✅ Monday briefing: Last call to book WaddsCon, journalists as brands, ESG washing, client and agency relationships, Socially Mobile deadline, AI garbage, Twitter GIFs, ALT tag SEO, and more...
Media, industry, research and education, and social media and platforms
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and public relations. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join us.
We've got four awesome speakers for you at WaddsCon on Wednesday 1-2pm sharing important stories about how they engaged the public in an important conversation via the media. Please come and join us.
Media
🛍️ LOCAL NEWS CONSOLIDATION: Local newspaper group Archant, one of the oldest publishers in the UK, has been acquired by rival Newsquest. Norwich-based Archant, which produces four daily and around 50 weekly titles, was acquired by Rcapital in August 2020 amid ongoing financial difficulties. Spotted Julian Christopher and Andrew Bruce Smith.
👤RACE AND LEADERSHIP: There is no ethnic diversity in top editorial jobs in UK media according to analysis by the Reuters Institute of news outlets in five different markets. 21% of the 82 top editors across the 100 brands covered are non-white, despite the fact 43% of the general population are non-white. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
🖊️ JOURNALISTS AS BRANDS: A Nieman Reports essay suggests that name recognition and a large social media following enables journalists to become a media entity in their own right. There's a growing group of journalists creating job security and future proofing their careers by going it alone and building a community around their content. Source Stephen Waddington.
Industry
🤯 ESG WASHING: Environmental, Social and Governance investment is facing a shake out as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed dubious investments. Self-reported ESG data is usually garbage because its intent is promotional. Spotted Mark Stouse.
📅 WORLD PR DAY: African PR powerhouse BHM is building a coalition of public relation practitioners, industry organisations and communities under the leadership of Ayeni Adekunle and Enitan Kehinde to create #WorldPRDay on 16 July. Source Enitan Kehinde.
💪 CLIENT AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS: The PRCA is consulting on a new Global Client-Consultancy Charter in a bid to develop best practice principles to strengthen the relationship between consultants and clients. The project follows widespread concern around issues including the pitch process and payment terms. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
Research and education
⌛ SOCIALLY MOBILE DEADLINE: Time is running out if you would like to be part of the next Socially Mobile cohort. The ten-week executive education programme helps public relations practitioners across the UK to increase their earning potential. Applications for funded and paid places close on 31 March. Source Stephen Waddington.
🔎 RESEARCH STUDY: A new study aims to explore the experiences of women working in the UK PR industry for one or more years between 1990-1999. The results will form the basis of a presentation at the International History of PR conference at Bournemouth University, and a book chapter. Please follow this link to contribute. Source: Heather Yaxley.
Social media and platforms
👎 AI GARBAGE: AI generated content is not good enough to meet human quality thresholds according to Search Advocate John Mueller. He said that machine generated long form content such as blog posts and reviews is poor. Source Andrew Bruce Smith.
📃 LINKEDIN NEWSLETTERS: Companies on LinkedIn are now able to create newsletters via their Company Page. It provides an opportunity to engage with the followers of a page. If your company has a large following it’s a useful form of media but beware using third party platforms to manage relationships. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
📹 YOUTUBE LIVESTREAMS: YouTube has announced a series of new features for creators with more than 1,000 followers. They include Go Live Together to enable guest presenters to join a live stream and a Q&A feature which will enable viewers to submit questions. Spotted Alan Morrison.
😝 TWITTER GIFS: Twitter is rolling out a new feature to enable iPhone users to create and share their own GIFs. To record a GIF in the iOS app, hit the new tweet button, tap the photo icon, then the camera icon, switch to GIF mode, and press and hold the record button. Spotted Alan Morrison.
🏷️ ALT TAG SEO: ALT tags are descriptions that are added to images on the web. They are an important accessibility feature used by machine reading tools. Google confirmed this week that they are also used as a factor to rank images in Google Search results but not regular services. Source Stuart Bruce.
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