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‘You haven’t got a PR problem, you’ve got a reality problem.’

Enjoyed this presentation by AlistairCampbell. He neatly puts his finger on the disconnect between the unrealistic hopes of company execs and the real world outcomes of PR.

‘I get calls from people out of the blue… But when a government or company or a big brand comes on, I always assume two things – 1, they have a problem; and 2, they think it is about the communications. They think they need a spin doctor.
So I go and see them and the first thing I do is say: “who are your key people?” and I ask to see them too, at the same time. And I get out some plain white postcards. And on each one is written the words: "The main objective of our organization is …"
‘And I ask them to end that sentence. Then I ask them to turn over the postcard, and it says:"The strategy to meet our objective is …"
‘And I ask them to fill that out too. Then I gather them in. And nine times out of ten, I gather in a stack of different objectives, strategies which are tactics, or strategies which are objectives, and I say to them… you don’t have a spin problem, you have a reality problem. 'If you are not aligned on strategy, you, the key people running the show, why should the public be expected to know and hear what you are trying to say or sell to them? And why should the media not take every chance it can to make your life more difficult, pore over your errors, ignore your successes?”

Of course he’s right. It’s probably the most frustrating thing that PRs have to deal with, the immanent failure of executives to integrate PR into all their work, instead to see it as a post-facto magic wand.

But how many other lowly PRs would embarrass a potential client at first pitch like this? How many would actually succeed in such a way by highlighting said client’s board-level dissonance?

I’m sure it works for Alistair Campbell but, by dint of his reputation, I think AC has most other PRs at a disadvantage here.  

Chewing the cud with journalists

When I was a journalist and short of a story I would spend hours on the phone talking to contacts for ‘golden quotes’. It’s a basic news trawling exercise that relies upon the art of making conversation, rocket science it aint.

I would just talk, have a chat, chew the cud, engage about anything and everything and wait for the contact to say something interesting and… newsworthy, why else would I have been calling?

The approach could be refined in proportion to the expertise of said contact. For example, if I was working on a provincial daily newspaper and wanted to know what’s going on in town, I'd speak to the pub landlord, the post office master, or newsagent. Just a bit of idle chit-chat for a few minutes, and I'd turn up a story.

A refined version of the ‘golden quotes’ tactic served equally well with contacts who had more specialist expertise than the bloke down the pub. The only difference was that the chit-chat took place at a more rarefied level of discourse. The outcome, however, would usually be the same. After a few minutes on the blower, I’d have a lead for a story.

Any decent reporter worth their salt continues to employ this tactic, they pick up the phone, they chat, they listen (they take notes).

Now sometimes it’s obvious why a journalist is calling, you know their angle and this can limit the chit chat a little. Other times a journalist calls up and they genuinely have no angle, they’re just after a story, anything really. 

I make this point to clients all the time nothing else matters to journalists, apart from stories. It's their medium of exchange, lifeblood.

It’s great when you can give them something, it doesn’t have be about your organization or client (journalists don’t particularly care about your client, they care about stories). Perhaps they’d be interested in a story you’ve read somewhere else (though usually not from a rival publication).

At other times you don’t have have a story at all. It’s at times like this that I like to turn the ‘golden quotes’ tactic into reverse, especially if the journalist is not near a deadline. I like to engage them in a conversation, find out what’s going on in their world, what’s happening in the newsroom? What’s today’s splash? How many staff photographers are on the books these days? Are they doing any freelance work? How many leads have they had this week? Best ever scoop? How did they stack it up? Talk news with journalists, talk their language. 

I think it helps. 

Leveson journo who lifted lid on dodgy press starts news channel exposing... er dodgy press.

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This is good. A new Youtube site ‘The Spike’ set up Richard Peppiatt, a former Express journalist who blew the lid on dodgy newsroom ethics at the Richard Desmond vanity title.

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Le charm discret de la bourgeoisie Vs Come dine with me.

I watched Luis Bunuels’ Discreet Charm for the first time recently on the back of comparisons between it and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

Discreet Charm is a better film –notwithstanding the aesthetic beauty of Von Trier - and is in some ways similar to Bunuel’s earlier Exterminating Angel. In both films Bunuel uses the dinner party as a means to satirize and poke a particular kind of surreal fun at the bourgeoisie.

Both revolve around the genteel rituals of the dinner party, in particular the polite discretion each middle class attendee affords the other.  Etiquette demands that certain conversations be off the menu.  

In ‘Discreet Charm’ Bunuel is having none of this polite dinner stuff. Instead he interrupts each of his middle class protagonists’ attempts at breaking bread with an excursus into social relations that underpin the surface of this polite society: adultery, drug running, assassinations, militarism, addictions, all are rudely played out to the annoyance of the dinner set, continuously interrupting their attempts to eat. The film is surreal and funny whilst ripping away the mask of polite society, thrusting the reality of domination into the audience and the actors faces.

I wonder what Bunuel would make of ‘Come DineWith Me’? A show that revels in encouraging its working class participants to heights of indiscretion, bitchiness and freakery.  A kind of ‘Discreet Charm’ turned on its head?

Field Recording 0001: Call to Prayer Turkey jul 2012

Walking around on a recent trip to Turkey I happened to be passing a mosque when the Adhan or call to prayer began.
I'd been wanting to capture this sound as a field recording and I managed to get a decent clip. It was outside a mosque in the tourist town of Marmaris.
My ideal would be to get a field recording in a larger urban environment when the sound of hundreds of mosques calling out at the same time gives rise to an almost unreal layering of sound that is unique to Muslim countries.