Who Says what to Whom on Twitter

Claire Thompson, Waves PR

Hoffman, Wu, Mason and Watts have shared a great piece of academic research via Yahoo! Research: Who Says What to Whom on Twitter is interesting because it rises head and shoulders above the normal fare of people claiming to be Twitter experts. The bit that resonates for me, and deserves some further examination, is the bit that challenges our perceptions of ‘mass communication’ and ‘interpersonal communication’.

by Claire Thompson., Waves PR

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Accidental journalism

Although this isn’t a UK based title, this presentation is a great example of the holistic nature of media. It’s a ‘bearbug’ of mine that people talk about ‘old’ media. There’s a role for all kinds of media and the ‘consumer’ doesn’t much care about the medium – it’s the value of the content in context that matters.

The Assange Debate at SXSW

The place I’d most love to be this week is South by South West.  All my friends and colleagues seem to be there, and although a lot of the debate seems trite from the Twitter stream, the Julian Assange, Wikileaks story has caught my eye.

The following is the Twitter stream: it raises some of the heftiest issues of our time, notably the media freedom/public interest debate.

So if there’s anyone left in the UK, who feels they want to comment on the issue, I’m up for being educated, as to my uninformed ears, the whole institutional reaction to Wikileaks seems out of proportion and terrifying in it’s implications, in equal measure. I veer between seeing Assange as a latter day Robin Hood, brave journalist in the best investigative journalism tradition and seeing him as a careless anarchist with little care for those he might have hurt, although slightly less of the latter as I am lead to believe that information *was* filtered prior to leaking.

Either way, I would love to hear what others think. Or are we all too afraid to speak up? And I being foolish by even contemplating debate of the subject?

International Women’s Day: PR and Gender Imbalance

On International Women’s Day, I took a somewhat introspective look at some of the things that we do as PR people/communicators, and what we, as individuals, can do to help redress the male/female balance of power in a positive way.

The area that most stands out for me is the imagery that we supply to media (all media types, from bloggers to print quarterlies).

News stands present a visual image of the media that we, as a society, consume. Take a look at the front pages of the the magazines that adorn them.

On the front pages of the women’s magazines are airbrushed women, already beautiful but with natural flaws that make each of us individual and human removed. If these, the most beautiful amongst us are made to feel less lovely, what chance do the rest of us stand?

I have already taken a professional stand against airbrushing anything except bruises in the images I supply to the media to accompany stories. I acknowledge that for me it’s easier than, for example,   fashion PRs, but would urge other communications professionals to take a similar stand.

On the front pages of the men’s magazines are, yes, more women, often looking lustfully at the latest must have gadget or scantily clad and draped across a motorbike. I’m not sure how we go about countering this. We provide gadgets that are then used in photo shoots, and frankly if a client’s product is going to be on the front page of a magazine, I would be fired for asking them to take it off. We seem to be in an unhealthy cycle that will be extremely hard to break. The magazines use  the images because consumers buy them. Consumers buy them because they want to read about said gadgets and the images are sexy.

Maybe, just maybe, the onus lies with the photographers. Food photographers manage to create objects of desire by creating hugely desirable images, without using sex (unless, of course, Nigella’s around). But by the same token, many of these images are painted with things and totally inedible at point of shoot in order to increase the ‘lust’ factor that makes us all drool. Is airbrushing a person that different? Maybe this was a bad example.

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