Tag Archives: journalism 2.0

LONG READ: The milking of Liam Payne’s death for clicks won’t do Reach plc any good long term

A pop star who was born on the patch dies and the news operation goes into overdrive.

Liam Payne was born and grew up in Wolverhampton and died in Argentina.

In three days, the Facebook page pumps out 81 posts in 36 hours and in a 24-hour period three days after the death still nets 846 reactions and comments. 

High fives around the newsroom and living proof that the old print adage ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ is alive and well.

On the face of it, this is a solid result for Reach plc’s Black Country Live, an offshoot of Birmingham Live, which is in itself the online inheritance of the mighty Birmingham Post & Mail.

Scratch the surface, and you can tell a whole lot more about where local journalism is in 2024. For starters, of the more than six dozen posts, there was almost nothing from the people of Wolverhampton. No vox pop in the street, no statement from Wolverhampton College where he was a student. 

Reach would probably say the no death knock at his parents’ and family house showed they were respecting their privacy. Old hacks would probably point out that there are no staff left who know how to execute such awkward tasks. In the olden days they may have even dispatched to South America their own photographer and reporter.

Secondly, their coverage showed an extreme example of a local title’s online presence milking a story. In this, the story is nudged on inch by inch with fresh coverage. I’ve seen this tactic many times before and it especially gets used by Reach plc with celebrity stories. If you’re invested in the story it’s great. If you’re not, it gets irritating fast. It also squeezes out other news coverage.

Here’s a selection posted to Black Country Live’s Facebook page on Saturday October 19, three days after the news broke:

Heartfelt tribute to Liam Payne from his father

Heartfelt tribute to Liam Payne from Cheryl  

Heartfelt tribute to Liam Payne from Cheryl

Tragic loss of Liam Payne in Buenos Aires

Heartbreaking loss of Liam Payne at 31  

Heartfelt tribute to Liam Payne from Zayn Malik

Heartbreaking loss for Liam Payne’s family  

Liam Payne’s tragic final moments revealed  

Liam Payne’s phone could unlock tragic mystery 

Liam Payne’s final moments revealed in tragic incident

Remembering Liam Payne’s joyful moments with fans

Disturbing behaviour from Liam Payne before tragic incident

Liam Payne’s final moments revealed by shocked fan

The singer, from Wolverhampton, was in Argentina when he died

Tragic end for Liam Payne at Argentinian hotel  

But thirdly, and maybe most importantly is the backlash from readers.

Of the 158 comments attached to the Black Country Live’s Facebook page on Saturday October 19, a weighty 42 per cent of comments were criticising the milking of the story.

Kathryn Lane: I’m annoyed with myself for writing this and giving this page what they want which is interaction. The more they annoy people the more they comment and react and build their page.  As others have said there are family and friends who have to see this bombardment. 84 posts and counting is just disrespectful.

Chris Way: Give it a rest Black Country Live?! How many stories more you going to milk out of this?!

Jenny Thomas: Enough is enough! Please just let the family, friends and fans grieve in peace.

Natalie Carrol: Give his family some respect and let him rest in peace. A seven year old got killed yesterday in an explosion, nothing really even mentioned about that. Every life is precious, not just a famous one.

Philip Alexander:That’s gotta be the 4th article today at least and it’s only 11am.

Full disclosure, I was a reporter for 12 years and nine of those I was up against the Black Country Evening Mail who had five reporters based in the West Bromwich office a mile away from the Express & Star where I worked. I got to know several of them. Some I speak to and others I wouldn’t have trusted an inch.

I’ve no criticism of the Reach plc employees pumping out content on the Black Country Live Facebook page and its 71,000 followers. They have a hard job and I don’t envy them. It’s a local story of a boy made good with a sad ending. 

On the face of it, hey, all engagement is good engagement, right?

In reality, if you annoy your readers so much they talk about blocking you this can’t be a long term strategy.

Then there is also Black Country Live being accused of stealing an image of a young Liam with his Mum around X Factor time. A former colleague and Express & Star photographer Tim Thursfield accused them of the theft. He should probably know because he took the pic.

What does this mean for public sector comms?

Please learn this. Reach titles have long stopped considering themselves as newspapers. They are not alone in this.They are news brands. The paper of record from a few decades ago has long gone. Those days won’t return.

Reach in the Liam Payne coverage are following a 2024 web strategy to maximise clicks. But as Facebook navigates away from news and makes it harder for titles to reach an audience this strategy itself may soon seem as archaic as publishing a Football Final on a Saturday night to get the football scores out. The reach of Facebook content in news has already fallen by a third, the UK Press Gazette reported. Meanwhile, on Reach titles,  reporters are being asked to write eight pieces of content per shift.

News and how we consume it is very much changing. But in a crisis we still turn to the local paper, or rather brand. The Liverpool Echo, a Reach title whose brand is strong enough to resist the company-wide ‘Live’ rebranding, led some vital reporting in the summer of the Southport murders and subsequent rioting.

The Live brand does have an audience in the Black Country with 78 per cent of adults living in the Black Country weekly see some form of content, JICREG shows

We are told that local titles play an important role in the health of local democracy. They used to, anyway. 

The milking strategy for stories does no-one any good in the long term. It iritaes people. It underlines the importance for the public sector of having their own channels. It also undermines confidence in people in their trust in the ability of a title to cover their patch’s news.

The Liam Payne story could be dismissed as a one off. But it taps into regular observation of the scarcity of local news reporting I’ve heard elsewhere.

As the trust in local titles dwindles day-to-day, what happens next? 

CAMPAIGN JUSTICE: What Journalism 2.0 Looks Like and What You Can Learn

It was around 2010 and as depressing conversations with a reporter go this one took quite some beating.

I was in local government communications and we had started to post gritting updates in real time on Twitter. We were talking with our residents directly without going through the Priesthood of journalists.

“The thing is,” the reporter said, “When you post your updates to Twitter, newsdesk want you to give us a call as well, so we know.”

I declined. I pointed out that they needed to be on Twitter themselves. I shook my head in despair.

Despair

I started in newspapers in the early 1990s and spent 12 years as a journalist. I still love them despite themselves and despite a further eight years in a local government communications team.

There was a time when I despaired of local newspapers utterly. Declining newsrooms, re-locating to ‘hubs’ far away and shedding staff still make me shake my head.

But just recently, I’ve had cause to think that maybe the penny is dropping and that newspapers really can use the social web and create journalism that will be relevant to the channels of the future.

Telling a story with the web

Making brilliant use of the web are the Evening Mail in Birmingham. They are telling the story of the Birmingham pub bombings which killed 21 people 40 years ago today. They are doing so with imagination and passion. The incident remains an unhealed wound in the city. Nobody has been brought to justice for it. Six people were imprisoned wrongly.

They are using thunderclap to gather support for the case to be re-opened. You sign-up using a social channel and agree to share a message.

For audio, they recreated the IRA telephone call to the Evening Mail offices which came minutes before the explosion.

For images, they created a gallery of news images from the time from their archive.

On Twitter, they used the hashtag #justiceforthe21 and #BirminghamPubBombings to promote the call to bring people to justice.

On the web, the posted the news story in which they name the man, now dead, they allege is responsible for the attack.

On Facebook, they shared content and drew scores of responses.

Also on the web, they hosted as as if real time recreation of the 24-hours leading up to the incident. Anecdotes and snaps of life from those who were living their last day. It is a docudrama told in realtime and you can see it here.   

This is what future journalism looks like. Story telling on a range of platforms. It’s sharable and commentable and has a purpose. But above all it is human. I just can’t tell you how much I like this.

They still make me shake my head do newspapers. The public subsidy they get through the government insisting local government pay them for print small ads for public notices at a time of 85 per cent internet connectivity is plain wrong.

But the Evening Mail have shown peerlessly how to tell powerful stories on the web. This really does tower over anything else I’ve seen in the 21 years I’ve been involved with local journalism. Sincere congratulations to them. Buy shoe polish and make sure your suits are pressed. You’ll need them for the awards.

Brilliant work and the lessons to take

This is brilliant work. Genuinely brilliant. This is using the social web to tell a very human story. It’s powerful. It’s moving. But it has a sense of purpose. The purpose is to mobilise public support for a specific aim. It is is to press for justice.

Yet there are lessons here for the public sector where I now work. Just recently the #housingday initiative saw a 24-hour campaign which saw housing people talk about the jobs they do and the people they serve. Very soon #ourday will do a similar task for local government. I’m an advocate for them. They tell hundreds of stories that tell a bigger story. They empower people. They connect people too.

But wouldn’t it be something if that wall of noise was made easier to follow with a live blog? And wouldn’t it be something if there was one single call to action, whatever that was? What is the biggest issue facing housing? Or local government?

What would that campaign be?

Wouldn’t it be something if that energy was pointed at something?

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