Burson-Marsteller

The times are a’changing

by Dennis Landsbert-Noon on 6th April 2010 • The Cast Blog

Looking back, what fantastic luxury of time and resources I had in my days as a journalist – rather more years ago than I care to remember.

Even as a cub reporter, working on a local newspaper, I remember being given more than two weeks to squirrel around, working on a single investigative piece about our local authority. And in the end, it never even made it into print – I ran into a wall of secrecy that my inexperience simply could not penetrate. But did my editor moan at me about the waste of time and money? No sirree! I was promoted with a pat on the back.

I wonder what would have happened if I had been working on that story today. With so much information just a click away, might I have been able to nail it? With new laws enshrining access to official information, would I have simply been directed to the local authority’s website for the corroboration I needed?

On the other hand, I wonder if I would have been allowed to spend even a quarter of the time trying to research what was a fairly complex piece of skullduggery? Instead, would I be running between news story and features story, filing multiple snippets via Blackberry to Twitter, all the while trying to juggle video and still cameras?

Such is the life of a reporter today, as the Burson-Marsteller media practice found out from 115 senior journalists we interviewed. The interviewees, from 27 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, confided to us confidentially about their working lives today.

They painted a consistently grim picture – of job uncertainty, vastly increased workloads, demands for multi-platform content, less editorial space to put that content into and (often) moves to ‘dumb down’ the content and editorial agendas in general.

They also elaborated on the battering that the ‘traditional’ media industry is being given, both from the exponential growth and use of highly competitive and ‘disruptive’ digital formats, as well as from a worldwide economic crisis that is applying the coup de grâce to outdated and failing business models.

It’s a pretty bleak outlook for traditional journalism, as our B-M Insight piece reveals. But for media relations professionals, however, the prospect is much rosier. We have a great opportunity to offer useful support to beleaguered reporters by providing them with well-crafted, well-timed, multi-format content. We also have a fantastic opportunity to turn the existing confusion – as well as the excitement – about the future direction of digital media to our advantage, by taking the initiative, using the many exciting new digital tools at our disposal, and trying to shape tomorrow’s media industry to an ultimate form that is to our liking.

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