Posts Tagged ‘tabloid’

In a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, or so it would seem to anyone born after 1989, there was a big TV name called Michael Elphick. He had a hit show, attracting millions of viewers. He’d been a party animal in his time and, for some reason, a Sunday taboid editor decided to take him down a notch. Elphick drafted me in to try and wrangle the gorilla.

This was a time when mobile phones were nothing more than a twinkle in the eye of the Star Trek props department and folk depended on land lines. A time when many, many celebrities chose to make themselves ex-directory, their number only available to friends, to protect their privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was a momentous day for British journalism and, of course, the PR industry. The world’s biggest English speaking Sunday tabloid newspaper is dead. Rupert Murdoch’s action to try and halt the hurricane sweeping through his empire by taking a Butcher’s cleaver to his own corporate flesh was tactical filicide.

It seems clear from the events of recent days, especially the confusion and contradictory messages from the News International camp, that the company was struggling to thwart the meltdown of the brand and counter the opprobrium.

The move to close the paper, and thereby protect the brand, took my breath away. As a veteran voyeur, I’ve seen some of the extraordinary events Murdoch’s committed in Fleet Street, yet I am unable to work out if this one is a masterstroke or a gesture of panic. I can only suggest that this was a ruthless, brutal and cynical publicity stunt. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an unimaginable horror to be in the middle of an awful tabloid scandal, your human frailty laid bare. Yes dear reader – I’ve been there when it’s happened. It’s a dark, sad, dank and lonely space. Watching and being with the subject is not the most edifying part of my job, witnessing a tsunami of emotions hitting from all directions as the story is outed.

The humiliation, the public outrage, everyone diving in to offer an opinion. The sniggers the jokes, then the realisation that ‘I’ve lost everyone. Will my sponsors disappear? What an end to my career! Please make the professional humiliation go away. How will my family cope? Will it ever be the same again?’ This rush of emotions concludes with: ‘how could I have been so stupid?’. Read the rest of this entry »

The “Fairy Tale” Royal engagement, announced yesterday, prompted an outpouring of joy in this morning’s papers. The red tops in particular are euphoric, filled to the brim with jubilant headlines and rapturous copy. I suspect the coverage arouses hope that the event will provide succour to their declining readership and influence. Past trends suggest papers do sell on these occasions, but beware the thread of over-optimism.

Hypnotised by the acres of print and online clamour, I have become absorbed by the stratagems and apparatus of the rejuvenated Royal PR pixies. This was not a unrehearsed, impromptu public announcement. The manoeuvre was contrived and pre-planned and immensely successful. Gobbets of positive content were distributed by sources close to the couple as well as the disconnected, well-prepared Royal experts. There was no vacuous emptiness on display. The proceeding nine years of official and off piste snapped moments, images of the couples’ courtship were all recycled and resulted in a gluttonous feeding frenzy. In the information age, nine years is a lifetime, generating a huge amount of detritus to reprocess and attribute.

Back in 1981 two thirds of the great British unwashed thought a Royal wedding was a good idea. Can the same be said now? Will they be put off by the fact that, just as we see the flowering of sensible Royal PR, we are also enduring the PR cliche, the spew and slew of endless opportunist press releases, cashing in on the euphoria?
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It was saddening to read about the death of Eileen Nearne, aged 89, who had lived a reclusive life for 20 years and had few if any friends and a niece who lived abroad and last managed to visit her 6 months before she died.

It’s always sad to see someone left so alone in the world, but doubly so with Nearne as it turned out she was a war hero in the Second World War and none of her neighbours knew. A member of the Special Operations Executive during the war, she had parachuted behind German lines, been captured twice and talked her way out of trouble before being incarcerated in a labour camp – which she then escaped from and went on the run until the American troops arrived.

This modest woman spoke to no one about her exploits in the last 20 years of her life and was only saved from a council grave by the discovery of wartime French currency, her MBE and various letters that have now been sent to the Ministry of Defence.

But saddest of all is the sort of stories that are appearing in the tabloids at the moment – Wayne Rooney’s sex life still rules the roost Read the rest of this entry »

It’s great to see that the fairy godmother of Edinburgh publicity, Liz Smith, has won the Bank of Scotland Herald Archangel Award. It has taken more than three decades for her to get the pat on the back that she so richly deserves, given the amount of help she has given others for so many years; some justice for the old school, who tend to be overlooked in the internet age.

There’s a proliferation of websites emerging at the moment, offering emergency PR advice for Edinburgh, but what use are these with ten days of the Festival left to play with? A show or act needing to get reviews needs help from an experienced publicist. Of course people need to start somewhere, but recognition for Liz Smith will hopefully highlight the need for both beginner publicists and producers and acts to seek out the x factor brought by experience if they are going to make any of their incursions into digital or traditional media work and work well.

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As the true scale of the disaster brought about by the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history becomes clear, it’s good to see that the British tabloids are supporting the humanitarian aid relief by giving acres of coverage – to the aftermath of the first episode of X Factor. Good to know they have their priorities in such well-oiled working order and are so keenly supporting the disaster zone that is the early rounds of Simon Cowell’s show.

New media commentators have decreed that the age of the personal PR minder is dead. “Long live Twitter” is their clarion call. It’s the new communication tool for folk in the public eye. Openness and willingness to feed the twitter cycle offers an opportunity to unveil the ‘real you’; to be judged as well as to engage in an open, public conversation.

Who needs a flak when you talk directly to the people? The evidence that stellar Twitter personalities – in the shape of Ashton Kutcher, Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry and Sarah Brown – have benefited from this thesis is proof that they are shining examples of successful DIY #PR 3.0. Read the rest of this entry »