be here but aren't - it doesn't mean I have forgotten you! Thanks to you all.

Most of all I would like to thank David for inviting me to help with the second edition of Online PR. I have learnt more about social media from him than anyone else and am grateful for the opportunity to make a contribution to this book. I would also like to thank my Delivering the New PR friends Chris Rushton, Tom Murphy, Neville Hobson, Stuart Bruce and Elizabeth Albrycht, my EuroBlog partners Ansgar Zerfass, Swaran Sandhu and Anne-Marie Cotton, and the blogger I think has done most to help PR students, Richard Bailey. All of them exemplify my belief that the more you put into social media the more you get out of it.

Social Media Stategy presentation

Neat work from VizEdu

Typepad

Sent from my iPhone

Social Media key to Sunderland PR MA

I suppose it was predictable that some newspapers would pour scorn on Birmingham City University's MA in Social Media (check #masocialmedia). 

At Sunderland we are working hard on our new MA in Public Relations. Naturally, the need to understand the impact of social media is at the heart of the programme. 

We are not offering an MA in Facebook. But we do believe we would be failing our students badly if social media WASN'T a key element. 

Guilty secrets, forbidden books

Not long ago there was a story about the books people pretended they had read but hadn't really (bizarrely the short and readable 1984 was high on the list). I am not sure I have ever done that... but I have read quite a few books I would be quite embarrassed to admit I'd read. In fact I have two on the go at the moment that I might think about covering with brown paper before daring to be seen in public reading.

Officially I am engrossed in Jan Kjaerstad's The Discoverer but I have galloped through the first 65 pages of I Did a Bad Thing (but haven't we all!), by Linda Green. The thing is it has one of the those red on orangey-yellow, all handwritten curly letters chick-lit covers that I am far too cool and intellectual to even look at.

I was uneasy with this to start with - then my daughter picked it up and accused me of reading 'girly books'!

It's for work, I said, lamely.

And it is. The central character is a regional journalist. Quite early on she is treated rather shabbily by a boyfriend who worked on the Stockport Express, so I felt a bit guilty on her behalf, and anyway, this means it is prime material for my much-loved Scoop! project. Post(s) to follow.

The second guilty secret is Can We Do That? Outrageous PR Stunts That Work - and Why Your Company Needs Them, by Peter Shankman. This is tricky. It is public relations as publicity, column inches are everything, and written in a breathless self-help style that is close to the parody of my current favourite finally-bought-on-CD-20+-years-after-I-bought-the-record albums, Kissing With Confidence, by Will Powers (well worth a listen).

Dare I point my students to Shankman? Should I encourage them to read a such a stridently non-academic text? Believe me, this is not Grunig, Theaker or Gregory. It is not even Phillips and Young (Online PR 2nd Ed comes out in May!!!!).

But it has energy and ideas. I am enjoying it.

But nowhere near as much as Linda Green...   

Let's ban Facebook because kids like it...

People are saying horrible things about us - let's shut our eyes and put our fingers in our ears.

That seems to be the official line on social media taken by a lot of Further Education colleges. It is not, I hasten to add, the view of those who work in communications and marketing but does seem to be the prevailing attitude of those further up the foodchain.

I am analysing some useful feedback from delegates who will attend the Association of Colleges Communications Conference on Thursday. With Sunderland colleague Chris Rushton, I will be talking about Modern Media Trends and College Communications. To get us started, we did a survey, seeking to discover how college communicators used social media; the results were, let's say, ... challenging.

From the outset, I failed to anticipate that many, many colleges ban access to social media sites. One respondent tells us:

"We have a constant battle with IT over access to social media sites - in fact I had to send a staff member home to work on it - which I was then told was unacceptable in itself..."

The central theme of most replies focuses on 'policing' and 'control' - we are frightened that people will post negative comments etc. My response will be along the lines of "Live with it - they will say and are saying these things whether or not you engage with social media...."

Which is easy for me to say...

I would be very grateful for any practical advice I can hand on to communicators who are keen to contribute to social media conversations but need to persuade administrators, executives and... (heaven help us!) their IT departments that the possibility of hearing negative comments is not a good reason for missing out on a range of media channels that will go on being hugely popular - whatever FE College policy decrees.

Carpet > I love you

 

All communication is subject to mediation and repurposing - as this romantic gesture illustrates. Storey Carpets began by using the most basic publicity tool - painting the word "carpets" on the warehouse roof - and then demonstrated sophisticated public relations skills by responding to what some would brand as vandalism with warmth and humour. Story via the BBC.

Visualising social media from a Grunigian perspective

David Phillips has put together a thought-provoking graphic to illustrate what he calls a A Grunigian view of modern PR.  

UPDATE: And now James Grunig has added his own comment to David's Post.

PR in fiction: through the eyes of others

For sometime I have been thinking about setting up a companion to my Scoop! Journalists in Fiction blog, looking at the way public relations is represented by novelists. Only indolence holds back Scoop! but finding mentions of PR is more of a challenge.

Which is sort of the point. Scoop! suggests that it is instructive to see how writers portray journalism; by and large, authors strive to create convincing characters so their representations of the discipline and its practitioners must somewhow resonate with wider conceptions held by readers. When I get round to it, Spin! PR in Fiction will do the same thing, hopefully giving an insight into what a range of novelists consider to be plausible notions of who PR people are and what they do.

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Richard T Kelly's Tyneside-set Crusaders, an ambitious and impressive novel that is grounded in sharp observation and gritty realism. One of the central characaters, vicar John Gore meets his sister in brasserie (of course). Susannah has moved into lobbying: "Well, I was fucked off with PR. Having to worry about the size of bloody billboards all the time..."

If that is Kelly's conception of PR, how about this from Murray Sayle's tale of 1960s Fleet Street, A Crooked Sixpence (recently republished by Revel Barker). Sunday Sun reporters O'Toole and Knight are paying a visit to Oliver Dawson Associates, Advertising, Camden Town.

"What's your business exactly, Dawson?" asked Knight.

"Well, it used to be called publicity," said Dawson, "We've only recently reached the status of a profession, if you know what I mean. The proper term is public relations."

Dawson explains that he has a couple of hundred accounts, mainly in the 'medical and theatrical professions': "We work creatively, not to plug our clients indiscriminately, but to mould and guide the attitude of the public, to influence, in a straightforward way, of course, the editors of the mass media..."

His role is to "get customers to the point of sale". To do this he handwrites and pins up in shops cards informing passers-by that Miss Maria now gives relaxing treatment and Miss Raymonde offers corrective treatment.

Knight: "He's convinced himself that this is public relations and you will never shake him off it. It probably is, at that. What the hell is public relations, anyway?"

O'Toole: "It means getting stories into papers without paying for them."  

News of the What???

My level 3 Media Ethics class was looking at the News of the World's Gordon Ramsey "He's an F-ing Cheat" splash this week. .

The F-Word star—who revels in his family man image—began his affair with blonde Sarah Symonds seven years ago.

This week they met for sex at a London hotel. Hours earlier, she made a trip to Soho and bought legal sex drugs for their tryst.

There was a predictable split between those who though Ramsey was a hypocrite and those he thought he deserved a good shaming.

But there was complete agreement over one thing - not a single student knew what a 'tryst' was!

I wonder how many other words in the tablod lexicon mean absolutely nothing to the most of their readers?

We also looked at the activities of the NotW's Fake Sheik Mazher Mahmood. In My Trade, Andrew Marr says: "To many (Mahmood) is the epitome of what real investigative journalism is all about. To others, not only his victims but some judges, politicians and broadsheet journalists, he is a bugging, intrusive menace and a blot on the trade.”

One of his harshest critics is Roy Greenslade: read Why I am out to nail Mazher Mahmood 

In a vote at the end of sessions. both my groups decisively backed the Sheik. 

Mediations tastes Delicious

While trying to persuade my Level 3 students of the virtues of Delicious I had a flash of inspiration - or discovered the blindingly obvious. Your choice.

I think Delicious is one of the most valuable tools I use. Hardly a day goes by without me tagging something to my account. But I had never thought to tag my own posts to Mediations or Scoop! and take advantage of a very efficient indexing system, much more powerful and instructive than Typepad categories.

Has everybody else been doing this for years....?

How we do it: Journalism and PR@Sunderland blog

With my colleague Alex Lockwood, we have set up a blog for anyone studying PR or Journalism at Sunderland. It's early days yet but please take a look - any suggestions on how to improve it will be welcome.

As well as providing course info and pointers to interesting discussions, we hope it will also showcase some of the great work being done by our students. I think Alex and I are quite happy with how it is developing but as expected we need to do more work to encourage students to visit - RSS is not part of their culture and life is too exciting to actually check what lecturers are saying. Likewise, it is not easy to persuade non-blogging colleagues to really get involved...

Suggestions please!

President McCain... it's my fault

This is simply brilliant. I defy you not to forward it to someone...

Time for a change

Ethics and Social Media

I am in Stavanger, giving a presentation on Ethics and Social Media to the Norwegian Communication Association's Autumn Seminar. It is an impressive event attracting 400 delegates and even without Norwegian it is clear they have heard some good sessions.

Delegates who want to follow up some of the ideas I discussed might look at the Social Media Guidelines posted for consultation by the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations - download here.

Timing is everything

"Coming soon! A waterside development of luxury apartments...."

Sounds attractive? Well, maybe not when the billboard is a few yards from Morpeth's main street, which still bears the scars of Saturday's floods and where ruined furniture lies in heartbreaking piles outside real people's homes. 

Good communicators react to the news agenda. Hats off to Flybe who have given an aircraft named Kevin Keegan a black nose cone in protest at his treatment by Newcastle United.