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.

It is like looking at an avalanche hurtling towards you and you cannot out run it.  In fact you have short legs and you have sprained your ankle.

I got back from holiday with a bug and no appetite, either food wise or media wise, considering the deluge of bad news.

Now, the media cannot be blamed for poor lending practices, over borrowing, naivety that a boom is never going to end, greed or any of the other causes that can be attributed to the recession.  But even the most optimistic might begin to feel they are mired at the edge of civilisation.  Should we all go round the world for a year or live it up on the dole and see whether our new band will make it?

I wonder how long it will take before good news stories start to dig us out of this hole when the storm has passed.

In terms of PR downturns aren’t bad news (sorry about the pun) in terms of potential stories, it remains to be seen how it affects agencies.

Then again booms are good as well.  Some media outlets get pushed along in the flow, whichever way it is going and enjoy the ride.  Indeed a good news story seems unwelcome, it destroys the concensus that we are in real trouble.  When times are good who wants to hear the opposite view?

That is a little unfair.  The Salford Advertiser recently had a story for example from Begbies the insolvency business that told of the woe of local enterprises.  To their credit they ran a piece on three companies I work for in the areas that are doing really well when I said that the piece gave just one side of the story.

Anyway I found a really interesting piece from Jean-Paul Rodrigue on the workings of an economic cycle.

In it the media is noted as a part of the mania stage.  But it has a part to play all along.  I believe it is not an instigator for the most part – you cannot blame our economic problems on the media – but it is a driver at which ever stage i the cycle we are.

People ask if there are stories out there, some from businesses that do well in tough market conditions and I reply, “I am glad you asked, recession related news, views and advice are in boom time.”

Is that a surprise?

That it is news or that people cannot cook?

We tend to think at times that the media is looking for that knock out story or that we have to wait for something to happen before contacting them.

The media is competitive.  It has pages, airwaves and web pages to fill every day.  Where a good PR comes in is to supply the staple diet of stories, but also look for new angles: reveal something we did not know or had taken note of.

Two stories come to mind are the potato one today, which we probably knew many people can rustle up a mean Pot Noodle but not much else.

The other from a little way back is one about the deadly keyboard: the bubonic germ investedWMD Saddam loving environment.  We could have guessed that keyboards are dirty places, but the delivery from the University of Arizona was done so well in made headlines worldwide.

It is creativity and presentation that count.

The last thing I want is to see magazines going bust.

Over the last couple of years a number of NW business publications have fallen away.  They have been replaced by Crain’s and Good Company and How-Do, which have been life savers PR wise.

The lifestyle press is the North West has been doing well if the number of publications are something to base this statement on.  Buoyed by city centre living, a favourable economy and a property boom the numbers of magazines that I could pick up in Manchester about a year ago I estimated at 14.  There was one named after me I think called “Bob.”

In the last month The Magazine has been the centre of speculation as to its future and now YQ magazine has had to defend its position after cuts fueled speculation.

The lifestyle press has enjoyed the boom.  Any fall off in the property sector and its advertising and worsening of the credit crunch and you have to winder if more stories will unfortunately be appearing in How-Do with increasing frequency.

I am starting to hear this criticism being levelled at the media, as though any financial difficulties can be attributed solely to some irresponsible journalists.

If that is true, surely any upturn can be attributed to those same guys. So if your house has trebled in value you should be thanking your friendly local business journalist. Go on treat them to an expensive meal out at the very least.

It is true that confidence is everything. And of course the media has a strong influence here. But the fickle ebbing and flow of that precious feel good factor has more to it than the media wallowing in doom ridden scenarios, if we take away some ridiculous articles: one such piece in a national today claimed that the property market will not recover for 20 years. Who are you Mystic Meg or whatever she was called before the lottery. About as reliable.

The fact is the banks over lent, credit card companies over lent, mortgage companies over lent. We want our money back: Credit Crunch. I don’t have an economics degree I know but it didn’t help the lenders, so.

The media has power, it can influence, but somewhere, at least here, it is for the most part reporting the mistakes of others.

If you want to blame someone there are much more credible targets and some of them unfortunately include ourselves.

Shocking isn’t it?  The picture above shows some of the damage from the epicentre of last week’s quake.  Some people were woken up no doubt, others lost crockery.

Apart from a serious injury was there any need to dominate the pages and airwaves with this?

And then there was Prince Harry.

Brave lad.  He has done the right thing and you have to admire him for that.  But surely the disproportionate coverage the media has devoted to the story works against their original aim.

When a personality or a story have too much media coverage it undoubtedly starts to grate: people push back against it as though they were being forced into believing something.  It is a natural reaction.

Half the coverage of the Prince Harry story would have got the message across just fine and with more impact.

What else happened in the news last week?  I really don’t know.

PR is among the most cost effective ways to increase your awareness and sales leads. However, all to often enterprises do not make full use of the opportunities available.
Rob Baker of Artisan gives a few pointers to start improving your PR drive and it’s return.

PR is a long-term activity. All too often companies get some coverage, it doesn’t yield immediate results and they lose interest. You must adopt a sustained, long-term approach for it to be really effective. You are building-up interest and trust in your company and it’s services, it cannot be relied upon to do that in just one go.

Developing relationships with journalists is a long-term activity. A journalist who knows that you deliver interesting, well-written stories is always going to be more open to your latest release than one that seldom hears from you. It is important to cultivate relationships, find out what a particular journalist wants and how they operate. Once you have their confidence, you will be more effective.

PR should not be a stand-alone activity. PR is more effective in combination with other lead generating activity. If you have an exciting new service and want to tell potential customers, you are more likely to achieve the results you want if you employ a number of ways to attract their interest.

Make sure your news is of interest to the journalist and their readership. Just because your company is excited about your new website revamp or office move, it doesn’t mean that anyone else is. Think carefully about what is really newsworthy from the journalists’ point of view before sending your press release.

Make the journalists’ job easier. A journalist does not want to re-write your poorly crafted copy, or phone you to clarify points that should be made clear in the original press release. The harder you make their job the less chance they will publish your release.

Make the subject of the release clear straight away. A journalist will receive literally hundreds of press releases a day. They might have space for one main release and a couple of smaller stories and possibly a column of News in Brief. They only have a few seconds to go through their e-mails and decide what they want to consider for publication. So, if the subject of your press release is less than clear, it is less likely to go any further than the delete button.
Do not neglect the local press. The regional press can be your best outlet for publicity. Local papers often have excellent business pages that capture the attention of the reader as they make their commute home or as they relax in their spare time. They also have a substantial readership. The Manchester Evening News sells 150,000 daily copies, while the Manchester Metro News has 390,000 regular readers.