Spinning a Googley

A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University has suggested that now newswire services can send stories direct to consumers through the proliferating digital channels, traditional newspapers may end up ‘disintermediated’ – a word my spell check can’t deal with which means, I think, cutting out the middle man.

If proved right, this could have seismic repercussions for the quality and tone of received news. If stories at source (e.g. press releases) are not ‘intermediated’ by established gatekeeper journalists, their contents will need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

On the upside, less intermediated news means less negative spin which would be welcome to many like the man who phoned the BBC yesterday to ask what he should say to his eleven year old daughter who asked him why the news was always so ‘horrible’. 

Social Media reshaping PR

One of the best descriptions I’ve read lately on how social media is affecting traditional PR thinking came from Andy Sernovitz, CEO of The Blog Council in the FT last week: “It’s no longer just companies talking to the press and customer service talking to customers.

All these other people showed up in the middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels.” The company departments developing to cope with those ‘people who showed up in the middle’ seems to have most in common with crisis PR. Johnson & Johnson appointed a director of social media in December in the wake of consumer outrage at an advert they produced for baby carriers and Dell’s VP of corporate communications has long had a large department of people monitoring online activity to ensure Dell hell 2 – the sequel never gets made.

Blogs on the other hand seem to be developing into a viable new business channel for companies in the US. Some new research from Hubspot in the US says that blogs and social media currently generate 8% of sales leads for companies, which is perhaps also why three-quarters of those that have tried blogging said their company blogs were "useful," "important," or "critical" to their business.

Meanwhile, PR agencies are getting to grips with developing online PR strategies using social media and blogs. Understanding the new channels would seem to be the easy part, putting together a convincing case why companies should use them is perhaps more challenging, so Hotspot’s research findings come at a good time.