Talking Point

Newsjacking and why pimping someone else's ride isn't as easy as it seems

By Craig Regan

“Newsjacking” is a colourful American PR term that means hijacking a breaking news story and inserting your own angle. In the Australian context, many try and few succeed and here are the reasons:

Despite what they might tell you, most Australian PR consultancies aren’t very nimble or responsive. Awakening at dawn and diving into the media to find out what news is breaking isn’t second nature unless you’ve worked as a political press secretary or journalist.

Once a rival story is running in the mass media, it’s almost certainly too late to seize the moment unless you jump ahead of the agenda and define where the issue’s going.

Even at the breaking stage, your story has to be more than good to change the news agenda. It must be newer, more unusual or a bigger game-changer than what’s already out there. That’s a judgement call based on experience and some gut feel.

If a client thinks their angle is the greatest story since 9-11 and it’s not, you need to have an honest relationship that lets you tell them it’s not. The same applies if buying into an issue isn’t a good idea.

Your PR company needs to know its way around the media. It’s no good firing out an email to an over-crowded or unattended in-box. Talking to someone senior on the newsdesk is imperative.

Newsrooms are chaotic places. A phone will ring out or be answered by a reporter’s neighbour who has no idea where their colleague is. That’s no time to be passive – it’s time to go up the line or find a roundsperson on their mobile.

Social media can be a useful tool here but it's no good tweeting if no-one's following. 

Lastly, the client needs to be prepared. Can they talk to the angle if journalists pick up on the angle and come calling? If they’re part of a large local company or multinational do they have authority to act without sign-off from someone else? Pre-agreed messages make all the difference.

It’s not as easy as inventing a colourful term.

Picture credit: Beyond PR blog

Why Puerto Rico's good news idea is doomed

By Craig Regan

In a variation on the “build it and they will come” theme, a radio station in Puerto Rico wants to turn around the island’s rampant murder rate by not reporting bad news.

Starting next Tuesday, the program "Noticias OK," will only report good news as a way to minimise violence on the streets.

The program’s host says "the distribution of news with a positive focus will be a balm that will improve the quality of life on the island".

The one-hour show will include segments called "Aplausos,” which will recognise people helping their communities, and "Musica OK," which will only play songs with positive messages. That rules out playing Led Zeppelin records backwards to reveal all those subliminal Satanic blatherings.

“Noticas OK” is basing its plan on market research with just 100 people in low-income communities.

Plenty of people have tried to launch good news media outlets in the past and have failed miserably. News, by definition, is something that changes the status quo.

The old saying in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads” means the most dramatic news is what’s most prominently reported.

Puerto Rico recorded a record 1,136 homicides in 2011. Between 1980 and 2005 the average annual homicide rate was 19 per 100,000 people.

Brisbane floods teach a PR lesson

So the final report of the Queensland Floods Commission is out and recommends that three engineers working in the city's dam system be referred to the state’s Crime and Misconduct Commission. The story’s likely to dominate Queensland news for the next week, especially since there’s a State election in eight days time.

Putting the politics to one side and not inferring blame, there’s a lesson here for PR professionals – especially those working in crisis management. It runs along the lines of: No matter how prepared an organisation is for a crisis, a plan is only as good as the people charged with implementing it.

Most large organisations have crisis plans. Few bother to regularly test them. Many have a plan only because it required by their parent company or taxpayers.

The Lighthouse Communications crew has collectively worked on hundreds of those documents. We all agree that it’s one thing to have a plan but it’s another to invest in training the people who have to use it.

Working for one of our clients, I visited the Brisbane flood scene shortly after the waters subsided. The sight of people picking through stinking messes that were once backyards or scraping mud from the floors and inside walls of homes was devastating. It reinforced that the victims of a crisis - and those charged with managing it – are people and a natural disaster can take a heavy toll.

I recall working with another external PR consultant on a plan for a health technology company. Most of the plan was “his” intellectual property. It was actually off-the-shelf and wasn’t anything new. The colour-coded flow charts were very pretty, though, and the document looked great when it was printed and bound.

Crisis plans are not “size fits all”. They’re a prescriptive guide to what you might do when something hits the fan and people need to know how to use them.

Smith finds defence tough when an enquiry comes back to bite

By Craig Regan

There’s an old saying in political circles: Never have an enquiry unless you know the outcome. It’s rubbish of course, even if that’s the outcome most pollies would want.

So it wasn’t a surprise to see Defence Minister Stephen Smith up to his neck in mixed messages and furore last night following the release of the so-called Skype Sex Scandal report.

Smith’s refusing to apologise for criticising the way the head of the Australian Defence Force Academy treated the alleged victim.

On the face of media reports at the time, the academy chief’s actions looked insensitive. Smith acted as many in his position would have, but probably didn’t have the full facts.

He isn’t the first and won’t be the last Minister to go head-to-head with Defence and come off second best. Did he know how the enquiry would go? Of course not.

You can bet your house that Smith was praying for the PM to drop the Bob Carr option and parachute him into the Foreign Affairs job, not only because he wanted the gig but so he could be overseas when the findings became public.

Speaking of enquiries, the one certainty about the Finkelstein Report into regulating Australia’s media industry is that most of its recommendations - in their current form and converted to legislation - will never see the light of day.

As worthy as His Worship’s intentions might have been, the report handed to the Government by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein last week had more holes than a parsimonious pensioner’s string shopping bag.

You have to question how “independent” a $2m a year media regulator with beefed-up powers of direction would be. The complaint systems we now have are feeble and choking in red tape but isn’t the solution simpler than a bigger stick?

Political payback theories aside, the original terms of reference seemed to be about making media organisations and their employees more accountable. The catalyst was the phone hacking scandal 20,000km away and any connection to Australia was tenuous, at best.

While making media organisations more accountable is a great idea, no sensible Government that supports a free press but already has lots on its plate wants to be picking a fight with people who buy newsprint by the container shipload.

Another own goal by the sport that never learns

By Craig Regan

We all have our sporting biases so let’s not pretend otherwise. As hard as it is to be objective when supporting your own team or code, it’s even more difficult to find anything good to say about the people running soccer in Australia.

The feet of Australian soccer are riddled with self-inflicted bullet wounds. It’s a sport that’s massively popular at junior levels but shuffles one step backwards every time it takes a pace forward.

Sacking the Clive Palmer-owned Gold Coast United team four rounds out from the finals is a big step. It puts a bunch of players out of work and creates a hole in the competition draw. But it’s more momentous when the axed club’s owner has immensely deep pockets and a legal team that’s busier than a one-armed bricklayer on a time-based performance bonus.

The public media war between Palmer and Frank Lowy hasn’t been pretty, but that’s the stuff of dreams for journalists charged with filling the back pages. Coach sackings, threats and protests. Chequebooks at 20 paces. This story’s had it all with more to come.

There’s a funny thing about court cases. They go on for ages and take up massive amounts of print space and airtime. A legal stoush will be the story that keeps on giving.

You have to wonder about the Football Federation of Australia. Palmer’s experience in owning and operating a soccer team was zilch. So why go into business with him, just a season after an equally ill-considered North Queensland franchise folded its tent?

Gold Coast United has been pulling an average home crowd of 2500. Clive Palmer was on AM this morning saying that this was a good result in proportion to the local population.  

Excuse me? I’ve been to funerals of immensely unpopular people that have pulled more heads.

It was great to see the Socceroos punch above their weight in the World Cup, especially as the professional commitments of leading professional players almost always mean lead-up games are marked by their unavailability.

By the way...there’s something about calling a sporting match a “friendly” that rubs me the wrong way, but I digress...

You don’t need a long memory to recall the ill-fated, taxpayer-backed campaign to win Australia the rights to host the World Cup in 2022. That amateurish bid cost $45m. We scored one first round vote from a possible 22. That well-known soccer heavyweight Qatar won.

There’s always the 2030 event - we’re not eligible to run for 2026 - by which time Frank Lowy will be 100-years-old. At the present rate he will have survived another 50 PR disasters by then.

 

Barrie told me about Kevin

By Michael Grealy

To rework Channel 9 Melbourne’s famous 6pm News promo of the 1980s ("Brian Told Me"), it was Barrie who told me about Kevin as leader.

Three words will long be remembered from Julia Gillard’s Adelaide media conference: chaotic, paralysis and sabotaged. They described, in order, her leadership rival’s work patterns, the state of the government he led and, by implication, his role in the 2010 election campaign.

Some media took up the ball. The Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr said: ‘No Kevin. This isn’t a breakdown in civility. Your colleagues are at last telling us why you were sacked.”

As pro-Gillard Ministers add fuel to the bushfire, and letter writers draw on Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Perry Gretton, Tumbi Umbi: "Kevin Rudd is not the Messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy"), it is true that formerly unnamed sources are finding the courage to be quoted by name.

But the story is not new.

Take Barrie Cassidy’s 2010 book "The Party Thieves, The Real Story of the 2010 Election." The ABC Insiders host and former Hawke press secretary didn’t miss in his account of the coup against Rudd – who had been labelled Captain Chaos by John Lyons as far back as 2008.

Firstly, on chaos and paralysis, Cassidy records Rudd summoning senior public servants for urgent meetings and keeping them waiting for hours, Ministers discovering major decisions in their portfolios only after the PM told the media first, the interfering nature of the PM’s office and a manic emphasis on winning the 24-hour cycle and its impact on governance.

He wrote: “That Kevin Rudd was cut down by Labor factions because of bad opinion polling is the great myth of 2010. The faction leaders took the initiative – that’s all. The support came in an absolute torrent. That’s because Rudd himself drove them (the numbers). His own behaviour had caused deep-seated resentment to take root.”

Cassidy added: “The coup was happening in part because Rudd had hijacked the party, and either ignored or abused key people within it for too long.”

Gary Gray bemoaned the blame lumped on Peter Garrett for the home insulation debacle: “For Rudd and his office to position Garrett as the fall guy was disgraceful, weak, sneaky, unprincipled and just plain wrong.”

Barry Cohen told Cassidy: “If Rudd was a better bloke, he would still be the leader. But he pissed everybody off.”

Take sabotage. Cassidy called the internal campaign against Gillard relentless, vicious and driven by some powerful media support.

Recalling the fallout from Laurie Oakes’ ‘exclusive’ that Julia Gillard had opposed in Cabinet a pension increase and paid maternity leave, Cassidy wrote: “It left few people in the Labor Party in any doubt that the source was either Kevin Rudd or somebody acting on his behalf, with or without his consent. It was now clear Gillard was going to be tested in a way that few leaders had been in the past.

"There was, undeniably, a rat in the ranks, to use a favourite Labor Party term. And that ‘rat’ was determined to bring down the government.

“Rarely before in an election campaign has a leader had such a fight, against an invisible yet real and potentially poisonous insider.”

So as we digest Kevin Rudd’s plea for an end to ‘vicious personal attacks,’ on the grounds they are ‘un-Australian,’ maybe the ABC will introduce Barrie Cassidy’s Insiders next Sunday with an update of Channel 9’s promo for the late Brian Naylor.

Angry Julia loses it for a minute

By Craig Regan

It’s a blip in the scheme of things but a clear case of Do As I Say, Not Do As I Do. I’m talking about Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ticking off of a journalist at her Adelaide media conference this morning.

Press Gallery journalists rightfully praised Gillard for giving one of her strongest performances ever in front of a media throng. That was until the final moments when The Australian’s Michael Owen asked about her role in the downfall of Kevin Rudd.

"So you just fell into the leadership?" he said at one stage – and kept going. Her response showed what not to do in front of an otherwise benign media pack.

"I’ll answer your question but, ah, just ... I’m not listening to this rudeness, I’ll answer your question and then I’ll give a question to your colleague, thank you very much... “I’m not going have you just speak to me like this. End of sentence. I’ll answer your question and I will take a question from your colleague.

"Your question is internally inconsistent. Let me answer it...well, I’ll answer it thanks very much... If you stop talking then I’ll give you an answer, but I can’t give you an answer if you keep talking.”

The appearance of Angry Julia not-so-deft sidestepping an issue might have been a play aimed at presenting her as a PM with renewed authority, but went dangerously close to portraying her as out of control.

That the reporter has since apologised doesn't quarantine footage fo the incident making the nightly news. 

It wasn't quite on the scale of K Rudd’s Unhappy Little Vegemite YouTube video, mind you, but it's still not a good look.

At Lighthouse, we use media training to enable clients to handle questions exactly like this. So here's some free advice.

The most graceful response is to pause, stay silent until the questioner has run out of steam, acknowledge the question and answer or re-direct it, on your own terms.  

Remember, it’s a reporter’s job to ask hard questions and probe. Ripping strips off them just distracts from the messages you were trying to convey.

Laotian tourism deaths an exercise in poor issues management

By Stephanie Furler

There has been a torrent of media articles following the recent deaths of Australians in Laos and the near death of another. Much of this negative publicity calls for fresh regulations in the local tourism industry and prosecutions of people breaking the already existing (and fairly lenient) rules.

In case you missed it, the deaths have stemmed from “tubing”. This involves sitting in tyre tubes while floating down the Mekong River and stopping along the way to drink (excessively) at makeshift bars.

It all sounds fine - until ridiculously cheap and sometimes free home-brewed whisky is mixed into the equation. 

It’s then that backpackers start jumping from rickety two-storey towers and swinging from ropes into shallow, rocky water below.

   

So what can we take from these deaths from a PR perspective?

Tourism is Laos’ fastest-growing industry but there has been no public comment from the Lao National Tourism Administration, addressing the fatalities or the international backlash. 

Granted, it is a very strict Communist country and its values and way of life are different, but if this situation was applied to a business or government organisation in the Western World, the time to go public would have been a month ago. 

In some situations a “no-comment” policy works – but this isn’t one of them.

Businesses need to constantly assess their position when an issue becomes a public concern. Timely and appropriate comments can reassure the public and ensure that someone else doesn’t fill a news vacuum.

It is unlikely that any of the regulations being called for in Laos will be implemented, so it’s important for the Tourism Administration to work with international government agencies and media to educate tourists about the dangers of tubing.

The need for personal responsibility is a something that many journalists fail to mention in their stories and is a key message that the Tourism Administration should be pushing.

The only information on the Administration’s site that remotely resembles a warning about excessive behaviour (after much searching) is in comic form.

No mention of tubing. 

It is important that organisations tailor messages to their key audiences and clearly in this case, the message needs to be louder, broader and maybe delivered with less levity.

A carefree, unregulated holiday destination is an appealing prospect for many Australians, but if the negative publicity continues, tourists may be deterred from visiting Laos.

Stronger messages, better issues management and awareness campaigns are essential to keep this industry thriving.  

 

PM shows she's not listening or atrociously advised

By Peter Laidlaw

Roll-up, roll-up, roll-up - The great Australian Labor Party circus has hit town and you are sure to be entertained by a wonderful team of entertainers - including a few clowns, a number of knife-throwers, invisible men and tightrope walkers, led by not one but two ring masters who can't tame the lions behind them.

Yes for at least the sixth week in a row (though I must admit I have stopped counting), the "phantom" challenge by the former PM, one K.Rudd, to topple the current PM continues to dominate newspapers and the airwaves.

We have seen media reports about who is backing whom.

We have heard party colleagues claim that it was not possible for Rudd to return as a leader having previously led and failed (despite those same colleagues being around when Kim Beazley was returned as the ALP leader in 2005 after having held the throne four years earlier).

We have listened to carefully crafted words from Rudd and Gillard and their supporters to dismiss the challenge as simply being a media speculation ....and wondered if Mark Latham would introduce his Conga Line of Suckholes descriptor to the current situation.

And then we read that the riot act had been read to the party – Stop Talking - it's only giving oxygen to the story!

With that, I was not holding out much hope for any explosive revelations coming from Four Corners story on the only battle taking place in federal politics - Rudd vs Gillard (Tony who?).

But being a political junkie, I removed myself from the family room - having just lost a debate with one of the kids over whether Kev vs Julz's would be more entertaining than the new Channel 7 US import Revenge - and flicked on the box in the bedroom to hear the old familiar Four Corners theme and Kerry introducing "The Comeback Kid?".

I was interested but not surprised when a line-up - including a former Rudd staffer (who got some good PR for his new book), a right wing union bod, two former ministers (now lobbyists) and another political staffer-turned-lobbyist - gave their views on Rudd and what happened.

In reality it was a bit ho-hum and in my view would not really give much fuel to the leadership fire. Any newsroom would be scratching hard to get much out of the story to give the "challenge" more life.

But then came the PM!

And to much celebration within newsrooms around the country came a very poor response to the question of whether her office had prepared her speech accepting the role two weeks prior to Kevin being shafted. If this was the case and she knew about this, there would be a huge question mark over the credibility, already tainted by her "no carbon tax" pledge and commitments to independent Andrew Wilkie regarding pokies.

The PM had repeatedly stated that she was not behind a planned campaign to dispose of her old boss and that she only made the decision to challenge for the leadership the day before.

After several unsuccessful attempts to get a straight answer to the questions, we heard "I have just given the best answer I can." If that was the best answer that could be given by her, one has to ask the question: Why on earth did Gillard grant the interview in the first place?

As I have long believed and advocated with clients - you don't always have to say yes to a media request. If Julia had taken such a position, we may have been saved at least a day of leadership talk in media and Julia may well have saved some face before the public.

Canberra clash a gift for media watchers

By Craig Regan

The Australia Day melee in Canberra is the gift that keeps on giving for PR and political junkies. Gillard media adviser Troy Hodges did what any political operative must – he took a bullet for his boss.

This isn’t suggesting the PM was a party to the chain of misinformation that provoked activists to lay siege to The Lobby restaurant. It’s just an observation that the public and media storm determined that a head had to roll. Hodges committed hari kari.

Many people would be unaware that political advisers from both sides routinely tip media to unfolding stories with the intention of reportage favouring their side. It's the way the game is played and  sometimes this extends to events of public disorder.

In this case, Hodges pushed the envelope by indirectly inflaming a protest at an event where his boss was in attendance. If the protest hadn’t been so ugly nobody would have noticed and Hodges wouldn’t be looking for a job.

TV loves colour and movement and the footage of Julia Gillard being keel-hauled into her Commonwealth car will be a defining moment of her leadership.

It will be filed next to Mark Latham’s bonecrusher campaign handshake...

 

...and John Howard’s  inglorious no ball: