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| Northern
exposure |
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| There
are several million potential supporters in Scotland, but
London-based charities may be missing a trick when dealing
with the Scottish media. Richard Saville-Smith explains where
mistakes are being made, and how to go about getting your
message across |
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Imagine
that George Clooney has agreed to appear at a charity media
event. The timing is the 2005 G8 period and the location is
Edinburgh. The world’s press is in town and the charity
is about to secure a media triumph. So, why on earth would
they hold the event at a location where the police had warned
of anarchists? The media team, parachuted in from London,
is willing to ask its Edinburgh colleague to summon the media,
but unwilling to take their advice about the unsuitability
of the venue or their suggestion of alternatives.
The result? George Clooney can’t get to the event; neither
can the twenty excited T-shirt wearing children (they’re
disappointed – but their mothers are distraught); the
massed ranks of the media are turned away, disgruntled, and
newsdesks are incredulous. How could this have happened? This
incident represents several elements of what London-based
charities need to change to be fit for a devolved United Kingdom.
Devolution across the UK has changed expectations and the
media based in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland will be
under-whelmed if your media team huddles in London. Certainly,
the Scottish media would prefer to speak to someone they know
in Scotland and who knows their outlet, rather than an unnamed
London person who will prioritise an enquiry from a London
title. Precisely because the Scottish media runs to the same
deadlines as the London media, their enquiries won’t
wait until tomorrow.
There are five million people living in Scotland. This is
only a twelfth of the UK population, but there are twelve
months in the year and nobody suggests living without June.
It’s surely unnecessary to invest a whole month implementing
your Scottish strategy, but even at the margin, Scotland is
too big to entirely ignore and, contrary to popular myth,
the Scots give generously.
Getting your messages into the London-based – so-called
– national press is a dysfunctional approach to reaching
Scots or influencing policy in Scotland. It is absolutely
the case that the London titles are on sale in Scotland, but
the Herald (which dropped the word Glasgow from its
moniker in 1992) outsells The Times, the Telegraph
and the Independent put together – every day
of the week. And for those media departments who celebrate
achieving coverage in the Guardian, it’s salutary
to note it only sells 17,000 copies a day in Scotland. To
have a media strategy that doesn’t take account of the
indigenous Scottish media is really not to have a strategy
at all.
Right now the Scottish print media is going through an interesting
time. The Herald, the Scotsman, Scotland
on Sunday and the Sunday Times Scotland all
have new editors, providing fresh options. The right wing
drift of the Scotsman under the Barclay brothers seems set
to be reversed as a consequence of the more ‘pragmatic’
approach of the Johnston press.
However, it’s probably the Sunday paper market that
confuses London media teams the most. The Sunday Mail
has a circulation of over half a million copies. On a pro-rata
basis this outstrips every paper in the country but, amazingly,
Sunday Mail journalists tell of charity media professionals
confusing it with the Mail on Sunday, which sells
a quarter of the copies. As editor Allan Rennie, puts it:
“We have a brilliant relationship with most charities,
but it is easy to lose perspective if you are based in London.
Scotland has its own parliament, different legal, health and
education systems and is a nation – not a region.”
Similarly, there’s no London equivalent to the Sunday
Post, which sells 444,000 copies every week. From a charity
perspective, it’s a great paper, preferring straight
talk to cynical twists. However, with nine editions and a
third of the circulation going south of the border, news editor
Tom McKay points out: “If you think we’re a local
paper you’ve misunderstood our paper and our circulation”.
For those based in London, unfamiliarity with these titles
may result in opportunities missed for sympathetic coverage
in nearly a million copies every Sunday.
Another commonplace conception is that Today sets
the media agenda, but the Scottish situation is subtler because
BBC Scotland produces Good Morning Scotland (GMS)
as an equivalent. GMS is not a Scottish supplement to the
Today programme – it’s an alternative.
And, whereas the weekly reach of Today in Scotland
is 260,000, 440,000 listen to Good Morning Scotland.
If your story is good enough for Today it will be
on BBC’s prospect list and available to the good people
at GMS. If you make the pitch you can get your message to
GMS’s audience without even changing BBC studios –
but the pitch works best if you’ve got a Scottish angle.
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‘Think Scotland’ – that’s how to generate
a Scottish angle. As an exercise, think about your next scheduled
campaign. If it’s a UK-wide story, it can have a Scottish
angle – by definition. Start by creating a separate
media release for Scotland. Have you got any Scottish data?
If not, why not? Is there a Scottish case study, a Scottish
image/photo opportunity, and what about a Scottish spokesperson?
The accent matters for radio or television.
If you’re launching a report based on data, separately
identify the Scottish element. Just one Scottish statistic
can make the difference. Building this requirement into the
very design of your research is cheaper than extracting Scottish
data at the end. There may be issues about statistical significance,
but additional sampling can deal with these, or simply caveat
the results.
The only real problem/opportunity arises when the results
of your research are different between Scotland and the rest
of the UK. For example, this year’s Households Below
Average Income Survey (by the Department of Work and
Pensions) showed poverty targets had been missed in England
but met in Scotland. If a ‘poverty’ charity ran
with a single statement it would have been greeted with
derision by the Scottish media. The increasing impact of devolution
and the different policies pursued by the Scottish parliament
make this outcome increasingly likely to happen.
A major benefit of disaggregated data is it provides an additional
media angle: “Scotland is better/worse than the rest
of the UK”. Wring your hands or throw them in the air,
it doesn’t much matter, because it’s your message
that’s being reported. Finding that “Scots prefer
deep-fried Mars bars while the English prefer to shallow-fry”
helps make the space to question if we should be eating Mars
bars at all.
Celebrities are a special case where no Scottish alternative
is required – celebrity culture recognises no geographic
boundaries. So, I wouldn’t swap Ewan McGregor for Jude
Law – I’d save Ewan for another campaign. However,
the tricky bit, which charities’ celebrity liaison people
might miss, is the way the Scottish media has a particular
soft spot for its own. So, if a charity was working with David
Tenant then it would get disproportionately better coverage
in Scotland – even though he lives in London.
With a working knowledge of the Scottish indigenous media
and Scottish angles to hand, it is possible to run some kind
of a Scottish media campaign from London – and some
make do with a media officer allocated to ‘the regions’.
It’s just a pity that the Scottish media doesn’t
think of itself as ‘regional’.
Some of the larger UK charities now have media personnel in
Scotland precisely because they recognise the limitations
of a London-based approach to the Scottish media. Working
up Scottish angles to stories generated across their organisation,
they sell them in to their Scottish media contacts with excellent
results. But for many other UK charities, the costs of a full
time Scottish media person are prohibitive.
A more realistic option is to outsource this function to an
agency, of which there are several. This is no different to
hiring a firm of Scottish lawyers to deal with a Scottish
legal issue. And, if you’ve got a representative in
Scotland, they’ll be sure to know a decent place for
a press conference.
Richard Saville-Smith is a partner at Saville-Ferguson,
Scottish media specialists for charities. Visit www.saville-ferguson.co.uk
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