digital pr insight

ROSS FURLONG

The Citigroup logo I’m used to seeing blazing proudly at night atop their Canary Wharf office block has been extinguished this week, perhaps out of respect for the 50,000 redundancies announced on Monday and what with Lehman’s once proud sign now unscrewed and lying in the liquidator’s skip, Auden’s words ‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’ seem weirdly apt for the financial sector these days.

However, in other areas of the economy we may be over- gloomy. “It’s a recession not Armageddon”  said the CEO of Next, Simon Wolfson today in Drapers and the belief that financial journalism must bear some responsibility for talking us further into recession is something also spotlighted this week in a timely report from POLIS – the LSE think tank which analyses the affect of media on society. They say:

“Whilst the root causes of the crisis appear to lie in the behaviour and regulation of banks and other investors, many have asked what role financial reporting may have played in the crisis, and whether the crisis would have been so sudden and deep if a different approach to the practice of financial journalism had been taken.”

Not that it’s all the journalist’s fault - PR strategies are seen as one of the four major problems facing financial scribes.  I wonder if by PR strategies they mean lack of them. If food companies can stem consumer fears over contamination by announcing immediate action why didn’t the banks and the government? It seems the knee jerk reaction is to keep a low profile, issue as little information as necessary and perhaps even go as far as to turn the light off on the logo of your company headquarters.

Big problem with that is people will wonder what else you’re hiding.