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The truth about news, PR and joined-up Sony thinking

by Bob Crabtree on 20 July 2006, 17:21

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagc2

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Today, we bring you the truth about news, PR and joined-up Sony thinking. Well, our version, anyway. Come in Howard Stringer!

The computer and specialist print media and their counterparts on the web would all have their readers/visitors believe that the "hard" news that they provide comes as a result of late-night drinking sessions in which beans are spilt by contacts too drunk to hold their tongues. Broadcasters, to a lesser extent, also propagate that fantasy.

Some stories do indeed come to light this way but very few. Most, you may be surprised to learn, are largely rewrites of press-releases - documents produced with the aim (so the PR textbooks say) of putting the very best spin on new products, financial results, law suits and all the other things that tickle our collective fancies.

In other cases, and rather worse still, news stories are just rip-offs of someone else's rewritten press releases.

Basing a news story on an original press release may be a bit of a deception (though rather less so than basing it on someone else's rewrite) but doesn't mean that story is necessarily flawed, invalid or without considerable worth.

That's because a well-written news story will simply have used the release as a jumping off point. And, in truth, even a news piece that uses as it's jumping-off point someone else's story can also have some merit - though the risk of plagiarism remains high.

Whatever the starting point, the aim of a good news story is to provide a more truthful and accurate account than the original source - by adding extra facts and background and, in some cases, a touch of informed opinion that helps flavour and enrich the whole mix.

We'd like to think that this way of working is true for the large majority of HEXUS news stories - irrespective of their starting points - and that we do actually have more than our fair share of late-night sourced beans..

We'll give just one example (for reason that will soon become clear) of a press-release-based news story - Lifestyle's HEXUS.headline yesterday's about two rather appealing-looking DVDirect recorders.

As an aside, quite how appealing these DVDirect recorders will turn out to be in the flesh remains to be seen but, on paper, they looked likely to many of us at HEXUS to hit a sweet spot with a large number of consumers.

The story started with an email from Sony Europe pointing to a press release on the web. But some vital facts and some basic information were missing from the release.

We thought the quality of the release was dire and it seems to us (meaow!) that the company has had years of practise to reach these sorts of peaks.

But, incomplete, half-baked releases are the order of the day for a huge number of companies and organisations, whether created internally by staffers or externally by PR consultants. So much for putting the best spin on things!

We set about writing the best story possible using the information available in the press release. This being the "tell me now!" internet, we put it up as early as we could but only when we thought we'd highlighted all outstanding questions and doubts. We also emailed Sony before it went live in the hope that the company would respond quickly to all our queries - after which we'd be able to update the story and bring it up to scratch.

The sort of information that was missing was far from minor. It ranged from pricing and the types of blank-disc that can be used, to what socket connects these burners to PCs. There were also inconsistencies that leapt out at us and which, again, we asked Sony Europe to try to resolve. As the writing progressed, more queries came to light and more emails were sent.

By the end of the day, and after a good few email replies and a number of live page-updates, we'd managed, we thought, to nail down all the key facts and resolve all the confusion caused by Sony Europe's original limp-wristed press release.

Today, in another dumbed-down Sony release, we discovered otherwise.

This release reveals that Sony Europe will be introducing three hard-disk-based camcorders. We'll do a story on those shortly but need to do a bit of checking first. We're trying to find out some important things - like pricing and when they're going to be arriving and what the full specs are.

Anyway, let's get back to where we were. Rightly (or, more likely, wrongly), we'd assumed yesterday that the DCR-SR90E HDD camcorder would be able to work intimately with the DVDirect recorders to speedily transfer videos to DVD. We were led towards that conclusion by an end-note in yesterday's release saying,

An advanced synchronisation feature optimised for the new Sony HDD Handycam camcorders automatically detects the newest content and immediately copies it across to DVD at the push of the “DVD burn” button on the HDD Handycam station.

After seeing that, and while writing the story, we visited the products pages of Sony Europe's site and spotted only one HDD-based camcorder, yes, the DCR-SR90E. This is a product, we have to admit, we didn't even know Sony was offering and, thus, we concluded it must be "new".

There was nothing on the site, though, about that camcorder coming with an HDD Handycam station. But we still concluded that this was one of the camcorders the release must be talking about because we noted in the "More features" list that this model had "One touch DVD burn" - though no explanation was given.

What we didn't do - and that clearly was a lazy mistake - was "bother" Sony with yet another email query.

Instead, we took the easier and superficially quicker option and guessed. We attempted to covered our backsides, too, by adding the mealy-mouthed phrase, "and other future members of Sony's hard-disk-based Handycam camcorder family".

After today's announcement, we tend to think that we were wrong to jump to that conclusion yesterday about the DCR-SR90E. Quite possibly, it's only the three newcomers Sony talks about today that work hand-in-glove with the DVDirect recorders.

But how the hell would we know one way or the other? Yesterday's release gave no HDD camcorder model numbers and today's make absolutely no mention at all of DVDirect.

What today's release does say - though, maddeningly, only in relation to PCs - is that the "One Touch DVD Burn button on the side of the station begins a completely automatic download-and-burn process".

"How about asking Sony?", you ask. Well, we've now done that, of course, and will update and rewrite yesterday's story once again when we know the real score.

Hopefully, Sony's answers will also make us better informed when we do write a story about the three new HDD camcorders.

So why are we bothering to tell you all this?

Okay. First, we think it's good to share. And what we want to share is how banging your head on a brick wall day after day can get to you even if the wall doesn't always have Sony graffitied on it.

More important, we thought it worth telling the tale of the creation of a hard-worked news story - even one that quite possibly remains flawed until our next re-write - simply to put you in the picture.

A huge amount of news that you read - in print and on the web - is little more than topped-and-tailed press releases. In contrast, some news stories, even if they use press releases or stories on other sites as their jumping-off points, will have involved a whole lot more work and knowledge on the writer's behalf.

Together, they result in the reader or site visitor being offered a whole lot more value but, almost inevitably, will go live a little later than an incomplete version elsewhere.

And that's something that definitely is not well understood or appreciated in the internet age.

Oh, yes, there's one more reason.

The new CEO of Sony, Howard Stringer, has been quoted widely on TV, in the press and on the net about the joined up thinking that the company needs to start doing to ensure that various division don't duplicate work and don't compete with each other but do, instead, keep each other properly informed of what they're up to and start working together.

If he's serious, we reckon he could do a lot worse than take time out soon to look at the disjointed way that Sony's European PR - one of the company's main public faces - operates.

This, we reckon, has to be down to poor communication between a whole lot of Sony Europe divisions - each feeding separately into PR (some internal, some external), not talking to one another and looking after only their own parish-pump interests.

Mind you, the alternative theory - that Sony's PR operation in Europe is largely rubbish, just as it is with a whole lot of other companies and organisations big and small - is one we've not yet totally discounted.

Thoughts? Be delighted to hear them in this thread in the HEXUS.community.

HEXUS.links

HEXUS.community : : Discussion thread about this article
HEXUS.headline - DVDirect - Sony's latest 'Why-didn't-I-think-of-that?' killer product?
Sony - DVDirect home page (not a lot there right now, mind)
Sony - DCR-SR90E home page