A caught 10 minutes of quite a preposterous episode today: The Treasury Select Committee grilling five well-known journalists about their coverage of the credit crunch and especially Northern Rock.

The caption underneath kept coming up with “should coverage of the credit crunch be restricted?”  Ridiculous!

The five business journalists included Robert Peston, Jeff Randall and Alex Brummer.  As you might guess Robert Peston was the centre of attention.

The MPs questioning centred on responsibility.  Shouldn’t Peston and his colleagues hold off with stories to give Northern Rock a chance?  Hadn’t they created the run on the building society?  Did they have inside information and mysterious sources?

The rebuttal was that Northern Rock was a badly run business.  It had failed because its wholesale division had stalled and big investors saw the writing on the wall and took their money out.  Holding off on a story for 48 hours would not have saved it.

The run was in many ways Northern Rock’s fault.  Their website had gone down because the bandwidth capacity could not cope with visitors and this created panic.

The queues had built up because they have too few branches for their client base and too few staff were put on duty.

And if a financial institution is badly run, whose fault is it when savers want to take their money elsewhere?  And more so when it is on the brink of collapse?

As for the insinuation that the journalists had shady sources, well that proved to show the MPs as lacking an understanding of their subject.

Peston maintained he had many sources and had used many different sources over the years, including some of the MPs questioning him.  He cross checked everything and did not have narrow weak biased source to base his stories on – unlike Bush’s evidence of going to war with Iraq.

If this was a trial then the case would have been thrown out on the first day.  It was embarrassing for the MPs and they did not know hope ridiculous they sounded.

This view that the media somehow created a recession is seeking a convenient scape goat.

And as for recklessly putting economic institutions in danger by their reporting, it came out that there is a suspicion the the Government used the media to suppress share prices before buying them by leaking the appropriate stories.  I wonder if that will go before a select committee.

Managing expectation can be quite a task.  Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes success in terms of PR.

The PR practitioner has to ensure that unrealistic expectations do not derail a campaign or even lose an account.  It is the job of the PR to guide clients, state a reasonable benchmark and beat it.  Of course this is subjective, and therein lies the problem.

But when I think of managing expectation, it compares as nothing to the level of hope, of anticipation that Barack Obama has generated, both in the US and worldwide.  It is an impossible task already.

Two wars, an economic meltdown, a terrible budget deficit (from a budget surplus under Clinton), health care provision, education to all that are gifted enough to take it and a housing crisis is enough.  But on top of that there will be conflicting hopes – he cannot satisfy everyone.

Now that Barack Obama has won, he now must cool down expectation, if he can do that he will be a very talented politician.  How he does that I have no idea, but if he doesn’t he could derail his own presidency.

I have been given the opportunity to talk about PR on Salford City Radio 94.4 FM today at 2-3pm. Most of the hour is a selection of my tunes based on my superlative taste – no irony intended.

But what are the benefits and how do you measure them?

Well there is RAJAR, which stands for Radio Joint Audience Research Limited. This produces research that shows reach, share of possible reach, average listening time etc.

But being surveyed is not cheap, it can run into the thousands. So many local stations will be a mystery concerning their success.

I was told that previous guests had gained new business as a result of their appearance, including a toast master that secured two new bookings. Perhaps the best measure.

Anyway whatever the result, it is worth going through the process to see what clients go through as I dismissively tell them not to be nervous.

Thanks to Jon Monks of Chapel Street Business Group for settling my nerves and setting up the opportunity.

It is not the name of a new bar that Manchester needs so badly.

But the perennial PR problem: justifying spend.  It all comes from PR being so hard to quantify.  How do you measure raised profile, greater understanding of what your client does, reputation being enhanced?

You can’t unless you have a big research budget, so anything but blue chip clients will be unable to gage the benefits accurately.

There are leads, which is where many businesses judge their PR.  It is wrong to base any judgement solely on this premise.  I have had clients that have more than covered their PR spend with new clients derived from PR.  You also have new clients where PR has played a par, but this has not been identified or noted.

The solution?

Answers on a postcard or in the comments please.