Those that can, become local government press officers

I was working on a response to an enquiry early today from a well-known broadsheet. The journalist’s name stuck out as someone I had dealt with in the past.

After a quick Google, I found her Twitter page. I remembered that the last time I searched for her, I saw a tweet commenting on how many out of office email replies she’d gotten from council press officers, saying they were lazy and workshy or words to that effect.

A tweet I saw on her Twitter page today made reference to a particular council press office with the comment, “Those that can’t become council press officers.”

I’d like to see her do a day in this press office. It’s not all parks openings and bin collections, you know, although with Pickles on the rampage, the latter is enough to keep us in business most of the time.

Today I’ve dealt with Panorama regarding ID fraud discussing our months of filming with them, BBC TV news about Brent Council winning the judicial review on library closures and organising an interview for them, a child trafficking piece for the Times we worked with the Home Office on following a prosecution that couldn’t have been won without this council and a particularly nasty enquiry from another broadsheet. I’ve also kept my eye on the HS2 debate in parliament, the No to HS2 campaign being a priority for this council.

I of course answered her enquiry quickly and professionally.

As well as these reactive stories, today I’ve met with the Leader of this council to talk about how we can let more old people in the borough know about our schemes to keep them warm in the winter and how we can work with Age UK get them more volunteers.

While I’ve been doing this, my colleagues have been working on more enquiries and pushing stories so we can let our residents know what services we provide and what we’re using their council tax to do.

We deal with enquiries because we get an endless stream of them from journalists and it’s fair and right that we have right of reply, even though our responses to stories are frequently ignored and left out.

This job isn’t glamorous. I’m not trying to get a client’s new nail polish in a magazine or bribing a journalist with a new product or getting them drunk in the hope they’ll write something positive about my company. But what this council does is important.

We are a particularly good press office at this council. And I know that because journalists, as well as other communications professionals, tell us so.

I am fiercely proud to do what I do and take strong exception to anyone who thinks that local government PR is a soft option. It’s really not.

Anyway, that’s my five minute break over. I have another statement to draft before catching the news at 6.30pm for our library story.

One man’s news is another man’s one-upmanship

This picture sums up the mood on Twitter on Saturday. News had just come in about the death of Amy Winehouse while most of us were still digesting what had happened the day before in Norway. Those who weren’t comparing the two tragedies were either expressing their disgust at people’s abhorrant attitudes to addiction or having a pop at the people saying Norway was a far worthier cause to get upset about.

Who made us the judge?

What is newsworthy to one person isn’t necessarily to the another. Having said that, the news tends to feed us what we want to hear, whether the story be good or bad. The great Glen was musing about the lack of coverage for the famine situation in Africa on Saturday morning versus the cacophony of rolling news about Norway (much of which was wrong and downright offensive).

Was the situation in Norway perhaps easier for us to hear? After all, there’s not much we can do about a madman on the rampage. It’s much easier to consume that information. It’s one-way. Watching the news about a famine can actually prompt you to do something to help. And who can be arsed with that? Maybe not us. Add to that the fact the people in Norway are a bit like us (white, and in Europe) and you can see why it’s perhaps easier not just to consume, but to identify with the suffering there.

Now compare that to Winehouse. I have no idea if there were more comments on Twitter about her than Norway but I can understand how there can perhaps be more personal empathy. If you are more inclined to sympathise with Norway than Africa then why can’t you be further inclined to sympathise with Winehouse. I think more of us have heard about Amy and have listened to her music than have a connection with Norway. We all appreciate her talent as well as know people who have suffered from addiction. We also know people who have died. Is it easier to identify with a single death of one personality? Perhaps.

Saying this, I don’t think people were more bereft by Winehouse’s death than Norway. They just expressed sorrow and for one reason or another, got picked up on it. Unnecessarily, just like in that picture.

Whatever it is we’re interested in or however we feel, we shouldn’t be made to feel bad about it. But on this I’m with the people expressing their disgust at people’s abhorrant attitudes to addiction and with the people questioning others comparison of Winehouse and Norway. Why bother? I really didn’t understand the point. Was it to make people feel silly for being sad about a young woman’s death? It felt a bit like that. It did nothing other than make people feel bad about their feelings and in some cases, genuine grief.

Is all public relations communication organisational propaganda?

This is an essay I wrote for my Chartered Institute of Public Relations Diploma.

To decide whether or not all public relations communication is organisational propaganda would first require cast-iron definitions of each term and defining both has always been a problem. The origins of the term propaganda seems to stem from the word propagate which came in the 18th century, from the Latin “propagare” (to propagate). The word relates to “propages” (a slip, a cutting of a vine) and refers to how gardeners produce new plants by planting shoots. So you could say propaganda is a form of communication aimed at “planting shoots” of ideas, or sowing seeds of ideas, with the goal of trying to influence attitudes toward a cause, a position, or a policy.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines propaganda as “any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice”. It adds that the propagation of information is carried out “by an interested party, especially in a tendentious way in order to encourage or instil a particular attitude or response”.

Jowett and O’Donnell (2006) define propaganda as the “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”. With much of what is thought about propaganda as negative, this definition could give us a good starting point to consider whether all public relations is organisational propaganda. However, there are far too many negative connotations with propaganda to assume anyone can consider ‘propaganda’ as a neutral term.

The first time the term propaganda was used in the sense we understand it now was in the 17^th century Roman Catholic Church, which established the ‘de Propaganda Fide’ to “mobilise talented intellectuals of every sort into a vast social apparatus to persuade men and women all across the globe to believe in Christian doctrine or, if perchance they had fallen astray, to rekindle their faith” (Jackall, 1995). If the Roman Catholic Church was to do this now it may simply be described as public relations.

With the advent of mass media, war rape was used as propaganda to justify colonisation of places and the most notable example was perhaps during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Beckman, 2003). Here, Indian soldiers rebelled againstBritain’s attempted rule. While rape incidents committed by Indian rebels against British women or girls were uncommon, examples were exaggerated to great effect by the media to justify continued British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. Stories were printed with little evidence to support them. This media management (or propaganda) was an attempt at changing public opinion much like public relations does today.

Great expectations

I wrote a post a while ago about my thoughts on cutting local government communications at a time when residents should, more than ever I believe, be well informed about council services. My points about why we should do both pro and reactive media relations still stand. However, I’m starting to get the answers to my question asking how we’re going to manage with fewer staff.

We used to have four members of staff answering questions from the media where I work. They would take it in turns and on the days when they weren’t dealing with reactive bits and pieces they would work on pushing stories.

Contrary to popular belief, this pushing stories lark doesn’t mean spinning and simply telling residents what wonderful people us public sector folk are (although some of us are, of course). It’s promoting new children’s centres so people know they’re there. A press release sent earlier this week was about activities for teens to do in the summer holidays. Another piece of work was about a free loft insulation scheme to help the elderly reduce their winter fuel bills. We also let people know when our fraud team has contributed to the conviction of a benefit cheat so residents know we’re doing our best to look after their council tax money.

Without the means to tell people about the things we are doing, residents wouldn’t know and what would be the point in these services existing if they sat there unused? There’s also the issue of reputation management.

But now we have two members of staff (and a team assistant we have highjacked) doing the same job four used to. And compared to this time last year, over the last few months we have had a 50 per cent rise in the number of enquiries we’re getting from journalists. So we haven’t just got fewer staff, we’ve got substantially more work. In this new working world, we have two doing the job that the equivalent of six would have done last year.

Having fewer staff and more work wouldn’t be so difficult if the stories we’re faced with didn’t include things like this, this, this, this and this. Once a story gets picked up nationally, there’s no stopping it. The phone rings off the hook and journalists (quite rightly) demand right of reply and put in requests for interviews. For the more sensitive subjects, you need headspace to think about and work on them. Where necessary, you need time to write the strategy so the web team knows what the media relations team is doing and the person stuck in court all day knows things are covered at the office.

Is this change in staffing levels and workload in our communications team indicative of what’s happening across local authorities as a whole? Perhaps.

A letter to the editor

Dear Mr Beard,

So someone referred to your newspaper as a local rag? Hold the front page!

As the big bad defamer and council comms chief John Shewell said earlier today, phoning him would have been preferable to sending an email suggesting he had ‘defamed’ you. The man was correcting something you’d got wrong.

“As to your comment describing the Argus as a “local rag”, the advice from our company lawyer is that the tweet as a whole is defamatory in that it characterises The Argus (and therefore the Editor and individual members of staff) as a “rag” that carelessly or incompetently publishes false or misleading information and is not to be relied on.”

Really, Michael?

Christ, if councils sent tetchy emails to every newspaper that defamed them, servers across the land would be collapsing under the weight of never before seen levels of tetchiness and lawyers would be even richer than they already are. And no one wants that.

If you’re looking for something to report on, there’s lots of lovely stuff here.

Best wishes,

Charlotte