Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet will start to charge for more of its online content. Martin Jönsson points out that even the top news story on Aftonbladet.se today is locked for non-subscribers. This is especially noteworthy since the same story is also covered in Metro this morning – for free.
Footnote: The article is now available at Aftonbladet.se here.
Tags: pay per view, media, aftonbladet, metro. Ping.
“Don’t tell my mother I work in an advertising agency – she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse”, is a well-known quote. Maybe the same could be said about the PR profession.
Last week I noticed a public relations term that I haven’t encountered before – Black PR, meaning the practice of paying journalists for coverage. Apparently this is a common practice in for example Russia and other nearby countries. PR Week recently wrote that the Ukrainian Association of Public Relations (UAPR) for the first time ever had made a resolution condemning a black PR campaign. The campaign in question was allegedly arranged by telecommunications company Altimo and designed to “smear Norwegian rival Telenor and the country of Norway”.
“Telenor has submitted planning documents from Altimo to the UAPR, which it claims show various journalists were paid off – $4,000 for a story, in one instance – and that Altimo had a clear and deliberate strategy to destroy the reputation of its rival. Altimo, owned by Russian company Alfa, has insisted the documents are false and, in turn, accused Telenor of waging a smear campaign against its company.”
The opposite of “black PR”, according to one comment in the article, is “Western-style communications”. But not all Western countries seem to be as “clean” as we wish to think. At least not if we should believe Toni Muzi Falconi, a Senior Counsel at an Italian management consultancy. He recently participated in the PR Formos 2007 (pdf) conference in Vilnius, Lithuania to discuss ethical and “black” PR practices and published his speech on his blog. It lists a number of cases from Italy that could be described as black PR.
After the conference he blogged about some of the other findings.
An April 07 study of the business community in Lithuania about the role of black pr revealed that:
– 35% believe that all public relations agencies indulge in those practices and specifically 50% say that those practices are mostly used to gain direct advantages for their clients, while 47% say that they are used to smear their clients competitors.
– A good 33% of the sample say that they have been themselves victims of black pr and the same number believe that in Lithuania the practice is more widespread than elsewhere.
– Some optimism in the 32% who say the phenomena in decreasing while 28% insist that it is instead increasing.
– Finally 47% believe black pr is not a crime, 40% indicate that it is less serious than bribing a public official while 10% say it is the same.
Inga Latkovska, from Latvia, was quoted saying “that in her country it was easy to bribe the media”.
Yaryna Klyuchkovska, from Ukraine, estimated that “some 50% of the pr spent goes in those practices, without even considering political pr where it certainly much higher”.
Thorsten Lutzler of the DPRG, the German public relations association, said that black PR is also conducted in Western Europe and “that 54% of the German public believes that pr is propaganda”. He also stated that the DPRG had a new policy to go out in public and denounce every bad practice.
Tags: pr, black pr, public relations, pr, ukraina, litauen. Ping.
Nine times out of ten when I go online for quick news I prefer Aftonbladet.se before Expressen.se. I find Aftonbladet easier to navigate and that they give away more information for free. Today I can give you a good example of how Expressen at times are way behind “Sweden’s leading news portal”.
Last night, one of the most exciting football games this season was played at Old Trafford. The first Champions League semi final between Manchester United and AC Milan, and what a party it was. The game had everything and for a Man U fan like me, the finish was excellent when Wayne Rooney turned a possible defeat around to secure a 3-2 win for the Red Devils. Since the game ended late last night, media coverage in the morning papers were scarce. Aftonbladet on the other hand has the story online on its frontpage and at least four articles (here, here, here and here), plus additional facts and photos.
When I check Expressen.se, it is even hard to find the coverage. I click on the “Football” section of the site, and believe it or not – I have to scroll down 16 pages before I find anything about the game. The only article found online is a short piece, two paragraphs with a quote from the studio at TV6.
Next time I need a quick sports update, I will choose Aftonbladet.se again.
Tags: champions league, manchester united, wayne rooney, expressen, aftonbladet, fotboll, sport, champions league. Ping.
Media Culpa’s PR Flop of the Day Award goes to FILA, the international wrestling federation, for naming Swedish female wrestler and bronze medalist Sofia Mattsson the most good-looking wrestler during the Europan Championship 2007 in Sofia (!), Bulgaria. We thought they were just wrestlers, not participants in beauty pageants.
Kudos to Sofia and Patrik Jansson, the Swedish national team manager, who refused to accept the “Miss Europe” award.
Pew Internet & American Life Project today published a new report (pdf) called “Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace”. The report talks about what kind of information teens share on social networks and what they keep hidden from strangers (and/or parents).
“Many teens post their first name and photos on their profiles, they rarely post information on public profiles they believe would help strangers actually locate them such as their full name, home phone number or cell phone number.”
Of those whose profile can be accessed by anyone online, nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Other interesting findings about the teens with online profils are:
– 82% of profile creators have included their first name in their profiles
– 79% have included photos of themselves.
– 61% have included the name of their city or town.
– 49% have included the name of their school.
– 29% have included their email address.
– 29% have included their last names.
– 2% have included their cell phone numbers.
– 6% of online teens and 11% of profile-owning teens post their first and last names on publicly-accessible profiles;
– 3% of online teens and 5% of profile-owning teens disclose their full names, photos of themselves and the town where they live in publicly-viewable profiles.
As a result, 63% of teens with profiles believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them.
Tags: social networks, pew, sociala media, ungdomar. Ping.
We already knew that the hyped-up service Twitter is not the place for deep thoughts. This week, A-list blogger Steve Rubel learned the hard way that a moment of reflection doesn’t hurt before publishing your views to the world. Here’s what he wrote on Twitter a few days ago:
“PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash,”
Not the best comment when you are a Senior Vice President of a PR agency that continuously pitches stories to the same publication. Jim Louderback, Editor in Chief of PC Magazine, wasn’t amused and he comments over at Strumpette.
Then one could argue that threatening to boycott Edelman PR all together is a huge overreaction, but Louderback indeed has some very good points.
“…I get a chance to remind everyone out there in PR that, even if you don’t read that copy of PC Magazine, please don’t toss it “in the trash”. Pass it along to someone who really wants it – or at the very least, be kind to the earth and drop it in the recycle bin instead.”
Rubel apologizes.
Tags: twitter, public relations, PR, twitter. Ping.