News you might have missed during the Olympics

One message pervaded the British media over the first 2 weeks of August 2012 - with a particular emphasis during the 6th - 12th August. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic's “inspire a generation” message was unmissable, dutifully mentioned in a mass of media articles - whether news or feature; print, broadcast or online - and expressed by presenters, interviewers and journalists as well as interviewees. It was a veritable cut-and-paste of key messages during a largely manufactured public euphoria surrounding the Olympics TV event. The last time a phrase was so eagerly taken up by the media was probably in 2001 - when a war was declared on an abstract concept - has media coverage been so on-message. “The War on Terror” message was adopted by the media as much as it was proffered by politicians. 

The dominant PR actor during August has been the Olympics and Team GB. In terms of actual content consumed, BBC Sports reported the highest viewing figures in the history of the UK for the Olympics; 51.9 million UK viewers saw at least 15 minutes of the Games – equivalent to 90 per cent of the UK population. Such content generation provided an unrivaled vehicle for key message delivery. Excellent media training of the Team GB athletes ensured that the key message was at the core of every interview.

The media committed a vast amount of space and air time to the Olympics, but for most other PR actors - whether businesses, not for profits or even governments - it's been difficult or impossible to attract journalists’ attention with news that’s not centred around running, jumping, throwing or rowing. 

Now that the Games are out of the way though, journalists suddenly have a lot of spare pages and airtime to fill, and are hungry for news. Understanding the media agenda is crucial to securing coverage, and a vital element of PR planning. Big events like the Olympics are bound to dominate the media agenda and so block opportunities for editorial coverage of other PR actors. Organisations that have planned well avoided conducting any PR activity over the period. However, the world hasn’t stopped. Big events and noteworthy news were taking place  over the last few weeks. Here’s just a selection of things you might have missed:

• Kofi Annan resigns as special UN envoy to Syria – Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations resigned his position as special envoy to Syria during the first week of the Games. The author of the UN’s six point peace plan for Syria blamed his resignation on “finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council” in a letter to the Financial Times. Annan closed his letter by asking “is ours an international community that will act in defence of the most vulnerable of our world, and make the necessary sacrifices to help?"

• NASA lands mobile laboratory Curiosity on Mars – NASA succeeded in shooting Curiosity – a roving, robotic, self-contained laboratory on wheels that is roughly the size of a Mini Cooper – to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour. The craft travelled a distance of 570 million kilometres and successfully landed in a circle approximately 20 kilometres wide. This is a distance that would take Usain Bolt – the fastest man who has ever lived – 1,459 years to travel, even at his top speed of 44.72km/h. Curiosity was sent to Mars to analyse the planet’s geology in an attempt to ascertain whether it could have once supported life. It’s nuclear powered, on Twitter and has posted several images from the surface of Mars. Yet it secured only one line on the BBC News front page, and the touchdown in the red sand of Mars was several pages behind Greg “Ginger Wizard” Rutherford’s arrival in the long-jump sand.

• UN Global Arms Conference dissolved – On the day of the Opening Ceremony, watched by 900 million people worldwide, a UN Global Arms Conference was quietly shelved without resolution. The conference had hoped to hammer out a treaty to prevent the sale of weapons to nations under arms embargoes, or to those who would use them to “promote acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.” The treaty has been supported by humanitarian charities including Amnesty International and Oxfam. However, the US, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea all asked for more time to deliberate, and it is unlikely that discussions will continue until after the US elections in November. This means that, according to Oxfam, it is still easier export AK-47s than bananas.

• Rebekah Brooks and six former News International staff charged over phone hacking – Former News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks was formally charged with phone hacking (following the CPS's statement of intent weeks before) and importantly had court dates set. Brooks faces up to two years in prison alongside David Cameron’s former spin doctor Andy Coulson and five other former News of the World journalists. Brooks is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in September 2012, while the other seven accused will be heard earlier, at the same court, in August 2012.

• French Central Bank predicts slide into recession – France’s central bank (Banque de France) said it expected the country’s GDP to fall 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2012.  This marks the first time the country has officially been in recession since spring 2009.While this news compounds the ignominy of being roundly beaten in the medal tables by Team GB athletes, the UK itself was not immune. The economy continued to suffer as the Bank of England cut its growth prediction to near zero. However, in the wake of the overwhelming wave of optimism and positivity that swept the country over the Olympic period, this gloomy economic prediction was widely ignored.

• Rory McIlroy sweeps US PGA as Tiger lags – In our opinion, sports reporting isn't really news, but a record breaking is. Far from the madding crowds of the Olympics, golfer Rory McIlroy was quietly reclaiming his title as world number one. McIlroy, from Holywood in Northern Ireland, won the US PGA by a record-breaking eight shots – one more than previous record holder, Jack Nicklaus, set in 1980. Despite the fact that golf, along with rugby sevens, will be in Rio’s 2016 Olympics, coverage of one of the world’s biggest golf tournaments was pushed from both front and back pages by the Games.

• Magic Mike mix-up – A children’s entertainer from Scarborough, stage name Magic Mike, has discovered the hard way that all publicity is not necessarily good publicity. Following the UK release of Steven Soderburgh film Magic Mike, which features Channing Tatum as the titular character – a male stripper. The entertainer – real name Michael DeFreitas – has been receiving inquiries from confused punters seeking “adult entertainment.” Mr DeFreitas has expressed his bemusement and worries about the mix up, stressing that he has never taken a stitch off but is now unsure whether his audience will feature “screaming women or screaming kids.”

Nobody reads the papers for the adverts. They read it for the content – the news, the features, the interviews. But for the first two weeks of August in 2012, almost all of coverage in the UK was Olympic Games related.

While media dominating events can be planned for, circumstances can occasionally conspire to create a media storm that drowns out everything else. On 11^th September, 2001, only one thing was on the media agenda, and no product, release or event could hope to secure coverage for several weeks.

Some things are impossible to plan for, but events like the Olympics shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone planning a PR campaign. With careful planning, companies can avoid conducting PR activity during big, scheduled events such as the Olympics that are likely to dominate the media agenda. Instead, they should use the downtime to develop collateral and to schedule media relations activity for a more opportune moment. Ideally just before the media dominating event is over. The quicker off the mark you are to fill the resultant news deficit, the more likely you are to achieve coverage. 

Blagged by a blog, hacks should pull up their socks

The popular American online newspaper Huffington Post launched its UK edition last week and with the site reading like a who’s who of the political, social and entertainment elite, one would assume that blogging is as good a form of journalism as any. Co-founder Arianna Huffington knows that much of her brand’s success is engagement with the audience and “the incredible impact social media can have in accelerating change”. Ordinary citizens have slowly become instrumental in the modern news making process and their shouts are finally being heard, but as social media and the blogosphere expand it’s difficult to see whether it’s a step forward for democracy or just more online noise pollution.

Today social networking, championed by the masses, is a force to be reckoned with. Facebook has more than 750 million users and every day the world writes an equivalent of a 10 million page book in Tweets. The internet’s power to impact on the news has been evident in the News of the World phone hacking scandal of late, where the online campaign to boycott the newspaper influenced the Murdoch Empire’s decision to discontinue the 168 year old publication. News of the scandal spread like wildfire and became, in a matter of days, the whole nation’s chosen topic of conversation-- starting on their laptops and ending over a pint in the pub. It seems the internet has developed into quite the formidable forum for debate, comment and opinion.

A great example of the proliferation of citizen journalism is the blog ‘A gay girl in Damascus’ which attracted coverage from the most prestigious of news corporations, the BBC, The Guardian and CNN to name a few. These publications’ respected journalists; moved by the plight of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari- a young lesbian woman living in politically unstable Muslim Syria, hung on the blogger’s every word and recounted her tales of trials and tragedy to their sizeable readerships. Sharing her personal struggle with her sexuality set against the backdrop of a war-torn and fiercely religious country, Amina’s experiences appeared to cast a spotlight on serious political issues surrounding the repressive Syrian regime.

The power of the blog came into full force when her ‘cousin’ alerted followers that Amina had been abducted by security forces, triggering online campaigns and causing the US embassy to launch an investigation on her whereabouts. Little did they know Amina was in fact the alter-ego of Tom MacMaster-- a 40 year old American with a life-size imagination, living out his bizarre fantasy from the comfort of his bedroom in the pretty Scottish city of Edinburgh. Quite a coup for the Masters student, who transformed his image from an unsightly unknown to an attractive, compelling wordsmith; racking up almost 100,000 page views and counting some of the world’s most established journos among his admirers. Eventually MacMaster confirmed growing suspicions that his blog was fictional, but the plot continued to thicken when it emerged ‘Amina’ was pursuing an online relationship with ‘Paula Brooks’, the editor of pro-homosexuality site ‘Lez Get Real’- another site posing under a false premise. Both transpired to be middle aged male bloggers, no doubt getting a kick out of successfully seducing a lesbian, completely oblivious to each others true gender – the irony is far from lost.

‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ sparked outrage in the blogosphere with many Syrians claiming MacMaster has taken away their voice in true ‘boy who cried wolf’ style, potentially damaging the opportunity for Middle Eastern citizens to have their say. It’s worth remembering, however, that reputable news companies handed ‘Amina’ the megaphone in the first place. What began as a personal project ended up a worldwide phenomenon – all because professional journalists fell for the story hook line and sinker. An industry that prides itself on holding others to account and exposing wrongdoing forgot the golden rule of journalism, check, double check and bloody well check the facts again- and were too busy pulling on the nation’s heartstrings to investigate the credibility of their sources.

There’s no doubt that the Internet has finally put the citizen on the news map, albeit armed with the handy shield of the computer screen. There’s a lot of stuff on the web that is fake, misleading and incorrect. Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that comes with the territory of being the biggest advance in communication in our time. The age old warning of online predators is more relevant today than ever and professional journalists would do well to remember that you can’t always trust people you meet on the net.

Traditional news media have been given an opportunity to play God with the swathes of information now available and must hand pick the wheat from the chaff – instead lazy journalism has left them scraping the barrel. Many attempts at citizen journalism do become valid sources of information, but MacMaster isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last of the online con artists. With so many different voices vying for attention, internet noise pollution is rife but manageable. The noise only becomes problematic when journalists neglect the basic principles of their profession and allow unchecked information to disguise itself as news. After all, ‘Amina’ was only telling a tale, not writing the front pages of a bestselling newspaper.