OC_SkomerAn experimental trailer for BBC Radio 4’s Open Country programme shot and edited entirely on location by the presenter using only an iPhone4 and iMovie.
Author: Rich
Helping you communicate with the written word, the spoken word and body language.
HACKS WITH NO BALLS
No surprise that a certain be-knighted football club manager should try to ban the reporter with the temerity to ask a question about Rhino. But deeply disturbing that the 199 or so other hacks at the news conference agreed to abide by some PR lackey’s arbitrary rule not to ask the very questions on everyone’s lips. Asking awkward questions – however unwelcome – is at the very heart of being a journalist and once that right is abdicated one becomes a sychophant and a cipher. A sad and sorry example of just how neutered the modern so-called reporter has become. Evidently the swarthy-faced footballer has more balls than a roomful of sheepskin-clad yes men. That starlet, whose name is not dissimilar to the glass of Sanatogen I am sipping as I write this, is clearly a lucky duck. (Note to subs: yes duck).
A FUNGI TO BE WITH – eating wild mushrooms for the BBC
Sometimes you have to suffer for your art. Take tomorrow’s Open Country programme on BBC Radio 4. There I am scrunching through the leaf litter in the New Forest looking for wild mushrooms when my guide, the mycologist John Wright (off Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage show), says to me “go on try that one.” So I do. With interesting consequences. Listen out for the sound of spitting tomorrow, Saturday, morning just after six or the following Thursday lunchtime.
And if you can’t catch it on the wireless then you can listen here once it’s been broadcast.
POURING TROUBLE ON OILED WATER – part two
So at last Tony Hayward has admitted BP was ‘not prepared’ for the Gulf oil spill. In an interview for the BBC’s Money programme – his first since the disaster – the former oil company boss said BP wasn’t ready to deal with the fallout of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the media “feeding frenzy” that followed it. Hayward said as the face of BP he had been “demonised and vilified”, but he understood why.
“If I had done a degree at Rada [The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] rather than a degree in geology, I may have done better, but I’m not certain it would’ve changed the outcome,” he said before adding “But certainly the perception of myself may have been different.”
Tony you could have saved yourself the time and expense of a degree in dramatic art and simply booked a couple of ACM Training’s media, crisis communications and emergency planning courses. They’d have set you back £99 per person or £999 per workshop but think how much you might have saved? The debacle is estimated to have cost BP £30 billion – of which a significant chunk was knocked off the company’s share price simply because of the spectacularly bad PR.
In just one day we could have helped you gaze at the “disaster horizon” and see (without yet another degree – this one in clairvoyance) which direction the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might be coming from. Then armed with the certain knowledge that if you drill for oil one day that oil is going to get spilt we’d have helped you draw up a very simple media plan complete with a number of straightforward, credible and punchy key messages that even a geologist could deliver.
Sorry for the sarcastic tone Tone but I still cannot quite grasp the fact that a company the size of BP should have been so useless in PR and media terms. There are small business across Britain bp than BP (better prepared than BP).
So if you’re reading this Tony give me a call or drop me a line and avoid another costly mistake in future. And if you’re not Tony Hayward but would like to know how we can help you and your organisation deal with the media in a crisis then why not come along to one of our public crisis communications workshops or book us to deliver crisis comms training in-house? [product sku=”wpid=38″]
IS NAD BAD OR MAD?
So Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, admits her blog is 70% fiction 30% fact. See the BBC’s website for details. Does that make her refreshingly honest, worryingly dishonest or just plain stupid? I know which gets my vote. Decide for yourself at http://blog.dorries.org/
AVOID CLICHÉS LIKE THE PLAGUE
So much writing (and speech for that matter) is lazy. People peck at their keyboards or open their mouths and let whatever comes to mind spill out. Which very often is cliché-laden, jargon-strewn nonsense. Take a look at “50 Office-Speak Phrases You Love to Hate” and you’ll see what I mean.
No excuses. Think before you write. Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. The 18th Century English writer of dictionary fame said: “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” Or Ernest Hemmingway’s. “The first draft of anything is shit.”
Avoid clichés like the plague. Don’t make your readers as sick as proverbial parrots. Please them with your well-crafted words. Let me show you how with one of my writing workshops.
BEAT THE CHANCELLOR – or why we’re knocking off what he’s putting on
We know how hard it is making ends meet in the Third Sector. And George Osborne’s decision to increase VAT to 20% from January 2011 can only make it harder still. But we also know that maintaining investment in staff development is vital if the Third Sector is to continue delivering high quality services to some of the most needy and vulnerable people in society. So we’ve introduced a new charity rate for all of our training and consultancy services to help training budgets go that little bit further.
To cancel out the VAT increase registered charities qualify for 20% off our “pay-later” prices and 10% off our online “book-and-pay-now” rates.* But we’re not waiting until the New Year to bring in the discount. It takes immediate effect. To ensure that you receive your discount you must enter your charity registration number in the promotional code box on our booking page. Please note that your registration number may be checked against the Charity Commission’s records in England and Wales or with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator in Scotland.
We run media training courses, provide training for trainers, can show you how to write a press release or how to make a podcast. We train people in presentation skills and public speaking and can help with writing for business
Click here to browse all our workshops, check dates and venues and book your discounted places.
*Workshops that are already discounted for promotional reasons will not be discounted by an additional 20% under this scheme but will receive discount from the full price at whichever is the higher rate.
JUST A MINUTE or GONE IN 60 SECONDS
Whether you’re a Radio Four fan and listen to Just a Minute or are more into movies and like Nick Cage in Gone in Sixty Seconds, a new feature has been added to the ACM Training website. You can now listen to our trainers give a minute long “taster” of selected courses – like media training, writing for business, writing press releases, presentation skills and training for trainers – by clicking on the media player below the hourglass icon on the workshop pages. Try it! Click here for Richard Uridge’s presentation skills course summary.
CHOMSKY’S A CHUMP – why Noam’s a numpty
Noam Chomsky may well be an expert linguist. But his suggestion in a recent Daily Telegraph article that oratory is unnecessary is ludicrous. ‘I am no Barack Obama,’ he told the interviewer, Nigel Farndale. ‘I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had. I don’t like to listen to it. Even people I admire, like Martin Luther King, just turn me off. I don’t think it is the way to reach people. If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.’
Well Noam I beg to differ. Hearing you drone on would bore me, however interesting the content. I’m glad I’m not one of your students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’d be the bloke at the back dozing off.
Great communicators combine content with style. Okay so no amount of style can make up for a total lack of content. But great content can be spoiled by poor delivery. Try reading any of Churchill’s famous wartime addresses to the nation in a boring voice. Or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech for that matter.
Classical music provides an appropriate metaphor. Imagine Beethoven’s 5th played on just one instrument. And, what’s more, imagine that the instrument played just one note. Wouldn’t be much of a symphony. Blah, blah, blah…You wouldn’t want to listen beyond a few blahs – oops I mean bars – now would you?
When public speaking your voice is an instrument. So use it as such. Unless, of course, you’re in possession of one of the world’s greatest intellects. And are arrogant enough to believe that alone will compel people to listen to you.
Are you a Chomsky or a Churchill? Take my presentational skills quiz.
GLAMOURPUSS OCTOPUS – or why the media loves animals and celebrities
One’s an octopus. The other’s a glamourpuss. And they’re both suckers for soccer (or soccer players) in their own peculiar way. But Paul and Cheryl have more than that in common. Over the past week their tentacles have reached deep into the murky depths of the British media demonstrating once again that there’s nothing like animals and celebrity (or better still a combination of the two) to whet the appetite of a silly season sub editor.
First to Paul. That’s the unlikely name given to an octopus who lives in a tank at the Sea Life Aquarium in the western German city of Oberhausen. Since when has Paul been a German name? And aren’t octopuses supposed to have alliterative monikers like Otto (which at least has the virtue of sounding vaguely Germanic)? But then Otto doesn’t scan too well with Paul’s skill as a psychic. Herr Otto, I mean Paul, has managed to pick the winners of every game involving Germany during the World Cup by choosing mussels coded with the national colours of the various teams. Call me an old cynic but clearly the England team’s mollusc was laced with a particularly nasty form of shellfish poisoning to avoid any slip ups in the group stages. Whether Paul’s punditry is a freak of nature or a fluke of chance matters not – you can’t buy this sort of publicity (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/10604336.stm if you missed it) but you can manufacture it. I’d stake my modest reputation on the fact that the managers at Sea Life set up the whole thing as a publicity stunt. Now that’s what I call a story with legs (or is it arms)? All you need to get free advertising in the editorial media is an understanding of what gets us hacks going. And Paul ticks a lot of boxes (as you’d expect with all those limbs) – his story’s topical, involves the national sport, is quirky and gives us a chance to have a wry smile at zose crazee Germans…
And so to the Geordie songstress. Cheryl’s story – or at least the most recent chapter – was an unfortunate accident. Let’s face it not even publicity-hungry ex-WAGs deliberately get themselves infected with something as nasty as malaria to try to deflect attention from their philandering former friends. But as soon as she contracted the disease – and even as she was being treated in intensive care – there were media opportunities being sought and exploited.
Malaria kills up to three million people a year – mainly in sub-Saharan Africa – and all those deaths rate barely a mention in the UK media. So you could, not unreasonably, argue that our obsession with celebrity is obscene when the relative value of human life seems so out of kilter. But at least Ms Tweedy’s suffering has put malaria on the map. Charities fighting the disease and its consequences have not been slow to use this opportunity for the good. In the same way that cancer charities sensitively handled the death of Jade Goody.
I’ll leave you with this question: which is the bigger parasite – the media or the malaria-causing Plasmodium protozoan carried by the female Anopheles mosquito?
If you’d like to use the media proactively (like Paul) you can learn how on our media strategies and campaigns workshop.
If you’d like to learn how to deal with the media in emergencies then our crisis communications workshop is for you.