5 things we learnt at the Shout! Communications Big Talk event
We attended the latest Big Talk event in November, hosted by Shout! Communications, a broadcast PR agency in London. The event welcomed three guest speakers; Matt Williams, Head of Home News at ITV, Richard Gaisford, Chief Correspondent at Good Morning Britain and Sandy Smith, Editor of The One Show who discussed the broadcast news landscape and highlighted some top tips for PR professionals.
Matt Williams from ITV headed up the conversation about the change in broadcasting landscapes and how TV still remains the most powerful form of relaying news for ITV. He also indulged in details on ‘citizen journalists’ and how this demographic can help the news industry, and not disrupt it.
Richard Gaisford from Good Morning Britain gave insights into how GMB are becoming more frugal with their news broadcasting. He focused on how news decisions are now being determined by location rather than money and in fact anyone can be a journalist with a video camera and good wifi signal.
To close, Sandy Smith from The One Show gave exclusive insights into how The One Show operates, who they target and what news stories they focus on. They understand that they are not a channel for breaking news, but more for stories that can provoke a conversation on the sofa from their audience.
Our 5 key takeaways from the event:
- ‘Citizen Journalists’ are a growing demographic within the news industry and are changing the way journalists receive real-time results to report on. Citizen journalists will use social media to relay their news and shouldn’t be ignored as they can end up seeing more news breaking stories than actual journalists can.
- Twitter and Facebook are the catalysts of change and act as an essential newsgathering tool whilst also delivering constant content to readers and ultimately reaching more people.
- News decisions used to be determined on whether the broadcaster could afford to send a team and equipment out to the location, however nowadays it’s all about location and whether a journalist can get there quick enough to broadcast the breaking news.
- PR planning is key and usually it’s bad planning that lets PR agencies down. It’s hard to compete with new news so always be aware of what’s coming up and what you think they might be planning in the pipeline and developing stories on
- Case Studies are really popular with news journalists. They prefer to have a background and a story to report on and prefer to put a face to a story
If you want to see the full video highlights from the event, just visit here.
