I’m half way through packing for the trip back to Blighty after what feels like a long and exhausting three days here at the Monte Carlo Reinsurance Rendez-Vous. But before I go – and to distract me from the pain of packing – here are 10 things the FWD team think you should know about the experience:
Cost of a taxi from Nice Airport to central Monte Carlo €90-€100.
Cost of the bus from Nice Airtport to central Monte Carlo €18.
Cost of a bottle of champagne at the Hermitage starts at €90…and keeps on rising.
Best party venue this year: the SCOR lounge.
Late at night, they take the jewellery out of the shop windows.
The Sass Bar. Just don’t.
Average daytime temperature during the Rendez-Vous: 28 degrees centigrade.
Worst thing to be seen wearng: coordinated brightly-coloured corporate polo shirts.
Greatest disappointment: no Aon party.
Most ubiquitous members of the media: Anthony Gould from Incisive and Jon Guy from Global Broker and Underwriter.
(Ok, I know I said 10 facts, but I just thought of one more.) Most elusive member of the media: Peter Hastie of Insurance Insider. Whenever you arrive at a party, you hear that Peter left it five minutes earlier.
So au revoir and bon chance from this year’s Rendez-Vous! Allez, salute maintenant!
Gosh, you know the news-free zone that is the British summer is well and truly upon us when the BBC comes up with this, the most patronising piece of infotainment I’ve seen in months.
Presenter Tazeen Ahmad spent six months working undercover as…wait for it… a checkout assistant. How’s that for cutting edge journalism? In this chat with BBC Breakfast anchors Bill Turnbull and Susanna Reid, she spills all on what she learned during her stint at the tills – and it’s shocking stuff: how people chatted to her when they reached for their purses; how she learned about colleagues and their lives; how people, well, bought things…
Wow, sounds just like a normal job, though one suspects Tazeen may not have had one of those before. Checking out her biog, I see Tazeen graduated from University with a 2:1 in communication studies. ‘Nuff said.
Never make a decision related to health based on anything you read in a national newspaper. That’s one of my little maxims after years spent monitoring health scares in the media. It’s proving particularly relevant now that swine flu has propelled itself into the national consciousness like a new X Factor winner.
Back in April, I wrote a post on how the public deals with the perception of a new risk like swine flu. Right now, our papers, news websites and TV programmes seem to be infected with the flu themselves – most of them giving advice. Do this, don’t do this; do that, don’t do that. The problem for the ordinary punter is trying to assess all of this information and turn it into some sort of meaningful guidance. And that’s not easy. As with other Great British heath scares like the MMR jab, SARS and BSE, no matter how much you read up on the subject in the press, it’s virtually impossible to reach some sort of rational consensus. I can remember sifting through tonnes of data on MMR, concerned parent that I am, just to tie myself in mental knots. It was only when some German friends mentioned that the UK was the only country in the world which seemed to be fixated on MMR that I saw a glimmer of light. (The children were duly dispatched to the doctor for their jabs pronto.)
Three media factors make swine flu the issue it is right now - four if you count the virus itself.
The first is that, with the summer holidays upon us, news is in short supply so the media are looking for anything else that can fill the gaps. With most of the nation’s politicians and celebs basking on a beach somewhere, the media’s traditional news sources have dried up till September. A good health scare that can potentially affect every person in the UK is great for filling both news and feature pages. (How long will it be before the first swine flu fashion piece: how to wear your respiratory mask and still look cool!)
The second is that newspapers in particular, and much of the media in general, are simply the wrong medium for the balanced, proportionate discussion of health issues. Front page headlines exist for one reason – to sell papers – so DON’T WORRY in 40-point Times New Roman bold isn’t going to be anywhere as effective in shifting copies as DO WORRY.
The media is not suited for discussions of shades of grey; journalists want black and white. Claims from all sides of the swine flu debate are given similar status in terms of headlines and coverage. There are realistic views among the scaremongering pieces, but they are easily lost amid all the shouting and misinformation.
Third, in the age of instant online reporting – and gosh, didn’t Michael Jackson’s death at night catch the British national papers on the hop – news outlets are tending to publish first, then ask questions later. GP dies of swine flu, shouted last week’s headlines; a few days later we learned, through much smaller articles, that the GP in question had a heart complaint and probably died of natural causes.
Finally, a prize for anyone who knows the difference between a disease that’s infectious and a disease that’s contagious. Keep healthy.
Citizen Kane: not the greatest advert for newspaper recycling
The problem of how traditional newspapers can survive in the online world and prosper when the vast majority of news content is free is something we’ve dealt with before in this blog. It’s a isue that’s been around for years now, but has become increasingly urgent as the recession has eaten away at newspapers’ advertising revenue. This week, however, has seen two major announcements affecting the debate.
The first is the launch of Amazon’s next generation of its e-reader, the Kindle DX. It’s reported to be around 250% larger than the old Kindle giving it a screen size equivalent to an A4 page – just the right thing to read a newspaper of magazine on. (I’m still not sure what DX stands for, though.) There’s no doubt that the publishing industry has big hopes for the new Kindle; users may well be prepared to pay a fee for a regular download of an electronic newspaper or magazine. Some commentators have wondered about the portability of the new device but the screen quality looks good as you can see in this BBC report.
The other big development is Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he expects News Corporation-owned papers to start charging for their online content within the next year. This would be a major shake-up of the current online status quo and runs the risk of driving readers away from News Corp content to other free content – unless other publishers decide that they need to jump on the same bandwagon at the same time. But even if all the old school publishers go paid-for, other sites such as news blogs and those of big broadcasters such as the BBC and CNN will most likely remain free.
When it comes to the big papers, the suspicion is that many will only ring-fence some of their content – e.g. the more specialist, niche news: business analysis, the Guardian’s highly rated supplements, horse racing tips.
But whichever way the old school publishers jump, you can be sure that the newspaper industry will never recover from the current recession. The dominance of daily papers, which began during the Victorian era and is exemplified by the magnificent Charles Foster Kane – Citizen Kane to his friends – is approaching its end.
A Hong Kong ballet class during the 2003 SARS scare
Astronomers every so often point to some heavenly event and hail it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a theoretical cosmic phenomenon close-up. In media circles, the swine flu scare amounts to the same thing: a chance to witness a global media panic in the raw.
From its epicentre in Mexico, news of the potential and allegedly deadly influenza pandemic resonated around the globe before beginning to deflate late last week. The Mexican authorities revised down the number of suspected deaths resulting from the new virus; Westerners stubbornly refused to die; the Scottish newly-weds reported to have brought swine flu to the UK with them noted that their close encounter with the killer bug was a bit like being jet-lagged. Hmmm, perhaps not the biological Armageddon some in the media had led us to believe was imminent.
Watching the flu scare unfold through the media has given us a bird’s eye view of journalism’s inner workings. We got to see the cogs turning, the great gears grinding into motion. First, the initial reports from Mexico: a starting pistol for the scare to begin. Next, the UK media asked itself this question: how does this information affect my readers in the UK? In two ways, it transpired: Brits on holiday in Mexico and the potential for the virus to reach our shores and wreak havoc here. Journalists hunted for the first UK cases, sought official UK responses and dragged out their clippings of the ghosts of pandemics past. After that it was a blow-by-blow account of the virus’s spread around the world and the rising number of cases, gradually tempered by the realisation that the scarily high death tolls at first reported in Mexico are not being replicated. Yesterday, one recovering 12-year-old UK sufferer said she thought she had caught a cold.
So is the media at fault for the manner in which it reports scares like swine flu? Yes and no. Yes because information and statistics are presented without context. Our pleasant breakfast is wrecked by the news that over 100 people are thought to have perished from this new bug, but we’re not told that up to half a million die every year from flu and 30,000 die from malaria each day. Yes, because the media call it ‘killer flu’ when, of course, all types of flu kill. It’s lazy headline writing which serves to raise unnecessary alarm.
On the other hand, the media’s mere act of focusing on a particular issue gives it a disproportionate profile. Every day, billions of events occur in the world with only a handful falling under the media’s spotlight – and it’s a spotlight that’s settles only briefly before moving on. The fact that most of the global media’s spotlights all settled on the same event – the emergence of swine flu – creates its own huge impact regardless of what is actually written on the subject. If the same spotlight was turned on a relatively innocuous issue, prostate cancer say, the resulting ’scare’ would encourage hundreds of thousands of men to book that long delayed check-up.
Like the virus itself, the swine flu scare has not gone away. It will return following the first UK death – and there will be a swine flu death in this country because influenza, as it says on the label, kills. Or the story will mutate: the price of Tamiflu rockets; vaccine problems; GP surgeries overwhelmed; government response inadequate; Mexican restaurants go out of business…And on it goes, until the spotlight moves on again in its relentless hunt for tomorrow’s headlines.
Attending the leaving drinks of a national journalist I know well, it struck me that I seem to have been present at quite a view of these farewell soirees recently. It’s also notable that the mood among many of the journalists I chat to is rather depressed at the moment. Of the journos attending last night’s bash, many were already ex-journos, having moved into PR or investment writing, while those still reporting muttered about the pressure they were under and their uncertain future.
Fair to say that what was once the UK’s most sought-after career is rapidly becoming a bit of a well of despondency. So why the bleak mood among our friends in the media? There are a number of reasons.
First, the impact of the recession. This is hitting advertising spend, which is the lifeblood of both consumer and business media. As a result, publishers are cutting pay, reducing the rates they pay freelancers, and making redundancies. In some cases, magazines have already folded or have gone online only. The mortgage sector has seen a swathe of closures, while last month Business Insurance Europe went the way of that great publishing house in the sky. Even the Press Gazette, the voice of British journalism, was shut down this month as economically unsustainable.
Second, the impact of online media. Google, the global search engine giant, has stolen much of the traditional media’s advertising revenue by launching its Adwords programme – and rightly so. For classified-style ads, Adwords is extremely cost effective and its impact is measurable right down to the individual click. Online news content also tends to be offered free of charge. An entire generation has grown us believing that news should be both free and on their computer. Why by a newspaper when you can read one for free on the net? Subscriptions, unsurprising, are dropping year on year with some predicting the demise of the traditional newspaper is imminent.
So perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that journalists are feeling uncharacteristically subdued right now. One journalist Sally Whittle, author of the blog Getting Ink, recently ruminated in one of her posts about whether she could, hand on heart, recommend a career in journalism anymore.
So the next time you’re scowling at some dodgy headline or moaning at inaccurate reporting, spare a thought for our down-heartened friends in the traditional media. Tory leader David Cameron came up with the idea of hugging a hoodie; maybe we should be thinking about hugging a hack. Well, maybe a metaphorical shoulder rub at least.
And remember: Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent was a journalist.
Clark never felt completely at ease in his new role as online showbiz editor
Communicating risk accurately and realistically is one of the trickiest things to do successfully in public relations. Just ask any government minister or scientist who’s had the pleasure of informing the general public about a food poisoning scare, or a new avian virus, or some rogue prions in their Barnsley chop. Worst of all: placating frightened townsfolk about the nuclear power plant that’s just been announced will be built 10 miles away. So with this in mind, it was with great interest that I recently listened to a fascinating presentation from Prof. Ragnar Löfstedt, director of the King’s Centre for Risk Management, about how the public responds to news of different types of risk.
Prof Löfstedt made two key points which are highly relevant to PRs and communicators. The first is that a known range of factors associated with a risk will influence the level of public alarm. The second is that the strategy used to communicate the risk will also affect the public’s response.
So, first, the factors which influence the level of public concern: according to Prof Löfstedt, the public will be more fearful of a risk that is technological in origin rather than natural, hence we’re more worried about nuclear power plants than earthquakes. We’re also alarmed more by risks over which we have no control and to which our exposure is involuntary, compared with risks we can control and choose to expose ourselves to. This explains why most of us don’t worry about our mobile phones but do worry about the effect of their base stations; it’s also why the thousands of deaths from motor accidents don’t make us anxious to get in a car, but a few hundred deaths in plane crashes bring us out in a cold sweat as we board an aircraft. (I’ve listed all Prof. Löfstedt’s influencing factors in the slides below.)
Second, the manner in which you communicate risk affects the public response: putting a scientist or minister on the evening news to offer reassurance is the classic approach – and the worst. According to Prof. Löfstedt, this top-down strategy has been rendered ineffective by the erosion of public trust in authority figures, a phenomenon caused in some part the government’s handling of the BSE scare. Much more effective is either a dialogue or a bottom-up approach – going to the local community, engaging in a dialogue, negotiating on possible risk mitigation strategies. (This seems to be the approach taken by the major supermarkets when seeking to build in a new area.)
Trust is also a key factor in determining the level of public alarm. The more trusted the purveyor of the message, the lower the perception of risk. On this basis, the government might be wise to call upon the services of Dame Judi Dench, Stephen Fry or Sir David Attenborough the next time it wants to announce a food scare. The value of trust is paramount: statistically speaking, trust is nine times easier to erode than to build.
The use of numbers to illustrate level of risk is also problematic. Prof. Löfstedt argues that the public doesn’t understand numbers so quoting percentage chances at them or predicted death tolls either does nothing or exacerbates the situation. A colloquial or anecdotal approach is more effective: “You have about as much chance of dying in a plane crash as you do of winning the National Lottery twice. (I made that up but you get the idea.)
So the next time you find yourself having to communicate a risk to an audience, have a think about Prof. Löfstedt’s work. It may well just help you prevent an issue turning into a full-blown crisis.
If you’d like to know more about Prof. Löfstedt’s work, have a look here.
Journalists have worked themselves into a self-righteous lather this week following The Sunday Times’ shocking revelation that the Government’s City Minister, Lord Paul Myners, set up an off-shore insurance business. Cries of ‘resign’ and ‘hypocrite’ have resounded through the media. Lord Myners is, after all, leading a taskforce to stamp out corporate tax avoidance.
But hang on a sec’. Isn’t the fact that Lord Myners was formerly chairman of Bermuda-based Aspen one of the worst kept secrets in history? In fact, it isn’t a secret at all; it’s public knowledge. Most people in the London insurance market, including its journalists, are only too familar with Lord Myners’s role at Aspen until he stepped down in 2007. So why did The Sunday Times treat the story of Lord Myners and Aspen as though some dark secert had been revealed through months of in-depth investigative journalism?
The answer is that, in reality, there are an awful lot of things that national journalists don’t know but that practitioners in any given trade or industry take for granted. Most business journalists working on the nationals will be au fait with Myners’s past; the problem is that their colleagues on the political desks are not – and they are the ones pushing this story. Were one to ask a denizen of Leadenhall Street whether the Myners-Aspen story merited coverage, their answer would probably be a bemused ‘no’.
While there is some merit to the charge of hypocrisy, it is questionable whether the story deserves the prominence given to it by The Sunday Times’ exposé-style front page and accompanying leader column. What is clear is that any attempt by the media to give the impression that Myners tried to conceal his connection to Aspen is utterly unwarranted. The information was in the public domain and about as widely available as it’s possible to be. How much investigative journalism is required to pump ‘Myners Aspen’ into Google?
Surely if anything should give rise to concern, it’s the ability of the national media to feign ignorance of a Government minister’s CV, and then present information from it as a major revelation – even though its business reporters were only too familiar with the facts. To prove the point, click here for a profile of Myners in the Times from 2005 which names him as chairman of Aspen Re.
Gosh, you know the news-free zone that is the British summer is well and truly upon us when the BBC comes up with this, the most patronising piece of infotainment I’ve seen in months.
