Eat News & Live

Are you into PR, brand reputation, corporate communications, interested in how ‘news’ is made, monetised and … ‘consumed’?

If ‘yes’, trawl through a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2024 that just dropped.

I share a link to this Full Monty in the comments below.

I went to its report launch event at 爱德曼 ’s London offices in Victoria, a strange, shimmering, slightly ethereal place - Victoria, not their agency.

2024 Digital News Report promo speakers included Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Nic Newman . The add-context panel comprised Samanthi Dissanayake , Jack Kelly , Cathy Newman & Matthew Garrahan .

I worked in this Victoria postcode years ago - serving drinks in a coach station bar when young and bright-eyed with a black T-shirt, fresh over from New Zealand and much later as a dark-blue suited corporate PR operator for a UK-based bank technology platform enabler.

Victoria.

Home to few if any green trees and a host to glass-coated, concrete cathedrals, along with a big-space, deep earth-hole cavity where House of Fraser once grew and wilted. Small independent cafes and bistros are today less noticeable. I wrote about one of them during a marathon training blog and a link to that is also in the comments below.

Dialling it out, the world is often huge and small in the same breath. It has the potential to intimidate, threaten, excite and calm.

Ultimately, there is more that connects than separates us. I was reminded of this as I sat to hear the insights on the global news report.

Edelman’s President, International, is Ed Williams .

Ed was the first and last to take the microphone during this report launch event.

I think he was also the first person I confided with at Reuters when, many summers back, I was head of European equities and tech-media-telco and positioning to take my first corporate public relations role outside of a pure-play media focus.

I was prime-time readying to go to 美国在线 , a business Kara Swisher once referred to as the 'cockroach of the internet'. Ed would soon move to a corporate communications role at the BBC.

Ed as I remember it was somewhat sceptical about my move but said go with the dice in your hand and what you think is right. It will be turbulent. There will be flux. Roll with the punches.

This was an ethos Cathy spoke to with passion and conviction when recounting how her and her Channel 4 team navigated the 'cut and thrust' of political and media management during the UK general election

As someone who has both a pre-digital and post-digital headspace, vibe & bloodline, the 2024 global news report makes for interesting reading.

Here are a couple of takeaways I found illuminating from the report, panel discussion and Q&A:

• Video networks and video stories are on the rise
• A major challenge for traditional media is how to manage youth-based influencers. A material reality is the growing influence these media messengers have at a time when older news consumers are questioning their media-influence channels. Given this and on the afterburn of the event, I will check out Hugo Travers in France, Jack Kelly in the UK & Vitus Spehar in the US.
• The above three media musketeers (my framing, not theirs) were billed as helping forge 'businesses built on explaining news and authenticity’.
• Jack was on the panel today – lucid, insightful. Clear in purpose, intent & message.
• A shift is happening towards longer formats being consumed - both video and as we learned from Jack in his closing remarks … print. Who would have thought?
• We’re smart but as Cathy from Channel 4 highlighted, the evolving sophistication of AI-generated fake content should make us ALL question what we 'consume'. I high-fived her defiant tracer-fire remark: “I am better than a machine … at the moment.”
• Yet, despite all the news turmoil in the UK over the past couple of years, its citizens rank last among countries prepared to pay for online news.

Amid the panel and Q&A, in the glowing embers, someone put up their hand and basically asked: ‘What is news?’

Roll Haddaway ...

PS:

Years later after leaving Reuters and working with a number of paytech and banktech businesses, I worked at 10x Banking , a business that for a time based its offices in a space in Victoria that was previously home to the Edelman UK agency.

Edelman's two-tone black and grey brand identity marks were on some of the meeting room walls where #team10x worked.

What were the odds?

PPS:

The report covers 47 countries and bills itself as the largest global study of news consumption habits.

That said, among others, it seems New Zealand is not in the mix. I am just saying as someone who has been in the UK for 30+ years and who is kiwi born and from a country now with 5m+ people and consumes news well beyond rugby, kiwifruit sales, Hobbit tales, Lord of the Rings clips and Tom Cruise background shot narratives.