Kiss and tells are one thing and the women involved know there will be a downside to telling/selling their story. Their backgrounds will be dug up, former lovers will come forward and it’s Titillation Central for a few weeks on the front pages. The female columnists will get indignant, and chew up and spit out the men involved, as well as the women, repeating the same lurid details from a different angle. But the next week, those same columnists will be vilifying—and objectifying—another woman in the public eye, just because she happens to be a woman in the public eye, and usually with as much venom as they can muster.

Tabloid editors are, by nature, so perverse they don’t see or care that what their rags perpetuate is the idea that it is ok to disrespect women, whoever the woman may be.

Successful women are nearly always objectified. Madonna’s got a young lover (slag), Posh is so thin because she tries desperately to stop her man straying (saddo), Angelina’s a man-eater, while all their other halves are heroes within their professions. The way ALL female stars are depicted in magazines like Heat, with their cellulite close-ups, the “have they or haven’t they had surgery” close-ups, those scrutinising portraits of women on the red carpet in their “hit or miss” outfits—is absolutely abhorrent. And when they can’t get a sexual or close-lens angle, those successful women are simply characterised as bitches or losers.

All this is now normal. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Women in the public eye now need thick skins more than ever to countenance the slanderous headlines with the good things, even though they shouldn’t have to.

The feminist groups who appeared at the Leveson inquiry last week made some good and wide-ranging points. The sexualisation of child models has to go, the reporting of rape and any crime involving sexual assault should be done more sensitively and the mainstream media in general has got to learn to report women in a fair and balanced way without objectification creeping in at every turn. But those groups need to be careful not to push a feminist agenda to imply that we must be protected from anything that could be deemed offensive – otherwise people will switch off.

The Daily Mail is a million times more sexist and misogynistic than the Star, Sun or Express, in the tone and the ideology it perpetuates, from all its writers. Women are not generally so sensitive that we need to be shielded from pictures of boobs in the redtops, surely? There are bigger battles to fight.

What’s wrong, on every level, is the sexual objectification of women who have made it into the public eye without seeking fame, and women who are in the papers as victims of a crime. This trend in reporting needs to be quashed, and soon.

Nicola Thornton is a freelance journalist from Brighton with 12 years’ experience in regional press and magazines. She’s a self-confessed “sucker” for fair and balanced reporting, something instilled in her by a course tutor who “scared the hell out of us” with stories of defamation and contempt of court every Thursday morning.

It’s been considered one of the perks of the job for years, and as one anonymous fashion journalist admitted in the Times this week: “I am a magazine fashion editor, and this is our dirty little secret… we supplement our lower-than-you’d- think wages with thousands of pounds worth of free stuff.”

But as of 1 July, a new Bribery Act was brought into law, and according to one lawyer journalists could be running the risks of imprisonment if they accept free gifts.

Using the example of the magazine fashion editor who wrote in the Times – who admitted to receiving items such as a BlackBerry, boots worth £340 and a leather bag worth £850 – lawyer Ben Whitelock explained to Press Gazette that both journalist and company supplying the goods are running the risk of breaching the Bribery Act, which is defined as “giving a financial, or other advantage, with the intention of inducing the recipient to ‘improperly’ perform a position of trust, or a ‘function’ that is expected to be performeed impartially or in good faith”.

Whitelock warns that journalists “should at least be aware of the individual offence of receiving a bribe” and explains that a lot of companies are ensuring staff know “that if staff receive any form of gift they can’t keep them; they are property of the company and are usually given to charity”.

The major concern for journalists, however, may be the financial implications of the Bribery Act. As explained by the Times‘ anonymous fashion editor: “If everyone is to take Kenneth Clarke’s new Bribery Act – which came into force at the beginning of last month – seriously, then my way of life is over.”

(Source: Press Gazette)

Covert PR promises prospective clients the power to “influence” conversation across social media and mainstream news websites for prices starting at £10,000 a month. The company states on its website: “We can influence pressure groups in both directions, create pressure groups and damage the reputation of pressure groups.”

PR Week claims to have been in contact with an individual who has worked at the company. The source told the website: “The first job was I had to create a few hundred email addresses, then Facebooks to match, make friends with each other but mainly with real people etc.

“The week after, I was introduced to Google alerts to check out any stories on our clients so we could then make comments to sway opinion to our clients’ favour.”

PR Week’s investigation, which failed to get a reply from anyone at the company, spoke to head of digital at Portland, Mark Flanagan, who suspects the whole thing might be a hoax.

“From the tone and style of this site, the person or persons behind it have only a superficial understanding of PR. The website is basically an off-the-shelf blog so has cost nothing at all to set up – it goes to show you don’t need flashy offices or even a decent website to punt yourself as a PR professional these days,” he told the website.

Despite Flanagan’s suspicions, hoax or not, the idea behind Covert PR is one that is probably already used by the majority of PR professionals, albeit in a more open environment. “In today’s world, your online reputation is your reputation so it needs to be managed. It’s entirely legitimate, indeed recommended, for brands and their agencies to monitor, participate in and help shape conversations going on around the web.

“However, this should be done openly, as covert methods are not just unethical, but tend to backfire.”

So while the ability to share our views with others across the internet is a great privilege, the story of Covert PR – regardless of its authenticity – is a stark reminder that such privileges can be easily abused.

(Source: PR Week)

The Government is inviting businesses and community groups to apply to run the services, which could start broadcasting by the end of 2013.

The stations, which will receive £25m in funding from the BBC, will be shown on Channel 6 on freeview. It is estimated that an initial 10 to 20 “pioneer” stations could be granted licences.

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The 65 possible locations for local TV services are:

East of England: Bedford, Cambridge, Norwich.

East Midlands: Notttingham.

North East: Middlesbrough, Newcastle.

North West: Burnley, Carlisle, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Preston.

South East: Basingstoke, Brighton and Hove, Dover, Guildford, Haywards Heath, Hemel Hempstead, London, Luton, Maidstone, Oxford, Reading, Reigate, Southampton, Tonbridge.

South West: Barnstaple, Bristol, Gloucester, Plymouth, Poole, Salisbury.

West Midlands: Birmingham, Bromsgrove, Hereford, Kidderminster, Malvern, Shrewsbury, Stoke on Trent, Stratford upon Avon, Telford.

Yorkshire & Humberside: Grimsby, Keighley, Leeds, Scarborough, Sheffield, York.

Scotland: Aberdeen, Ayr, Dundee, Edinburgh, Elgin, Falkirk, Glasgow, Greenock, Inverness.

Wales: Bangor, Cardiff, Carmarthen, Haverfordwest, Mold, Swansea.

Northern Ireland: Belfast, Derry/Londonderry, Limavady.

(Source: Press Gazette)

Former BBC reporter Michael Cole has hit out at the corporation’s reliance on “gratuitous and usually utterly redundant” pieces to camera in its news coverage.

He even went so far as to claim that “future historians seeking coverage of what is going on now will search the BBC archives in vain for moving pictures of some events”.

His remarks are not unfounded. One edition of the BBC’s 10PM news bulletin contained just one minute of originally sourced footage, with the programme dominated by reporters performing pieces to camera.

“BBC TV news has lost sight of its original purpose: to let the pictures tell the story,” he says, before outlining the process that has invaded the way the BBC reports its news.

“Every BBC news show is the same: presenter outlines the story and introduces the reporter, in the field or, more frequently, in the studio. The reporter repeats what the presenter has just said. A few random shots are punched up as illustration and quickly dispensed with so we can return to the reporter who, with a furrow of the brow or slight shake of the head, delivers a summary of the three facts we have just heard.”

His damning conclusion: “This must give great pleasure to the mothers of some on-screen journalists, but it is not news.”

It reminds Media Digest of Charlie Brooker’s analysis of how to create a news package, which you can watch below:

(Source: Press Gazette)

The practice of smearing a rival through the media is a well-trodden path – but it’s getting easier, not harder, for PRs to repeat the trick.

So says the Economist. The recent story about Burson-Marsteller spreading make-believe stories about Google, on behalf of Facebook, may have given the impression that the media was becoming less susceptible to the dark arts.

The Economist provides the full story however, and believes thinning workforces are making newspapers a “softer touch”.

It says: “The PR flacks who did Facebook’s dirty work were two ex-journalists who had only recently gone over to the dark side. Their error was to put their indecent proposal in writing, in an e-mail pitch. When the blogger, Christopher Soghoian, sensibly asked who was paying them to do so, they refused – again in writing – to say, whereupon Mr Soghoian published their exchange of messages. This prompted USA Today to reveal that it had been on the receiving end of a similar PR pitch, and the Daily Beast, an online newspaper, to reveal that Facebook was the paymaster.

“More seasoned PR flacks might have done it differently. First, lunch the journalists concerned, ostensibly to discuss some other story. Then, over dessert, casually slip into the conversation the poison that their secret client wanted them to spread. With luck the reporters would follow up on the scuttlebutt without mentioning its source, assuring themselves that they had got the story through their ‘contacts’.”

Instead, Burson-Marsteller committed the cardinal sins of getting caught and becoming the story. But that was thanks to a blogger “not obliged to play by the rules” by copy-hungry editors and tight budgets.

“Few journalists would be as brave as Mr Sighoian … in jeopardising their relationship with a powerful PR agency,” says the Economist, which goes on to argue that “newspapers and old media are losing influence – and thus becoming less worth lobbying”.

One study, by Jamil Jonna of University of Oregon, reveals the stark truth about PR’s stranglehold on the media. It found that “as newsrooms have been slimmed and PR agencies have grown fatter, for each American journalist there are now, on average, six flacks hassling him to run crummy stories”.

(Source: The Economist)

The newspaper’s audit found that at least 264 orders exist which “grant anonymity to children or vulnerable adults”. Of most interest, especially to the red tops, is the additional 69 cases “where injunctions have been granted barring the publication of the names of high-profile individuals, including 28 men accused of extra-marital affairs and nine cases where convicted criminals have been granted anonymity”.

The figures do not include superinjunctions, which are so shrouded in secrecy that outsiders cannot even report that the gagging order exists. Such an injunction was used by oil firm Trafigura when it attempted to cover up the illegal dumping of toxic waste in Africa – something the public would never have known, had the Guardian not fought to break the gagging order.

Some of the orders researched by the Independent do have names attached to them. The publicly-owned bank Northern Rock has had an order granted, which restricts the publication of “allegations about its commercial affairs”.

There is no way of knowing how many of these orders have been granted, something admitted by Lord Neuberger, Master of the Rolls, who claimed it is “impossible to verify” the number granted through the court. His report into the prevalence of the injunction in the British legal system said: “The absence of evidence has encouraged a view that an entirely secret process has developed in the civil courts, and that this is improper in principle, risks neutering press freedom to report matters of public interest and undermines the public’s right to be informed of court proceedings.”

(Source: The Independent)

Media Digest reported last week on the story that a Premier League footballer had filed to take Twitter and “persons unknown” to court, but the weekend saw an explosion of developments that are threatening to produce a landmark case for internet privacy law in the UK. Here’s a round-up of what occurred over the weekend.

Friday 20 May

Twitter users react to the news that the footballer has filed to sue the social network and its users by sending tweets using the name of the footballer. The hash tag associated with the story becomes a trending topic in the UK. The footballer’s Wikipedia entry is altered to include details about the gagging order.

Elsewhere, Lord Neuberger releases his report on the state of superinjunctions in the country.

Saturday 21 May

The footballer’s name continues to reverberate across Twitter.

Sunday 22 May

The Sunday Herald publishes a photograph of the alleged footballer on its front page. Text underneath the image says: “Everyone knows that this is the footballer accused of using the courts to keep allegations of a sexual affair secret, but we weren’t supposed to tell you that.”

The image features a black bar with the word “censored” written across the individual’s eyes, but it is easy to identify the player. A photo of the paper’s front page is leaked onto Twitter, and is viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and retweeted by nearly 5,000.

The editorial running alongside the picture states: “We believe it unfair that the law can not only be used to prevent the publication of information which may be in the public interest, but also to prevent any mention of such a court order. The so-called superinjunction holds no legal force in Scotland, where a separate court order is needed.”

It is also reported that a “well-known” UK journalist faces a potential prison sentence after revealing, on Twitter, the name of a separate footballer who has taken out a superinjunction.

Monday 23 May

Prime minister David Cameron offers his view on the scandal, calling the UK’s privacy laws “unsustainable” and saying they need to “catch up” with social media. Talking on ITV’s Daybreak, he says: “I think parliament’s got to take some time out, have a proper look at this, have a think about what we can do. But I’m not sure there’s going to be a simple answer to it.” He adds that current privacy rules are “unfair” on the press.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Herald‘s legal adviser, Paul McBride QC says: “We’re having this kind of surreal, parallel universe conversation where everyone with a mobile phone and access to the internet knows who the individual is, but mainstream news organisations can’t publish his name.”

No complaints have been made against the Herald, according to Attorney General Dominic Grieve.

Brands are learning to exploit basic human needs to inspire the devout following of the buying public, according to a BBC documentary on the ‘rise of the superbrand’.

The human inclination for gossip, religion and sex have helped brands such as Apple take over our world at “lightning speed”, says Alex Riley in the BBC Three programme, Secrets of the Superbrands.

Riley watches as staff are whipped up into “an evangelical frenzy” at the opening of an Apple store in Covent Garden, and later takes a look into the mind of an Apple fanatic to discover that the company appears to stimulate the same parts of the brain that are associated with fervent religious following.

Riley’s mission – to discover how companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have enraptured the consumer – sees him visit the set of a pornography shoot, where he learns that the adult industry is at the forefront of popularising the use of modern technology, such as iPads, high-definition and 3D.

Companies are also happy to sell at a loss in order to gain the loyal following of millions. The 41 million Playstation 3s that Sony has sold, for example, has equated to a loss of around £2 billion, but has also enabled the company to capture the vast share of the Blu-ray market after it muscled out Toshiba’s competing HD-DVD discs.

It’s a case of lesson learned for Sony, which lost out in the 1980s to the VHS, in part because of its refusal to allow the pornography industry to use its now long-forgotten Betamax competitor. There is no such restriction on the adult industry today when it comes to the use of Blu-ray.

“That’s not to say that clever marketing and brilliant technical innovation aren’t also crucial,” says Riley on the BBC website. “But it seems that if you’re not providing a service which is of potential interest to every one of the 6.9 billion human beings on the planet, the chances are you’re never going to become a technology superbrand.”

(Source: BBC)

Photo taken by Flickr user jonrawlinson, licensed under Creative Commons

The Daily Mail and Guardian have long been at loggerheads in the UK, but now the battle for readers is set to expand to America, as both have revealed plans to expand editorial operations in New York.

Both Associated Newspapers and Guardian News & Media have kept their cards clutched firmly to their chests, but it is known that the former is to launch a SoHo office with the sole aim of boosting the Daily Mail‘s online presence in the US, MailOnline US.

MailOnline is also in the process of developing news operations on the West Coast, hiring staff from Los Angeles. The groundwork for the project has been done by a small and somewhat-covert team led by the “no-nonsense” MailOnline publisher, Martin Clark.

Meanwhile, the Guardian‘s plans are starting to come to light, on the back of former Guardian.co.uk editor Janine Gibson being put in charge of content for the American venture. The Guardian reckons an office will be open later this year.

Brand Republic’s Arif Durrani has studied the rationale for such an expansion by these two papers, concluding it’s “clear enough: both media groups have forsaken any kind of online paywall in favour of open mass reach, so expanding in the world’s largest and most affluent English-speaking market appears something of a no-brainer”.

And although both papers have vastly opposing target demographics, both believe they can increase readership across the pond. The Mail‘s Martin Clark told one conference that “when I was a kid I didn’t have lots of retail experience, but even I know that I’m going to have more chance of selling things in a shop visited by three million people a day, rather than one visited by a few thousand”.

The Guardian‘s editor, Alan Rusbridger, remains just as optimistic, buoyed by the sizable American audience Guardian.co.uk already attracts. “We believe there is real demand for the sort of open, internationalist, digital journalism which we have been pioneering,” he said last week.

The question is, which publication will resonate best with American readers? One thing’s for sure: the enthusiasm both publishers are showing for the expansion means it won’t be too long before we find out.

(Source: Brand Republic)

Photo taken by Flickr user joewcampbell, licensed under Creative Commons.