Posts Tagged ‘journalist’

Yesterday I managed to find the time to lunch one of my old journalist pals. Now retired, the wizened old hack knew how to harvest my leads because he cut his teeth in an age when press releases were walked into the newspapers and news desks and journalists needed copious amounts of TLC.

In an age of time-compressed newsrooms and the ten-minute news cycle, opportunities for the old school long lunch are pretty much all encased in the British Museum, alongside a sorry-looking stuffed Dodo. This is a shame, as there were valuable lessons to be learned at the long lunch coalface back in the day.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from these Bacchanalian skirmishes was the precious skill of face reading. But now we live in a world where nearly all communication is done by email or text and a network of contacts can be built up with a few clicks on a keyboard.
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Scathing and probing headlines are continuing to castrate and castigate BP’s hapless crisis PR endeavours, further to my blog of the other day. Disapproving chatter clutters the web and denunciatory journalists, bloggers and commentators continue to feed on the corporate leviathan’s swift downward trajectory.

The latest casualty in the ongoing debate about the oil spill fiasco is the global PR financial shop Brunswick. Alan Parker’s stately independent whale has made a habit of maintaining the lowest of profiles. Accomplished, circumspect and effective, Brunswick are respected in the financial orbit for their tactful and discreet diplomacy. The company have successfully produced a number of Richelieu figures, many of whom have gone on to the most powerful corporate multinationals.

The diabolical fix their client is in has started to spatter even their enviable brand reputation with the sticky, oily residue of failure. Brunswick now face a very public, very uncomfortable test. There was a time when the solemn and sober Alan Parker would, like Zelig, be visible at every corporate disaster; an undertaker with a reassuring demeanour. But no more. Crisis comms have not been one of Brunswick’s most effective tools of late. Read the rest of this entry »

Given the current debate surrounding PR, PR spam and how to further the better practices of PR in the 21st Century, the news that 3am has fallen out with Peter Andre’s management, CAN Associates because CAN wanted to control every aspect of a minor story about Andre teaming up with a coffee emporium can’t have come at a worse time. 3am’s account makes for riveting reading. Click here to find out more.

PR is living in interesting times at the moment. As traditional marketing and advertising suffers a confidence slump, the best people in PR are carefully repositioning themselves and the PR industry into a lead practice that can take on all aspects of the modern, digitally savvy rapid-change media. But for every good and forward-thinking PR firm, there’s always one who wallows in the clichés of the industry, as CAN’s attempts to out-Kingsley Pat Kingsley have proved. Read the rest of this entry »

Is PR spam the new chlamydia? Certainly it’s being fulminated about an awful lot as the latest social disease that may have infected us all, although we’re too often too ashamed to check out the symptoms.
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Our publicist which art in Chinawhite
shallowed be our names.
Thy quick-fix come,
thy stunts be run
in Heat as they are on Popbitch.
Give us this day our daily big-ups
and forgive us our coke deals
as we forgive those who report our coke deals to the press.
Lead us not into the Priory
and deliver us from journalists
for thine is the Twitter, the spin-cycle and the story
for fifteen months and forever.

Amen.

Adam Horovitz

Written after hearing that a chain of hotels frequented by celebrities, which are to be featured in a reality show, have asked to use The Fame Formula as a replacement for the Gideon’s Bible – something for the down-at-heel Z Lister to turn to for inspiration.