From Journalist to PR - Part 3 - The Butterfly Effect
So, it’s taken me 2000 words and two articles to describe how an old newspaper journalist made the jump to public relations. You could argue that this is not the best argument for succinct writing and communication, but I thought there would be media folk out there who might be interested in such a transformation, seeing it took me 44 long years to achieve.
Now it’s time for me to talk about a few elements of the tool-kit I brought across to my new job as Editorial Director of RAW Food & Drink PR. And I’d like to think that, to have lasted so long in journalism, I must have had at least a basic set of skills to go with those tools…
Or perhaps it’s just one skill: story-telling.
Which is no small matter. Throughout his wonderful books (such as Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind), Yuval Noah Harari emphasises time and again that we could also be known as the Ape Who Told Stories - because according to him and many others, it’s the really big deal… The one that allowed us to dominate the planet.
We spend our lives in stories.
We listen to the news on radio or TV and it’s just a series of stories. Most things we hear about or see are not actually happening in front of us right now (or very rarely). Even when it comes to the ubiquitous Covid-19 which is currently shaping all our lives, we are for the most part removed from it. Terrible when it strikes a family or an individual, of course, but where I live the number of people infected with the coronavirus at present is registering at under six per every 100,000.
After four months of lockdown and everything else, I actually do not personally know anyone locally who’s had the virus. And yet it is everywhere because it is - by far - the biggest story in town. And day after day, week after week it continues to be. We are all entirely bound up in the Covid story because the great majority of us believe in it and fear it, even if we havn’et seen it.
Away from real-life stories, we watch soap-operas, movies and the like because they provide us with the kind of narratives we seem to need. And, of course, we read. Novels, books, newspapers and magazines, whatever…
Our addiction to stories is obvious - what’s not quite so apparent is the way in which we as individuals are constantly spinning our own tales, no matter how ephemeral or irrelevant they might see to be.
“I’m in the supermarket…”
How many times have we heard that being shouted into a phone? It’s a really boring narrative - you can hardly work out why people need to convey such information - but the person is still painting a word-picture to describe their very basic story to someone who isn’t there.
There are paleo-anthropologists who believe that it was the first simple word-pictures— and the understanding thereof - which began making all the difference when it came to early homo-sapiens moving up the domination ladder.
Modern chimpanzees have simple calls which can be understood by their fellows. A bark that means “Lion!” will see the whole family group leg-it up the nearest tree. But a warning call is not really the rudimentary word-picture we’re talking about…
If you can say: “There’s a herd of wildebeest in the next valley - you guys go down to the narrow bit and we’ll chase ‘em towards you…”
Well, that sounds like a plan.
One that does require a huge leap in intellectual ability. You need the sounds or phrases to say it - AND you need a strange abstract part of the brain which can understand the sounds and then somehow visualise a series of pictures relating to the information received.
An imagination. That unique invisible thing which can see the valley, the wildebeest, the narrow section and play-out the eventual slaughter, and almost taste the resultant barbecue full of delicious meat.
And do all this without a single atom of any of it being present in the here and now.
That is when this strange ability becomes huge. It’s why paleo-anthropologists believe homo-sapiens came to have supremacy over the Neanderthal’s, who were larger and stronger physically, and who had bigger brains…
There are even those who believe the sudden development of imagination was caused through some sort of autism occurring in a single individual. They argue that the ability to imagine or visualise wasn’t exactly an obvious requirement demanded by evolution. And this theory is underlined by the fact that no other species on the planet can pull off the imagination trick.
Homo sapiens have been relying heavily on the ability to imagine ever since.
Which brings us right up to modern times - and it brings me to a moment many years ago when I was a young cub-reporter and I heard an advertising guru say the words: “Don’t sell the sausage - sell the sizzle!”
How right he was. In pure terms, a cold uncooked sausage is a pale pink tube made from animal’s stomach lining, filled with chopped bits of meat and fat and elements of a cereal product. Not really a thing to make you drool.
But imagine hearing and smelling the savoury sizzle as the dense, toothsome, juicy sausage turns golden brown and delicious in a pan… Imagining such a thing is enough to make most meat-eaters drool and say: “I think I’ll buy a pack of Westaway’s finest so we can have sausages tonight…”
What that old advertising guru was really saying was: tell the right story - and tell it well.
It surprised me as a journalist how often people would contact the paper with the wrong story. Here’s an example…
A wildlife charity once emailed me news of an amazing success. They’d managed to turn things around across a badly dilapidated chunk of natural environment, so that a rare brown butterfly was once again beginning to flourish on the site. The email contained a photo of a rather dull looking butterfly and a completely unusable image of its tiny eggs on a leaf.
Like most people, I love butterflies - so I was thinking: okay, maybe I can make this into a bit of a story - a couple hundred words at most and possibly the image of the fritillary, which ain’t the most beautiful butterfly in the world.
Then I noticed a figure in the “editor’s notes” part of the email. One that astounded me. Apparently the cost of this environmental initiative was £600,000. It’s still a vast amount now, but it was an absolute fortune back then.
Six-hundred-thousand-quid to save a little brown butterfly?
I rang the charity and was told it was all part of a larger project which, for the most part, was being paid for by a big regional water company. All part of something called “upstream-thinking”.
It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, so I decided to go to the middle of nowhere and see what it was all about, taking photographer Richard Austin with me. We were duly shown some butterfly eggs and Richard was hugely unimpressed.
“Six-hundred-thousand-quid!” he kept muttering.
So our hosts hurriedly began to shown us other things which proved that nature was returning to what looked to us to be a fairly drab and barren landscape.
The background was that two World Wars had convinced a series of governments that Britain needed the ability to feed itself, so farmers were being paid grants to plough up marginal land in a bid to increase the nation’s agricultural productivity. In this particular location the farmers had to crack a hard upper shell of clay or culm land with extra large ploughs and then blitz every inch every year with industrial fertilisers if they had any chance of seeng a return.
Over the years, all this work, money and effort had resulted in nothing more than a bit of beef grazing and the odd field of cereal. It had always been a case of fighting nature - but at a huge cost to the environment. And, as it happened, an unseen financial cost. Because there was so much artificial fertiliser in the landscape, it was oozing down into one of the region’s biggest drinking-water reservoirs and causing poisonous algal blooms to occur every summer.
To make the contents of the reservoir safe to drink, the water company had to employ “end of pipe cleaning” - a process which is cripplingly expensive and environmentally unsound.
So the big story was that “upstream thinking” (ie paying farmers not to farm and returning the landscape to its natural condition) was helping to keep the water clean and therefore reducing many £millions each year spent on end-of-pipe cleaning, which in turn was a saving that could be passed on to customers - ie to our readers.
While the return of a little known butterfly to an obscure part of the landscape was a wonderful symbol and a headline - it wasn’t the story.
That came out in a font-page head-line which said something like: “Region’s Water Bills Cut by Cleaner Landscape”.
So, a front page lead… And instead of just 200 words and a thumbnail sized photo inside the paper, we carried an entire double page spread full of facts, figures, panels filled with bullet-points and five photographs. Indeed, that one story gave rise to two major series called The Contested Landscape, for which we won major awards.
The butterfly-effect was actually a win-win-win story. A rare creature was saved - an entire landscape was cleaned up and made nature-friendly - and our readers’ water bills were being reduced.
In the next article I’ll write about another win-win situation which helped one tourist destination shout from the rooftops about local food, promote local walks and highlight just about everything else good about the island.
And I’ll be doing that because guiding stories - engineering stories - telling stories in exactly the right way, can be a massive boon when you’ve a genuine message to convey.
