MEDIA RELATIONS CONFERENCE

I was a guest panellist at the 7th Annual Media Relations Conference in Wellington this week. The conference was targeted to members of the public relations industry, and, among many other things, we discussed the changing face of the media. This is a big topic in these days where the mainstream media is struggling and the impact of online is rapidly increasing. The discussion was very interesting, though in the end I guess no-one really knows exactly how things will continue to move and change and where we will all end up.

At the moment I know some people who pretty much never read a newspaper or magazine, but spend huge amounts of time online and seem to gather all or most of their information that way. But I also know people who have never or rarely been online. And then there is the whole mass of people, including myself, who happily use a mix of all media options. So is it a generational thing? If there is a whole generation of young people coming through who never read them, will newspapers and magazines eventually evolve out completely? Will a generational shift change everything completely, or will things just continue to merge and evolve? Only time will tell.

As discussed at the conference, media people who ignore the rise of online do so at great risk. All of our big media outlets in New Zealand now have websites as well. Whether they make money or not at this stage, they can’t afford not to have them. And this of course brings me to the thorny topic of getting consumers to pay for online news/magazine content. Internationally, Rupert Murdoch has announced plans to charge users for content, and locally Fairfax are making similar noises. The National Business Review is already charging for some online content via paywalls. It will be really interesting to see how this goes for NBR. I’m more of the mind that it’s too complicated and that consumers are now too used to getting everything for free for the concept of paying for online journalism to work. I think it may make sense to just give more and better away for free in the hope of eventually making money from advertising and related promotional activity.

But Barry Colman is a savvy businessman and Rupert Murdoch apparently knows quite a bit about the media too! So I guess we can all watch this space.

Because the conference was for the public relations industry, we also talked a lot about the need for PR people to work with both mainstream and online media these days, and the similarities and differences in working these two worlds. Many of the usual business courtesies and efficiencies apply in both worlds, and similar judgement calls based on knowing who you are dealing with are also involved. But social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter do have some quite particular things to bear in mind. If you are too overtly commercial on Twitter, people will quickly block you from following them. You need to come across as a real member of the Twitter community. And if you send your general news release to a blogger you risk them deciding to do something rather irreverent with it, so your action could backfire and you could become the victim of a blog piss-take. Bloggers don’t obey the traditional rules of journalism - and they won’t necessarily respect an embargo date, so PR people need to be careful.

There was a lot of interesting talk at the conference about what works and what doesn’t work for PR people in terms of all types of media outlets. But the main thing that was agreed upon was that you ignore the online world at your peril!