Media mentor: Is it time to shred the press from your marketing mix?

A contact who is in press relations was chatting with me yesterday. His clients had been telling him, increasingly, that the press was irrelevant. They had paid influencers they could rely on to publicise their wares; the press was no longer important, was beyond control and was populated with dinosaurs and mavericks.

Thank you for the compliment, was my initial reaction. It's worth considering, however, whether the press has really fallen from grace and whether it's still worth corporate clients engaging with us.

A note on journalistic style

The issue to address is to distinguish the product review/commercially led press article from the news-driven, current affairs model. Some people I know say there is only one sort of journalism and that is "hard news" - something someone else wants to cover up, discovered only by rigorous investigation and sometimes at personal risk. It's the sort of thing that drove Watergate, the sort of thing that uncovered certain MPs' involvements in the arms industries in the 1990s, the sort of thing that uncovered exorbitant MP expenses in the 2000s.

It's important. However, the suggestion that it's the only sort of journalism that exists is utter baloney. I got into the press many years ago because I admired the work of the late Alan Coren; people who remember me from 1989 in my first job might even remember that I was the idiot who was going to edit Punch when he was older.

The closure of that magazine and the fact that I wasn't much use as a humourist anyway put paid to that one. There are other sorts of journalism, however. I'm not a great celebrity follower in terms of gossip columns but Hello! magazine continues to thrive. It's overtly not an investigative piece. In 2005 I was lucky enough to cover the relaunch of "Doctor Who" for the Radio Times; that didn't take much investigating either and boy were we led by the PR team. It didn't matter, that wasn't what was required. The readers were happy.

Likewise there is coverage of recipes, new phones, music and a great deal else as well as the goss on who's behaving and who isn't on Strictly. It's all journalism and a subset of it can be useful to people wanting to sell you stuff. Its problem is whether it's universally trusted.

Fake news and other excuses

This is no place to get political but to an extent we have to when examining "Fake News" because of the way it has been adopted as a catchphrase by president Donald Trump. Taking personal political convictions out of the equation, it was a masterstroke of communication. The actual definition, according to Wikipedia, is of course 'news that is fake'; scroll down to the bit about Trump and the page raises the possibility that he uses the term to mean anything that isn't favourable towards him.

The result might be favourable to the president but to journalists it's precisely the reverse. In the US this report appeared in September, suggesting trust in mass media had sunk to 41%. That's right; fewer than half of the American public believed what the mass media told them only a couple of months ago. In the UK, meanwhile, Ofcom is criticising the BBC for not being bold enough in challenging controversial opinions, while the Urban Dictionary suggests "mainstream media" is a term of criticism for a media that pretends to be neutral when actually it swings either to the left or to the right.

The conclusion, for many, is that nobody trusts journalists anymore. Which in turn is why my press relations colleague kept hearing from his clients that there was no need to speak to the press. Paid influencers were fine.

Is the press paid?

There's a misconception about whether the press is paid anyway, just to add further confusion. A friend of mine is also a media trainer. He gave a talk to a company, whose chief said he didn't need any training because the press would write about him anyway. My friend said they wouldn't if it wasn't interesting; the guy said: they'll write about me if I pay them to.

No they won't, but this belief persists. Only last week on Facebook one of the people in the group for Tech PR and Journalists was complaining that someone had approached him to write about a particular company and offered him money to do so. There was a lot of outrage from senior hacks but I wondered whether it was just a genuine misunderstanding. A generation has grown up with people paid for their influence in the background somewhere. Celebrities from reality TV shows and others take substantial remuneration from the PR industry as "influencers" and as long as they declare their interest there isn't much of a problem. Actors have been doing adverts for decades and it's clearly understood that they are being paid for a performance; influencers are in my view much the same. It's a paid promotion and understood as such.

But then logically, should we be judging the junior PR person who gets their wires crossed and starts offering the journalists hard cash? Personally I think not, although no self-respecting journalist should ever take it. It may have been the training of the PR person that was at fault, not having highlighted the difference between an influencer and an independent publication. The money a journalist will receive should be from their publication as a professional writer. I'm not going to say there are no side activities; some won't, some accept corporate writing commissions on the side, some of us are media trainers, whether on the side or as a major part of their business, as my own offering has become. As long as they don't offer mentions in their articles as part of the deal (here's a piece I wrote in 2016 which I hope makes that pretty clear in the first bullet point) so the reader always gets something unbiased I see that as healthy.

That said, there are 'promotional articles' and other sponsored pieces as well - as long as they're labelled, again, I have no problem with them and have written them. But with all these alternatives you can see why people no longer feel they need to engage with the independent press. There is, however, one detail that undermines this belief.

People are still reading the press

The subhead there says it all. No matter what's happened and what a lousy press the press itself manages to attract, people still take it seriously. This blog post says, in its second paragraph near the beginning, that people use a mix of media to make their buying decisions. This download from ijism confirms that although online search is obviously colossally influential when someone is about to spend their money, 67% - almost exactly two thirds of searches - start off in the offline world. Researchgate also highlights the importance of newspapers and magazines, albeit it is looking at the impact of advertising more than it's worrying about editorial.

The only possible conclusion is that things are evolving but as historical precedent suggests, the media is realigning rather than changing overnight with a single stroke. When someone put radio into the mainstream there were fears it would wipe out theatre. When TV arrived it didn't kill radio, they just realigned and found their natural balance. Arguably we're still going through that process with the Internet, and as a medium it contains unprecedented amounts of overlap anyway; when I'm looking at my newspaper on the phone I'm reading the paper in my mind, and is Netflix Internet or TV?

The media will continue to evolve, of that I have no doubt. It's premature, however, to write off an individual medium because of the effect of a newer player in the market. Those brands my colleague represents will still need to be in all of the media if they want to continue as the significant mass brands they are, and that will mean talking to the press, engaging with us and understanding what we do.

Do you or your clients need help and advice on how the press works? My media training service could be ideal - feel free to drop my assistant Lindsay a note, Lindsay at Clapperton dot co dot uk, and she'll set us up an initial obligation-free call.