Pitching to AI news editors at Microsoft, Murdoch closes papers, and leveraging virtual events.

Hi, and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm the founder of ESOS Public Relations and also an entrepreneur who's lived and worked on 4 continents and set up companies in 3 continents and worked with many, many entrepreneurs on getting them noticed at the same time as getting my own companies noticed. And I, on this podcast, like to share thoughts and insights that I've used with major companies that might help owner-operators and people responsible for marketing. So one of the things I was looking at over the last week, as we need to pivot the agency, is the core values of what I have been doing over these last 25 years. I started the company in 1995 in Singapore and then moved to China in 2006 to start the agency. And then I've recently come back to the UK, and I was starting to think about what East West meant. And originally it was as helping Western companies get to Asia, and it was access to Asia as the strapline. And at the time, pre-internet really, the business model was that it was cheaper for companies to use me than it was for them to use fax machine to multiple media outlets in Asia. Well, of course, quite quickly that changed, and now we see that the media really is as local and global at the same time because of the technology that we've got. So I decided that I, I would look at East West in a different way And it's no longer about me helping companies go from west to east or east to west, but it's about trying to share best practices that I see from around the world with people in whichever location that you are listening to this from. And I can tell you that having looked at the stats on Buzzsprout's control panel, that actually I'm joined by people from all over the world on this episode. So thank you very much for listening. But also what I realize is, of course, course, that now the news as it happens around the world is delivered to our desktops or our phones in real time. This weekend I saw that Rupert Murdoch in Australia has decided to shut down over 100 newspapers. And Murdoch, of course, owns newspapers in the UK but also in the, in, in the US. Apparently a Denver Post journalist was laid off actually while on assignment. So the news of cuts being led by an Australian impacting Americans in small towns is in my own living room and on my own iPad in my home. And on the same day comes in news from Microsoft in America that they are now laying off journalists. And I think some 20, 30 journalists who were curating the content for the MSN News are now being replaced with artificial intelligence, which will just simply scoop up the media stories and allocate them to certain content syndication engines and populate the content management system. Of course, there are, there are tool sets like scoopit.com, which we use, which will basically track the internet for relevant news and bring it as a news feed. And this is not dissimilar to the old RSS, of course. So it's inevitable really that eventually the, the manual labor of cutting and pasting stories from one place to another will be replaced by technology. And some of the journalists even quipped that this is the technology they've been writing about, and now it has actually indeed taken their jobs. So it's perhaps no surprise really that the world's largest media companies now were not publishers, they were actually technology companies. If you think about it, all the big publishers, including people like News Corporation, who are nowhere near as powerful as they used to be are being supplanted by the companies like Google, Facebook, YouTube. In China, Tencent. In Japan and in Korea as well, with even Yahoo, for example, in Japan became very large with SoftBank supporting them. So the traditional news networks that have been independent have really suffered. The ones that have survived will be the state-owned ones, and even those like the BBC are under pressure, and their license fee may be cut because the Conservative Party are questioning their survival and their independence, and whether they really do deserve a grant that everybody should pay for a license to the BBC, even though they may never even watch the BBC or listen to the BBC. In, in China, the, the state grants the licenses to the media, and of course the TV and the radio are all state-owned. And in Singapore, it's the same, uh, even though they, they are positioned as independent publishers. MediaCorp, for example, and the Straits Times come under, under government supervision. In some other markets, we're seeing that these state-run news organizations, ironically enough, are more stable than the ones that were supposed to be the bastions of free press. And so the, the control of the media by the government, by the governments of places like China and Singapore, is ironically enough sustaining the journalist community. But to To cope with this insecurity, some titles like The Guardian are becoming or have become subscription-based. The Guardian is aiming for some 2,000— sorry, some 2 million subscribers by 2023, according to the CEO David Pemsell. Now, in just last year, they had some 650,000 regular payers around the world for both the digital and the print. And The Guardian, if you, if you didn't know, is owned by the Scott Trust, which is an organization founded in 1936. And, and it's held in trust in order to ensure its editorial integrity. So it's not owned by an individual or by shareholders, but by a nonprofit trust. Now, the, the goal of of media like The Guardian is to become trusted and profitable, or at least sustainable, through the subscription model. And, and one view from a chap called Douglas McCabe of a media analyst firm called Enders Analysis says that journalists, not just commercial teams, should be incentivized to achieve the targets that the people like David Pemsall, the CEO of Guardian is trying to achieve. Now obviously this means that the journalists will ultimately know about the performance of the pages and the articles that they're writing. There used to be a church and state separation between the advertisers and the editorial, and the idea was the editorial then could all be trusted. But if the journalists themselves are starting to be remunerated by the performance of the pages, then they are inevitably going to be choosing stories or writing stories that are going to be more sensationalist. And from a PR point of view, it will mean increasingly that only those companies that can afford to, to engage those media and create that kind of content along with the journalists will survive. Now, in parts of, of Asia, certainly in Indochina where we're working with a client at the moment, The media were maintaining a semblance of integrity, but in the last six months have started to say that they really need to be paid for the coverage that they are going to be providing to us. The advertising has died. The journalists want to continue to be paid. The publisher is saying, "Get what you can from the people who will be providing you the content," and in a way. There was always this uproar that this would be the case, but it's not really dissimilar to what's happening now in Western titles as they're realizing that the people who should be paying are both the readers but also those who want access to those readers. So we're looking at now, um, the media integrity, which has already been questioned by some, changing its business model And that's impacting how PR is being done. Publishers are going to be looking to PR, and have been for quite some time, to increasingly provide engaging content because the media survival isn't going to be on being a trusted independent platform for discussion necessarily. It's going to be based on content creation, audience engagement, and measurable results. Now, in, in May, the publishers in America, the association, revealed that events revenue is down 60% in the year. Now, friends of mine that run publishing companies would make their money on the events, and they used to have events and publications running in tandem, and it was a very nice complementary business model. Now, of course, they've been hit both with the loss of advertising on the print and with the, uh, the sort of abandonment of all events. So companies like Bloomberg are now pivoting, and they are working to leverage their database of great speakers and great research and are creating paid-for events. We've seen this more and more with webinar and Zoom, and there are platforms like On24 Digital which are now coming as specialist platforms to complement the more general like Zoom. And from a PR point of view, what we are needing to do is to help clients to create events and to participate in virtual events where they would have in the past been participating in trade shows or even local fairs. So the challenge now for all of us is to think about the storification of our businesses and to think about the audience groups that we've got that are no longer necessarily defined by location, but are defined by profile and are going to be possibly quite short attention span in terms of the content that we create and the message that we provide. Now, in the absence of the independent editorial advisor, which is the role that the publisher and the editor used to play, there isn't the consistent narrative that these audiences are going to be seeing. And this is true whether it's in consumer press or trade press. What we're seeing is really that social media, these big tech companies like Google and Facebook, have really been seeing all content as equal. They have no interest in the content. They have interest only in the page display and the advertising on it, which has meant that we have media which is, is kind of random in terms of what it's providing. But the algorithms are now starting to send people the news, which is more and more targeted to the news that they've seen before. So the announcement by Microsoft that AI is going to be curating the content and sending it will only amplify this trend. So we're going to be removing the filter, which was some curator, some people saying, you know, this is a good story but unbelievable. And as we saw how Twitter has been fact-checking now some of President Trump's more recent tweets, If, if we end up with people not checking these tweets and but AI checking these tweets or these messages, then we're going to have quite possibly stories that may or may not be true about a company or a person being run. Now, from a PR point of view, of course, what that means is that we need to be proactive about managing the content that goes out, and we need to be absolutely diligent about tracking the content that's online about us, because it's no longer the case that we can rely on, on editors or people to safeguard the best interests of, of an industry or of our company, of our brand. And this crosses whether it is big companies, small companies, CEOs, or local salespeople, or, or fire chiefs. So we're going to be finding that in this disintegration of traditional structures of the media, that the role of PR is going to change. And I started off talking about how I was originally working to help Western companies going to Asia, and, and now that I'm back in, in Europe, I will still play that role. But I think also the role is going to be finding best practices from around the world on how companies and individuals are able to manage content creation and distribution and what I call digital storification— how to make the story about you and your brand and your product be something that your audiences are able to see consistently incredible formats and on channels that they are engaged with. Now, I mentioned to my, to my daughter, um, who's got her exams this week, that I was tomorrow taking back up with the phone calls with my, uh, team in Singapore and Beijing. And I thought, isn't it incredible that I can do all of this from here? And then she turned to me and she said, you know, actually I've been chatting to my friends in Beijing today. I don't see what's so amazing about that. And I said, oh, okay, well, you know, how do you feel then about going back to school online tomorrow? And she said, well, actually, for my exams, I'm quite happy not to go into school because there's less distraction and I will be able to work at my desk where I have everything that I know and I like it and I can get the food I like and so on. Um, and I said, what will you miss? She said, just my friends, but I'm more productive at home. And actually, isn't that exactly what people are saying about going back to work? That they're actually now geography independent in terms of their concentration, their focus. She can do her work from home, she can take a test from home, and she misses the social interaction. So the challenge is going to be, from a PR point of view, for schools to engage, but also for us companies and us communicators to build compelling content that's going to get people to come out of the space where they're comfortable at home and to communicate with us and with their team members and possibly with their customers. So I'm going to be working more on how I can create engaging content and how I can track that and how I can share that information with you, the listener who is running a business or running a brand somewhere. So my metrics are becoming increasingly clear, and digital means that all PR and all communication has metrics in the same way that sales And customer satisfaction have metrics. So as you lay down your plan for the week or for the day, what metrics do you have to measure the performance of your communication? And how will you communicate your KPIs to your 3 sets of audience, that is your team members, your partners, and your customers this week? So thank you for listening and tuning in. And I pray that you are in good health, that your business is profitable, and they keep communicating. My name is Jim James. Thank you. Be listening to Speak PR.