I can see it now, I’m sitting around the table playing the fiftieth anniversary edition of Trivial Pursuit and a question will come up asking me what journalistic brand best described the British economic turn down in 2008?
O god..., it on the tip of my tongue, any guesses people? Well I got to tell you it’s a name most people who turn on the news or are in the industry today can’t escape from easily these days. The answer of course is Robert Peston. But can he really be described as a Brand?
Today’s lecture intrigued me, I couldn’t agree with all the areas and topics discussed but he did have a point about the branding of journalist’s or journalism.
When you go shopping at a supermarket, many will go to the brand they know delivers the best service or most convenience. When we buy the produce we know what we are getting from brands like Pepsi, Walkers and Birds Eye (Just for the lawyers who read blogs, other produce and brands are available)
The point is if these brands let us down we would not purchase what is behind them. Take Woolworths as another example, can anyone tell me what this brand of store was primarily on the high street to sell. Please note pick and mix is not a sufficient answer. Woolworths lost the focus and point of their brand and are now suffering financial peril because of it. I come back round to the point, if a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio channel didn’t deliver what was expected from the brand, you would lose interest and not subscribe to what it’s delivering.
Journalists are just as susceptible to becoming brands. Man of the moment Robert Peston has been created into a brand because of his coverage of the economic turndown and how it’s affected businesses in the UK. Peston’s speed and skill at reporting this area means that it will be very hard for him to escape a future job away from business journalism, should he want to. At the moment it’s the Peston’s brand that draws him attention, therefore should he move away from this the likelihood is that he would have to rebuild his brand and contact book.
Soccer Saturday football pundit Jeff Stelling is about to learn what re-branding in the business feels like. Having built a famous following for himself behind the Sky Sports visage, anyone and everyone remotely interested in football knows where to find this man on a Saturday afternoon between the hours of 12pm and 5:30pm. We sit in awe of his jokes and quips related to football teams and players and his extensive knowledge and statistics that stretches across nine divisions. However it broke last week that as well as continuing the job that inspired the birth of a Soccer Saturday drinking game regularly played by students he was to build a new brand for himself as presenter on Channel Four’s Countdown. I can’t see all his fans flocking over to Channel Four for some weekday tea time TV nor can I see a Countdown drinking game being inspired. So is it a smart or foolish move?
My personal opinion, a shrewd and clever move to create a second brand for himself in front of a new audience that could potentially keep him in broadcasting for a further two decades before collecting a pension from BSKYB.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7675710.stm
Friday 28 November 2008
A Blog about Blogging
Well this is going to be interesting, writing a blog about blogging and how blogs and blog posts have had such a dramatic and influential impact on the world in the ten years since its birth. That reminds me, many happy returns to whichever BlogSpot you subscribe too.
If you have kept up with the opening paragraph and haven’t yet blogged off, you should be OK to see this through to the end. I will try from now on not to mention the word... Blog! So first question I guess and the basic one that most would ask. What is a Blog? Oh bugger!
I must hasten to add the I am no academic on what a blog actually is or the full scientific and psychological explanation behind blogging. I only gave birth to my first one a mere two months ago. Of course I had heard of the term “to blog” about five years ago and knew it had something to do with computers as you needed the Internet to access one. In all seriousness I never really knew or understood what this technological tool could do for people or deliver for a community of readers.
Now this will sound very silly and possibly simplistic but when you create your blog for the very first time it’s like purchasing your very own space on the web (only no money changes hands) Once created it’s completely yours, no one else can touch it and you can decorate what lays behind the html with whatever topics of conversation you choose to create, whether related to a particular hobby, a work topic or football team.
Once up and running your mouth piece to the Internet has been created, you now have a voice that stretches not just across a single continent but the whole world and can be accessed by anyone. It is however up to you how loud you project your voice via this tool.
Trawl around the Internet and you find millions of blogs available to view. Some in full flow of conversation exchanging and expressing opinion, others have fallen silent after the first or second post never able to project a loud enough voice to be heard.
So, Blog created. Conversation engaged. Discussion in flow and opinions exchanged. Is this all there is to it?
For those that want to push the boundaries further then you can link your site to the wider Internet conversation, dig deeper and see how much is out there.
Like any interesting news story, Blogs are continuing to develop all the time. A great example is one that is likely to go down in technological history, the BBC’s Robert Peston’s Buisness Blog (Peston’s Picks). With the continuing and constantly developing economic turn down situation that Britain has found itself consumed by in recent months, Peston used his Blog to break news before appearing on the six, the ten and Newsnight to give updates on the situation. Like any breaking or developing news story, it won’t wait for the journalist to go live, you have to go live with the story first to ensure the news remains fresh.
The other example I am going to use before I Blog off is something I found this evening relating to the Mumbai attacks that have dominated the news over the last twenty four hours. It perfectly demonstrates how web tools like blogs and twitter help spread information into the public domain faster and can even provide help, comfort and warn of danger.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/154621/in_mumbai_bloggers_and_twitter_offer_help_to_relatives.html
If you have kept up with the opening paragraph and haven’t yet blogged off, you should be OK to see this through to the end. I will try from now on not to mention the word... Blog! So first question I guess and the basic one that most would ask. What is a Blog? Oh bugger!
I must hasten to add the I am no academic on what a blog actually is or the full scientific and psychological explanation behind blogging. I only gave birth to my first one a mere two months ago. Of course I had heard of the term “to blog” about five years ago and knew it had something to do with computers as you needed the Internet to access one. In all seriousness I never really knew or understood what this technological tool could do for people or deliver for a community of readers.
Now this will sound very silly and possibly simplistic but when you create your blog for the very first time it’s like purchasing your very own space on the web (only no money changes hands) Once created it’s completely yours, no one else can touch it and you can decorate what lays behind the html with whatever topics of conversation you choose to create, whether related to a particular hobby, a work topic or football team.
Once up and running your mouth piece to the Internet has been created, you now have a voice that stretches not just across a single continent but the whole world and can be accessed by anyone. It is however up to you how loud you project your voice via this tool.
Trawl around the Internet and you find millions of blogs available to view. Some in full flow of conversation exchanging and expressing opinion, others have fallen silent after the first or second post never able to project a loud enough voice to be heard.
So, Blog created. Conversation engaged. Discussion in flow and opinions exchanged. Is this all there is to it?
For those that want to push the boundaries further then you can link your site to the wider Internet conversation, dig deeper and see how much is out there.
Like any interesting news story, Blogs are continuing to develop all the time. A great example is one that is likely to go down in technological history, the BBC’s Robert Peston’s Buisness Blog (Peston’s Picks). With the continuing and constantly developing economic turn down situation that Britain has found itself consumed by in recent months, Peston used his Blog to break news before appearing on the six, the ten and Newsnight to give updates on the situation. Like any breaking or developing news story, it won’t wait for the journalist to go live, you have to go live with the story first to ensure the news remains fresh.
The other example I am going to use before I Blog off is something I found this evening relating to the Mumbai attacks that have dominated the news over the last twenty four hours. It perfectly demonstrates how web tools like blogs and twitter help spread information into the public domain faster and can even provide help, comfort and warn of danger.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/154621/in_mumbai_bloggers_and_twitter_offer_help_to_relatives.html
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