Above: Dominic Kalipersad and Golda Lee-Bruce at the event. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.
BitDepth#1141 for April 19, 2018. An author edited version of this story appeared as “A conversation about communications” in Newsday on that date.
When the Public Relations Association of Trinidad and Tobago (PRATT) gathered last week to discuss Facing the Challenge of Earned Media in Modern PR, it might have been reasonable to expect a discussion of the challenges that PR professionals face in placing their statements and releases in an increasingly fractured and fragmented media landscape.
To be sure, there was some discussion that set out with those concerns as a destination, but what followed became more of a dissection of the challenges that traditional media faces in a communications age that favours immediacy and digital presence.
From the first question posed to the panel onward, it was clear that the new media landscape and its impact on traditional media weighed as heavily on the minds of PR practitioners as it does on journalists.
“What,” asked Nicole Duke-Westfield, president of PRATT, “has been the biggest change in the last five to ten years in media distribution?”
The rise of digital media and the disruption that has ensued,“ responded LoopTT’s Laura Dowrich-Phillips.
“People no longer need the media to capture and share information on their own. People are now getting their news in real time, and now media must rally to bring filtering to it.”
“Our challenge,” added Golda Lee-Bruce, Deputy Head of News at CNC3, ”is not to report on what you are reporting, it is to bring value to what you are sharing.“
Earned media, according to Duke-Westfield, who moderated the evening’s discussion, are statements and press releases that are published and broadcast at the discretion of the media and are not paid for column inches or broadcast minutes.
There were a few attempts to bring the discussion around to concrete issues arising from the new media landscape.
Daren Lee Sing and Laura Dowrich-Phillips at the event. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.
“Advertisers and PR people did not understand what digital was, “Dowrich-Phillip said of her experience with the Loop network of regional news websites.
“Until Loop, digital was one arm of what was still traditional media. It took a while for people to understand that we weren’t going away. That we didn’t have a scheduled time for publication or broadcast. That once we have the information and we are good with it; it goes live.”
“You need to examine what your message is and who is your audience. Then you go to where they are,” advised Lee-Bruce.
“You need to understand how the media operates, when the deadlines are and how to mesh your message distribution with that reality.”
There was some spirited discussion about emails with PDF attachments (bad idea, as per here) and the advisability of sending captured media (video, audio) to newsrooms.
Best practice? Send the entire unedited video of the speech/event via digital download with notes on what times on the clip hold newsworthy/soundbite potential for faster scrubbing through the media. Double points for providing transcripts of those parts of the video or audio clip.
“I think practitioners should do an internship in newsrooms to understand the field in which they are working,” said Dominic Kalipersad, veteran journalist.
“Understand the publication. Journalists are storytellers, when we get releases or information that need work, then that’s something I have to work through.
Practitioners don’t seem to know the people they are sending the releases to. This is not a science, it is an inexact art and it’s about relationships.”
“People consume information differently online, so consider recasting the information differently,” said Dowrich-Phillips. “Try a listicle. Submit a video.”
“Know the times when the news is slow and time difficult to place material when the media house is starved for content.”
Despite the many articulated concerns by the journalism professionals on the panel about the quality and focus of releases and information provided, there was also room for a robust discussion about the role of media in what is very much an evolving ecosystem of call and response in modern communication practice.
Most of the questions about the failings of traditional media in TT to respond to fundamental changes in information consumption fell to Daren Lee Sing, President of the TTPBA who consistently pointed out that he could only speak with authority about his experiences as General Manager of Gem Radio Five.
“Newsrooms are lazy, and media owners are cheap,” said Kalipersad.
“Legacy media has spent millions on equipment and staff, know that their days are numbered, but have to continue to earn money while preparing to transition to digital media, And they have to get there.”
“I find it unusual as an older journalist that I have to convince younger journalists that they should be participating in the digital space.”
“With the advent of media like Loop,” Lee Sing said, “we engaged in almost a year of discussion about whether to let digital in. The TTPBA is not all media; it is the publishing and broadcasting association of Trinidad and Tobago. We are not the journalists, we are the managers and owners and we continue to look at several areas of change, including developments like digital TV.”
By the end of the event, the discussion had spun wildly off anything resembling public relations concerns to general worry about prevalent trends like the illiteracy of urban radio.
And perhaps that’s a good thing. All communications increase in value when the audience is primed, informed and ready to receive it and good media paves the way for good PR.
With seamless media outlets, I have difficulty understanding what is meant by “the illiteracy of urban radio”. That illiteracy seems to be all around and media bosses and consumers appear to not care about fine distinctions like the difference between the use of “that” and “who”. Where do we begin to tackle the illiteracy?
I think it’s about threading the needle.
Personally, I like proper English (whatever that is, let people argue over that), but as Steven Pinker has pointed out, language is an evolving thing. I’d offer it’s devolving due to definitions of ‘literally’ and ‘figuratively’ becoming synonymous in dictionaries, but that’s an opinion. Unlike French, there’s no ‘last say’ when it comes to English.
So, I agree with you. I think the pidgin has been going a little overboard – and having seen it in more than one nation (on the Internet it’s hard to miss, particularly in social media), it seems to me – opinion- that this is about the anti-intellectualism that’s out there. When I say anti-illectualism, I’m not talking about the branding it has gotten by the far Left, but instead about it not being ‘cool’ to be smart across the board, and a sure sign of being smart is being able to communicate properly.
And here’s where I swing back: if people understand it, hasn’t that communication happened?
In arguing both sides, it’s hard for me to find anything objective either way. My opinion is that you are correct, but I can’t substantiate that more than thumping the floor with my cane as you make your point.
We need to communicate globally and promote understanding. If we are satisfied with only understanding in our bubble, then we will continue to shrink and have less and less relevance outside of T&T. Granted that I might be in my own bubble but everytime I take public transportation, I have to ask people to repeat what they said … I don’t understand some of the hosts on urban radio … I have trouble shopping in the market. It is almost as if there is another language happening.
Well, this is reporting and not personal opinion. If I were to weigh in, it would be to note that it will have to be done by examples set outside of mainstream media. You’re already familiar with this website. Have a look at http://trinigoodmedia.com to see another effort at bringing a more considered approach to the business of reporting, opinion and journalism.
Technology is such a problem for people used to doing the same way. I say this as someone who has worked for media and other transitioning companies over the decades.
I recall not being able to be a voting member of MATT in the days of KnowTnT because it wasn’t considered full-fledged media, and it wasn’t owned by a company, and the people who contributed didn’t get paid. It was a grand experiment in many ways that I still learn from. Imagine that we had the then government asking us for sources for cases they were trying to prosecute, but we weren’t ‘media’.
Media transitions are a complicated issue, and while this conversation seems like it should have happened at the turn of the millenium (where was everyone?),
On the business side, you have the bean-counters. They have to have a bottom-line, and the idea that they might have to report loss of profit or even worse, losses, is hard if not impossible. That comes from a lack of vision from upper management, typically, and when upper management realizes it needs a new strategy, a new vision, it’s usually so late in the game that it’s all uphill. And yet they have to make sure that everyone gets paid, and isn’t that what everyone in media wants?
On the journalist side, from what I can see and what I have heard, there is the mounted frustration. There’s the problem Dominic Kalipersad alludes to with wanting people to do internships in media houses… which is sort of like taking a bright eyed and well intentioned police officer and throwing them into a corrupt police station where they have to do it the way it ‘has always been done’, and lose their spark. Indoctrination is an unpredictable thing.
The inertia of ‘the way things are’ can crush souls. That might be why this conversation is so late. However, there is merit if approached correctly. Let loose the dogs of change when they are inside, and allow them to change things to make things better. Any number of companies would profit from such things, but it just doesn’t happen. And for the sake of the future, don’t steal their thunder. This, of course, might require the planets to be aligned a certain way.
As far as reporting news whenever it happens, this I applaud. Yet I prefer news to be mature when I get it. When, for example, a mass shooting happens in the U.S., I don’t listen to anything about it for a day because it’s all rampant speculation. Being first to report isn’t always good, having the best report is always good. There’s a responsibility in sharing information that I have always looked up to journalists as an example to uphold. That has eroded since the Internet made it’s inroads all over the world, where the news-time compression allegedly approaches zero as nothing more than filler and a way to keep people clicking web pages (antiquated, by the way, since AJAX).
Being first is crap when it sets you up to be wrong, but when retractions can be made quickly, people get lazy. Studies have shown that almost no one shares retractions, everyone shares snappy headlines. And, my word, if there’s one thing this country has kept up with the global market on it’s headlines designed to be shared instead of read in a society that can’t seem to process more than a Twitter message at a time.
The good news is that no one has really gotten it right yet. The bad news, at least for me, is how disheartening it is to see this conversation only happening now with no real actionable items that are different, that speak to not the global problems but the local problems – but that too is unfashionable.
It’s so important to get this all right – as a layperson, I know this, as a reader, I am consistently disappointed and often spend my time explaining to people I know that the allegations presented are not presented as allegations. I’ll point to the facts presented and say, “This is all w e really know, the media reported it in one paragraph, the rest is meaningless.” I’ve seen so many headlines on articles and videos that misrepresent what people say that it’s something I roll my eyes at. Insulting my intelligence.
And, really, that’s the other big problem. The society being communicated to (and it should be ‘with’) has changed over the years. It’s not as discerning as it used to be because of the infoglut we get through social networks. Insulting the intelligence of people to get them to share something that they don’t even read…
But sure, med ia owners are cheap. In what used to be a pretty conservative venture, they’re now looking at large and well established international news conglomerates rolling the dice. Everyone wants a magic answer, nobody has it (Al Jazeera bypassed some of these issues by starting in this age without all the overhead). The BBC is funded by the Queen, so that’s pretty stable. The rest, well – TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Newsrooms are lazy? I do not know that, they are black boxes to me. What I do know is that it seems to have become increasingly difficult to find facts in the weak porridge presented to me with spices and sugar in an attempt to get me to eat it. What I do know is that internationally, I’m disappointed with journalism – it’s not resting on the shoulders of local media, and so I see the problem as a global one.
I think instead that it might be that people in newsrooms like to get paid, and to get paid they have to do certain things even if the end result is not what I would categorize as journalism. I think that the fight for relevancy in social networks and social media has been more of a mistake than anything since not everyone is Reuters. Organic trust means more than the smoke and mirrors sideshow social networks have become, where people share headlines like collectibles, but do not even read/view what they are sharing.
Journalism, in my opinion, should be raising the level of information to a higher level during this time, the business models are generally contrary.
It might be time for a new experiment. ;-)