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

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 EastWest meant. Originally, it was to help Western companies get to Asia, with access to Asia as the strapline. At the time (pre-internet), the business model was that it was cheaper for companies to use me than it was for them to use a fax machine to multiple media outlets in Asia. Quite quickly, that changed.

Now, we see that the media is local and global at the same time, because of the technology that we have. I decided that I would look at EastWest in a different way. It's no longer about me helping companies go from west to east or east to west, but it’s about sharing best practices that I see from around the world with people in whichever location that people read or listen to me from. I can tell you that, having looked at the stats on Buzzsprout’s control panel, I'm joined by people from all over the world.

What I realized is that 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. Murdoch owns newspapers in the UK and the US as well. A Denver Post journalist was laid off while on assignment. The news of cuts being led by an Australian impacting Americans in small towns is in my own living room, on my own iPad, in my home. On the same day comes in news from Microsoft in America that they are now laying off journalists. 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. There are tool sets like Scoop.it, which we use, which will basically track the internet for relevant news and bring it as a news feed. This is not dissimilar to the old RSS. It’s inevitable really that, eventually, the manual labor of cutting and pasting stories from one place to another will be replaced by technology. Some journalists even quip that this is the technology they've been writing about. Now it has, indeed, taken their jobs. 

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the world's largest media companies now are not publishers; they are technology companies. If you think about it, all the big publishers, like News Corporation, who are nowhere near as powerful as they used to be, have been supplanted by companies like Google, Facebook, YouTube, in China Tencent, in Japan, and Korea as well. Even Yahoo, for example in Japan, became very large with SoftBank supporting them.

The traditional news networks that have been independent have really suffered. The ones that have survived will be the state-owned ones. 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, whether they really do deserve a grant that everybody should pay for even though they may have never even watched or listened to the BBC. In China, the state grants the licenses to the media, while TV and radio are all state-owned. In Singapore, it's the same; even though they are positioned as independent publishers, Media Corp. for example, The Straits Times come 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. The control of the media by the government in places like China and Singapore is, ironically enough, sustaining the journalist community. To cope with this insecurity, some titles like The Guardian are becoming or have become subscription-based. The Guardian is aiming for some 2 million subscribers by 2023, according to the CEO David Pemsel. Just last year, they had some 650,000 regular payors around the world for both digital and print. The Guardian, if you didn't know, is owned by the Scott Trust which is an organization founded in 1936. It’s held in trust to ensure editorial integrity. It’s not owned by an individual or shareholders, but by a nonprofit trust. The goal of media like The Guardian is to become trusted and profitable, or at least sustainable, through the subscription model.

One view from a chap called Douglas McCabe, a media analyst from a firm called Enders Analysis, says that journalists, not just commercial teams, should be incentivized to achieve the targets that people like David Pemsel, the CEO of The Guardian, is trying to achieve. This means that the journalists will ultimately know about the performance of the pages and the articles that they are writing. There used to be a church and state separation between the advertisers and the editorial. The idea was editorial, then, could be trusted. But if the journalists themselves are starting to be remunerated by the performance of the pages, then they will inevitably be choosing or writing stories that are going to be more sensationalist. From a PR point of view, it will mean increasingly that only those companies that can afford to engage those media and create that kind of content, along with the journalists, will survive.

In parts of Asia, certainly in Indochina where we're working with a client at the moment, the media maintains a semblance of integrity. But in the last six months, I've started to say that they 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, while the publishers are saying, “Get what you can from the people who will be providing you the content.” 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. They're realizing that the people who should be paying are both the readers and those who want access to those readers. 

We’re looking at the media integrity now, 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 necessarily going to be on being a trusted independent platform for discussion. It's going to be based on content creation, audience engagement, and measurable results. In May, the Association of American Publishers revealed that events revenue is down 60% in the year. Friends of mine that run publishing companies would make their money on events, and they used to have events and publications running in tandem, and it was a very nice complementary business model. Now they've been hit, both with the loss of advertising on print and with the abandonment of all events. Companies like Bloomberg are now pivoting, and they are working to leverage their database of great speakers and great research, and creating paid events. We're seeing this more and more with webinar and Zoom. There are platforms, like 24digital, which are coming as specialist platforms to complement the more general, like Zoom. From a PR point of view, what we need to do is to help clients create events and participate in virtual events where they would have, in the past, been participating in trade shows or even local fairs. 

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 have that are no longer necessarily defined by location, but by profile, and will possibly have quite a short attention span in terms of the content we create and the message we provide. 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. This is true, whether it's in consumer press or trade press. What we're seeing is that social media, these big tech companies like Google and Facebook, have really been saying that all content is equal. They have no interest in the content, only in the page display and the advertising on it, which means that we have media which is random in terms of what it's providing. The algorithms are now starting to send people news which is more targeted to the news that they've seen before. 

The announcement by Microsoft that AI is going to be curating the content and sending it will only amplify this trend. We're going to remove the filter, which some curators, some people were saying that this is a good story but unbelievable, as we saw how Twitter has been fact-checking some of President Trump's more recent tweets. If we end up with people not checking these tweets but instead AI, then we're going to quite possibly have stories that may or may not be true about a company or a person being run. From a PR point of view, that means we need to be proactive about managing the content that goes out. We need to be absolutely diligent about tracking the content that's online about us. It's no longer the case that we can rely on editors or people to safeguard the best interests of an industry, our company, or our brand. This crosses, whether it is big companies, small companies, CEOs, local salespeople, or fire chiefs.

We're going to find that, in this disintegration of traditional structures of the media, the role of PR is going to change. I started off talking about how I was originally working to help western companies go into Asia. Now that I'm back in Europe, I will still play that role, but I think 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, your brand, and your product, and be something that your audiences are able to consistently see in credible formats and on channels that they are engaged with.

I mentioned to my daughter, who’s got her exams this week, that tomorrow I was taking back up with the phone calls with my team in Singapore and Beijing. I thought, “Isn't it incredible that I can do all of this from here?” Then she turned to me and said, “You know, I've actually been chatting with my friends in Beijing today. I don't see what's so amazing about that.” I said, “Oh okay, well how do you feel then about going back to school, online, tomorrow?” She said, “For my exams, I'm quite happy not to go to school because there's less distraction. I will be able to work at my desk where I have everything that I know and I like, and I can get the food that I like,” and so on. Then I asked her, “What will you miss?” “Just my friends, but I'm more productive at home,” she said. Isn't that exactly what people are saying about going back to work? They're actually now geography-independent in terms of their concentration, their focus. She can do her work from home, she can take her tests from home, and she misses the social interaction. 

The challenge is going to be, from a PR point of view, for schools to engage, and also for us companies and as communicators, to build compelling content that's going to get people to come out of the space where they're comfortable at home, to communicate with us and with their team members, and possibly with their customers. I'm going to be working more on how I can create engaging content, how I can track that, and how I can share that information with you, the listener, who's running a business or running a brand somewhere. 

My metrics are becoming increasingly clear. Digital means that all PR and all communication has metrics in the same way that sales and customer satisfaction have metrics. 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? How will you communicate your KPIs to your three sets of audience that is your team members, your partners, and your customers this week?

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash