hmmm

020 7269 1430

• Communication
• Legal Business
• Real Estate
• Wealth Management

When The Going Gets Tough… Hacks Become PRs

March 27, 2009

Speaking for himself, as a scribe, Blade has no problem with PRs. They do their job, and journalists do another. There are those, such as Nick Davies, who aren’t convinced that the PR industry is a force for good, but Blade believes that across its various sectors, from legal PR to environmental PR, even including property and accountancy PR, there are good eggs, bad eggs and some boring old indifferent ones.

But those who agree with Davies – who believe that PR is the dark side, while journalism is all baubles, joy and light – will be aghast at this story from the Press Gazette. It appears that financial impoverishment thanks to the recession has led many journalists to seek a new career in… PR.

As the Gazette has it, the National Union of Journalists has even organised a conference in Bristol to introduce out-of-work journalists to the PR industry. The NUJ regrets having do this, calling it a “sad indictment of the newspaper industry”, but for those not so squeamish Saturday 4th April is the day for your diaries.

Blade does have one or two concerns. If there are diminishing numbers of journalists, and increasing numbers of PRs, won’t there be something of an imbalance? And if the trend continues, so that everyone becomes a PR, who will write the stories? Once they’re written, who will they give them to? And if newspapers keep closing, who will publish them?

Perhaps we’re heading for a world full of stories which are destined for homelessness, ones which will be written but not told. At that point, one hopes, we’ll be emerging from the recession and the new PR/Journalist will become… a newspaper proprietor.

The Purpose of a Thought for the Day

March 26, 2009

Regular readers of Swordplay will be aware that we hew, from deep within the labyrinths in which we toil, a thought for the day. We do so every day, save on weekends, when we try to suspend thought and simply be. We are not alone in enjoying a thought for the day, for it is a staple of many media enterprises. And no wonder, too: a thought for the day is a succinct and reliable means of stimulating debate.

That being the case, when we posted Milan Kundera’s line that “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation”, did we “lose all credibility”, as one reader opines?

Or did we simply post a thought for the day, as is our habit, sans editorial endorsement?

And now we’re thinking about this, what, exactly, did Kundera mean? We’re not sure – which is why we put his thought up in the first place.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? LaTur’s image, courtesy of Flickr, makes us wonder. It also reminds us of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But that’s another story (by Milan Kundera, as it happens).

Libel Lawyers: Positive PR Needed?

March 26, 2009

Jo Glanville writes passionately in today’s Guardian about what Lord Hoffman called “the blackmailing effect” of our libel laws. She bemoans the no win, no fee regime and laments the fact that, according to a recent study by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University, the cost of libel litigation in England and Wales is 140 times the average elsewhere in Europe. As she puts it, the present system has turned “the libel courts into casinos”.

Unfortunately, all this has been said since time immemorial. Indeed, so hackneyed do the arguments over libel appear to be – on both sides – that Blade sometimes wonders whether this grandiose bickering has assumed the form of a curious English ritual. Talking of which, when confronted with the barrage of cliche that libel, like no other area of law, seems destined to provoke, Blade wishes he could travel in a time machine to a society which settled its disputes by means of a good old-fashioned duel. After all, it was good enough for Joseph Conrad, so why not?

But despite his weariness when it comes to hearing the same tired old phrases trotted out (next up: “London is the libel capital of the world”), Blade is, at the end of the day, an Article 10 man. As such, he too is in mournful mood. The cause is a conversation he had with his literary agent recently. She told Blade that it was becoming more and more difficult to place “tricky” manuscripts, i.e., those with some degree of legal risk. “Publishers don’t want to touch them,” she said. “They get scared off by the prospect of fighting a huge legal battle.” She even said that, as an agent, she was increasingly familiar with the libel lawyers’ letter before action. “If I get a lawyer’s letter, that’s usually it,” she confessed. “The MS is returned to the author.”

But libel isn’t all bad. It exists for a purpose. It is blatantly wrong for a newspaper such as the Express to publish a series of falsehoods about Kate and Gerry McCann, and it is right that those so vilified have a means of redress. But maybe – just maybe – it’s time for the claimant libel lawyers to highlight the good they do, rather than stand on the back foot and simply rebut the many attacks made on them. In other words, the ancient tort of libel might just need bit of trendy 21st century PR.

Pictured: a dragonfly of the family Libellulidae found throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. With thanks to Martin Werker.

« Previous Page — Next Page »