A new spin on blogging

Here is an article I wrote for the October / November edition of the Walkley Magazine (a publication of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance which covers journalists, pr professionals, actors etc). The article covers Dan Gillmor's We the Media, Jay Rosen on PR transparency, Global Pr Blog Week and Bloggercon. The full text is below or here is a pdf
"Blogging is the new frontier for journalism and public relations. For some it promises excitement and limitless potential; others worry that it is ushering in a chaotic and perilous information jungle without recognisable standards or controls.

Disenchantment with traditional media has provided the backdrop for the explosion of new media over recent years. Disquiet about the impact of public relations and advertising is even more pronounced. The media is accused of lecturing to people and of allowing only a narrow spectrum of acceptable viewpoints to have access to public forums, while public relations is seen as simply beyond the pale - a dark art caricatured as ‘spin doctoring’.
The media has become more concentrated in recent decades, more expensive to run, and, consequently, less able to serve local communities and specialist interests - two areas where blogging is growing rapidly. The media is also criticised for adopting simplistic ‘he said / she said’ formulas while avoiding analysis. Serious journalism has also suffered from a management belief that people prefer lifestyle coverage to hard news.
Early media coverage of the Iraq war highlighted a general reluctance to criticise the Bush Administration when the ‘national interest’ was in play. Sustained criticism of Administration policy was more readily available online (or from the European media). Media timidity created the opportunity for Howard Dean to go from unknown to front-runner by combining a strong anti-war position with an online campaign.
A massive global surge in micropublishing brings with it new ideas and concerns about the different ways news can be generated and consumed. Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media, was released in August and has become a major focal point for deliberations about the impact of blogging across a number of fronts including media, politics and business.
Gillmor, a veteran journalist and major league blogger, is enthusiastic about the creation of a new climate of citizen participation in news creation through conversations rather than the more traditional centralised and top-down media model.
The importance of these ‘conversations’ to news creation arises from a central point in Gillmor’s thesis and that is the idea that collectively the audience knows more than the author. These conversations also link large numbers of people through networks, which can be even more powerful than the audiences of mass media outlets in terms of their capacity to create agendas and influence opinion.
Gillmor’s analysis has won respect in many quarters including Chris Schroeder, vice president of strategy with the Washington Post Co. who wrote: “For anyone in the news and information world, for anyone who cares about and needs information in their daily lives, this book (Gillmor’s) is for you.”
For Gillmor and Schroeder, perhaps the biggest hurdle blogging creates for traditional media is the way it challenges the essence of what media companies are; and that is, content aggregators. A major part of the service provided by media companies is involved in assembling, ordering and presenting an array of information in a digestible and appealing format. With blogging, the importance of traditional media as content aggregators is diminished. People with an interest in a topic whether it is a hobby, a business pursuit or a political cause can communicate with each other directly.
In the world of new media, news is being created and distributed through a suite of technologies that include blogs, wikis, really simple syndication (RSS), news aggregators, email and search engines.
Bloggers use aggregators to scan through hundreds of sources each day looking for items that interest them. It’s a very different approach to ‘reading a newspaper’ and it is this behaviour change that interests Schroeder as a media company strategist.
Earlier this year, I initiated what became Global PR Blog Week 1.0 by emailing twenty or so PR bloggers asking if they would be interested in such an event. Almost all of them responded enthusiastically.
We used the blog-friendly ‘open-source’ approach to organise what may be one of the blogosphere’s first virtual professional services conferences. A PR blogger based in Florida created a wiki and I designed a program with a theme for each day on things like: participatory journalism, corporate blogging and crisis communication.
We then invited anyone, anywhere in the world, to put their name forward as a contributor by using the key feature of a wiki – the capacity for anyone to edit (and therefore help create content for) a website. Forty people added their names and together they contributed over 230 extended posts on dozens of subjects of interest to PR practitioners. Although North America provided most of the contributors, people from as far afield as Argentina, Spain, Ireland, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe also got involved.
Our conference website (http://www.globalprblogweek.com) attracted over 1,000 visitors each day between 12 – 16 July. The site is still attracting people every day, and the total number of visitors now exceeds 14,000 since it went live in early July. The site and the accompanying wiki (http://www.thenewpr.com), are some of the best resources available to anyone interested in the contemporary practice and future of the PR profession. The contributors are keen to have a bigger and better event next year.
One of the debates that attracted the most interest during PR Blog week was around the impact of blogging on public relations. Some contributors argued that blogs are just another PR tool, but many others see blogging as an opportunity to move away from the idea of PR as an attempt to control communication through ‘messages’ and clever media tactics (spin).
There is no doubt that blogs are proving to be useful extra tools in the communications armoury. Many contributors discussed practical applications from corporate blogs that give customers a stronger sense of connection with an otherwise impersonal organisation, to crisis management blogs that can be used to counter media misinformation in the shortest possible time.
Nevertheless, many PR practitioners agree that PR must stand for real transparency; a point made by Jay Rosen, chair of the New York University Department of Journalism, in an interview on the first day of PR Blog Week.
Rosen, who recently blogged both US party conventions, is due to visit Australia next May, as part of the Deakin Innovation Lecture series, and his views are likely to draw a lot of interest from media and PR professionals alike.
Rosen believes that spin was only really effective in “the era of few-to-many media, (with) a small number of gatekeepers who could be spun.” Now he says “knowledge monopolies are breaking up, and (we are seeing) … (that) more power has fallen into the hands of the people who were mere receivers before”.
With these power shifts the future of PR in Rosen’s view lies in promoting “real transparency in organizations, and genuine interactivity with publics.” Many of us have always believed that promoting transparency and real dialogues has been the true function of PR.
In my view, the real long-term usefulness of blogs for public relations is as a way of getting information into the public arena without having to go through the media gateway.
The trade-off, of course, is that information distributed in this way doesn’t come with the third-party validation of an independent media. Bloggers will have to replace this validation over time by building their own reputations for credibility and fairness.
Bloggers and journalists might be able to help each other build credibility and trust with a disillusioned populace. One of the features of the new media environment is the way in which bloggers and journalists are now tracking each other’s output looking for errors and omissions- and, flat-out deceptions.
In fact, Gillmor sees this community of fact-checkers as one way we might counter ‘the flood of unreliable information’ on the Internet. Another way is for all us ‘grassroots journalists’ to acquire some traditional journalistic skills; particularly, a determination to ‘check sources’.
Rosen’s own interest in transparency is far from being purely theoretical. Earlier this year, through his PressThink blog, he was active in the push to address the issue of PR people posing as ‘reporters’ in video news releases. His efforts helped prompt the Public Relations Society of America to finally declare its opposition to this deceptive practice.
Still the debate goes on. Bloggercon III (http://www.bloggercon.com) will be held at Stanford University in Palo Alto California on 6 November this year. Three hundred bloggers will participate, it was fully subscribed in about three days. Gillmor will be involved as will many other blog pioneers and evangelists. Looks like I’ll be the only Australian.
It will be just days after one of the most ‘polarised’ presidential elections for a generation. The focus of the conference will be partly on blogging and the political process, but there are many other issues about the development of this new medium that still need to be explored further.
There will be no media passes issued because the organisers assume most people present will report on the event. Just another small sign of the way things are changing.

Comments

[Matthew Podboy]

I enjoyed your article, Trevor. This is definitely a communication vehicle where PR consultants and journalists can help each other.

[Mark Jones]

Y'know, for a PR guy you make a great journalist. ;)

There's another story here that I'd like to see someone write. Global PR Week represents the continued contribution PR people are making to the blog conversation. Rather than become disintermediated the blogosphere, it's interesting to watch a growing band of PRs wrestle with change rather than ingore it. As a media guy, I can't help but wonder if the shift to "real transparency" is too great a hurdle for many PRs to jump?

[Pete Jeans CEO at SMO Sydney]

G'day Trevor,

Thought you might be interested to learn that we have launched Australia's first business transformation blogsite.

We're creating a business community for leaders who can share and contribute to the challenges of business transformation.

Cheers!
Pete Jeans
CEO

SMO Sydney

http://www.strategicmarketing.com.au