Sunday Business Post | Irish Business News

Breaking News Business Ireland World Sport Weather

Navigation (Home)News News Features The Market Technology Media & Marketing Comment & Analysis Computers In Business Profile Property Motoring Agenda Letters

People In Business Business Of Law Done Deal Commercial Reports Budget Forum Events / Conferences Company Reports Tools Crossword Search the archives Newsletter IMODE RSS

Text-Only

reality BYTES
Sunday, May 03, 2009 By Adrian Weckler
Two weeks ago, public relations expert Terry Prone launched a withering attack on blogs and internet discussion boards. In an article in the Sunday Times, she said that blogs were laced with defamation and breaches of privacy. As such, they represented a threat to our society, she said.

This should raise an eyebrow or two. Has Prone not read newspapers? Sometimes the printed media can be worse in its disregard of citizens’ privacy than a few small-time blogs with a couple of hundred readers.

But none of these established, organised, commercial media titles is attacked by Prone, even though they are far more dangerous and powerful. None of the editors or publishers, who regularly print large feature articles about PR clients, is attacked.

So Prone’s broadside against penniless, non-commercial bloggers might be put into some context. So too should her attacks on journalists who blog ‘‘for nothing’’: after all, a blog is unlikely to include a large feature on a PR client.

‘‘You get journalists writing blogs for nothing, their urge for self-expression obscuring the fact that they are undermining their own employers,” she wrote in the Sunday Times.

‘‘I can think of no other well-paid profession whose members compete against each other for free. You don’t get orthopaedic surgeons doing knee replacements in their leisure time without charge.”

Prone’s choice of peer - a €200,000-per-year orthopaedic surgeon - will not be recognisable to a 27-yearold journalist earning €32,000 per year. And therein lies the difference: a mega-rich peer of Prone’s would logically have no interest in blogging, and might well see it as a threat to the status quo. A modestly paid young journalist, on the other hand, has little to lose by blogging.

Within the media, better paid journalists do not like younger journalists who blog. They would much prefer that things stayed the way they are. They see no need whatsoever for services like Twitter.

After all, how many golf classics can you get invited to from engaging in Twitter or Facebook?

Prone, like all senior public relations experts, has worked hard to foster relationships with senior figures in the media. She knows where the land lies and the structure of existing media organisations.

So if a client of hers gets into media trouble, there is a good chance that an editor or producer will take her call before the item appears to hear her out.What’s more, she probably has that number.

But how many bloggers has Prone taken out to lunch? How many of their mobile numbers does she have?

Prone’s attitude is symptomatic of a backlash against digital media among senior practitioners in public relations and the media. The outraged traditionalist can be characterised as a higher-paid, older, more comfortable executive who is used to being in control and who has gotten used to existing structures.

Younger, lower-paid journalists have much less resistance to blogs: some of them even blog themselves.

Prone has a valid point about standards and defamation on blogs and internet chat boards. Many are unregulated areas of ill-informed rubbish, with ignorance displayed in large dollops. And there remains a lack of ethics when it comes to many bloggers’ activities. But these remain a pale shadow of the power and destruction of Ireland’s most successful commercial newspapers.

Perhaps Prone’s next article will complain about those papers’ editors and publishers. Then again, perhaps it won’t.

Click here for Sunday Business Post stories before this date