Excursion 1

Chris Grimes gives Grady at Oxford students a look at the substantial news operation at the Financial Times.

Tuesday we took the first of two planned excursions to London.  We visited the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and heard from Drs. Heidi Larson and Pauline Paterson about how they monitor media worldwide to try and identify attitude trends about vaccines.  Their project, The Vaccine Confidence Index, is funded primarily by the Gates Foundation.  Their work is shared with the World Health Organization and the United Nations among others so they can nip problems in the bud before epidemics arise because of lack of vaccination.  The Vaccine Confidence Index project hosted us for a good lunch of salads, fish and fruit.

We then went to The Financial Times where we were met by Chris Grimes, Analysis Editor for the FT.  Grimes is a 1992 Grady alumnus who began his career at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, then went to New York to join the Dow Jones news organization eventually joining The Financial Times in New York.  He has been working in London for three years.

There is NO such thing as Good Sweat...

It has come to my attention the importance of producing advertisements that resonate with a specific culture. Out of curiosity, I picked up a tabloid magazine at the newsstand called “Ok!.” The United States has several versions of this magazine in the form of “People” or “E News.”

Flipping through the pages, a couple advertisements caught my eye. The first one that really piqued my interest was an ad for Mitchum Ultimate which is a deodorant brand. The information given about the brand shows that it protects for 48 hours and it contains ‘revolutionary Oxygen Odour Control Technology that targets and destroys odour, neutralizing it all.’ Therefore, we should all switch to Michum.

However, the more interesting portion of the advertisement shows a picture of four friends; two boys and two girls. They are about 21-25 years old, attractive, and all very different looking. It is nighttime and it looks like there is a concert going on in the background of the low quality picture. You can assume that the people in the picture are smiling and having a great time from the “selfie” that is the image. The layout of the print ad looks like an instagram post from ‘Laura’ where she geo-tagged the location as “London” and the caption is “Good Sweat is a night out with the crew. #Goodsweat”. Then, the tagline of the ad states, “Great moments in life make you sweat. Share them.”

Now, from what I know about American women, I would say none of us would be turned on to the idea of sweating. American deodorants are mainly antiperspirants and the concept of sweating is not acceptable among younger populations. American women even go to the extreme in removing their sweat gland from their armpits to avoid sweating all together. To make a long story short, this advertisement would not be successful in the U.S. but the campaign is quite successful in the UK. According to a study done in 2012 by the International Conference on Communication, Media, Technology and Design, research proves that advertising is linked with societal norms. 

In the United States, the product equivalent is Secret Deodorant and Antiperspirant  which is currently using a hashtag campaign as well. Instead of instagram, the brand shares its new scents through videos that feature a different scent inspired by a different designation such as Paris, Brazil, and Hawaii. The words used to sell the product are quite different from Michum's hashtag of GoodSweat. Secret is using #Epic48 Hour Adventures and words like "Gorgeous" to describe how the product makes the females feel. This is a very simple example of how a subtle difference in word choices that would resonate with a target audience among a different culture. 

Long Live the Print

Ever since my first experience with journalism in high school, I've been told that print is a dying breed. Even though I spent years being the editor of the school's newspaper, I eventually stepped back from the field and decided to pursue a career in advertising at The University of Georgia. Certainly with the boom of social media and technology, words on a screen would eventually outlive anything on paper. Especially with interactive, banner, and all other digital ads we see in our media classes.Yesterday however, our excursion to The Financial Times (FT) in London gave me a massive reality check. Print is NOT dead.

Christopher Grimes, a 1992 UGA alumni (forgive me if I've got the year wrong) greeted us at the security gates of the building. He was younger than I imagined and well dressed in a grey suit. No tie. I thought this was odd because when I knew we were going to a big business newspaper like the FT, I thought certainly the atmosphere would be overly professional and even a little stuffy. But there Mr. Grimes was, happily greeting us and excited to give us the tour.

Our first stop was a large conference room where Mr. Grimes gave us a brief overview of his position at the FT. He's in charge of the large feature piece found in the middle of the newspaper. He and his higher editors determine what the topic on the insert will be based upon their perceptions of importance. As we all obviously know, this is the epitome of gate keeping and agenda setting. What I don't think we all realized however, was how close to a deadline decisions like these are made. Mr. Grimes provided us with a specific example of how six hours before a deadline his head editor decided that he wanted to cover a specific topic about Mexico. Thus an avalanche of necessity was triggered where the general Latin American reporter and Mexican correspondent needed to be contacted in order to crank out a piece right before the morning's publication. Mr. Grimes described how one floor of the building could go from complete calm and boredom (like how I thought it would be) to a chaotic and adrenaline motivated war zone.

This blew my mind. I couldn't believe how tight their deadlines could be. Especially considering how many drafts or versions an advertisement can go through before it's even considered.  So much effort goes into one publication that is from an industry that's allegedly "barely hanging on." But certainly something so stressful must have some sort of a pay off if people are still keeping it around. To be frank, I was asking myself were the money was. Why stay in this industry?

My question was immediately answered while in the same conference room. Mr. Grimes went on to tell our class that a yearly subscription to The Financial Times costs roughly $350. Yet another mind bomb. But wait, there's more--Mr. Grimes literally threw down multiple copies of the FT's affiliate magazine called How to Spend It. This ungodly large glossy magazine featured advertisements from Louis Vuitton, Maserati, and Michelin-Star restaurants. Earlier today I looked up just how much such an ad would cost. According to the current rate card, a double page colored ad can cost up to $103,000 at the most and $49,000 at the least.

Let this blog post serve as a retraction. About my original judgement of how the atmosphere of a business magazine would be, and for anyone who claims that newspaper is extinct. Reign on FT. And long live the print.

BBC and Ownership

When I got in front of a computer after arriving in Oxford, one of the first things I did was get on Twitter and follow BBC. I suspect I'm not the only one who did this. Like lots of people my age (or not my age), I get much of my news online. Although it's not entirely rational, I've been surprised by how similar British news coverage has seemed so far to American news coverage. Especially in the form of a tweet, the common elements are obvious: brief lede explaining the gist of the story followed by a link to an article. Clicking through, you can recognize an inverted pyramid style of writing, a careful citing of sources, a clear attempt toward impartiality -- all hallmarks of American journalism.

Looking at BBC's Twitter and website got me thinking, though, about an American equivalent. The obvious answer might be something like CNN, being a major national news network, but the comparison that's most readily come to mind for me is actually the Associated Press. Like the AP, BBC manages separate accounts for news categories like world news and sports. And maybe it's the journalist or the anti-capitalist in me, but the first source I would think of as thorough and unbiased is the Associated Press. That brings up, of course, a key difference between the AP and other news sources like CNN or Fox or even the New York Times. When we want news from CNN, we visit CNN.com. AP's website? AP.org. Sure, the organization is owned by news companies. But it remains a nonprofit organization. And I think that's part of the reason for what may be a more implicit trust on my part of news from the Associated Press.

Unlike CNN or Fox or MSNBC, BBC is not, in the traditional sense of the term, a business. Also unlike any news stations in the United States, BBC is funded by the government. I know we've discussed some of the risks of receiving the news from a government-funded organization, but is that any worse than relying on for-profit companies to tell us what's happening? A lot of Americans have no idea just how tangled our web of media ownership is. It still seems crazy to me sometimes that someone let Disney buy ABC. Surely there have been some conflicts of interest since then. Meanwhile, BBC is in the midst of reporting a government abuse scandal. Do we take everything at its word -- at least as much as we would do if it weren't a story on the government? Is it better to have a media that is largely for-profit or a media that is largely funded by the government? And does it make an actual difference in day-to-day reporting?

The Anorak Newspaper

Today I glanced around at some of the UK's online publications. I wasn't actually sure which publications were credible and which weren't so I settled on a newspaper called the Anorak (mostly because its font and color scheme online reminded me of the A.P.) I'll note that I REALLY did try to find something positive I could talk about when describing this publication but with it's poor layout and even poorer writing that was near impossible.

A quick list of some things that bothered me from the Anorak: the use of abbreviations in important news stories (exp: lol, the Feds...), editorializing content with words like "sadly" and "luckily", use of casual terms like "folks", the scattered layout is not user-friendly, and lastly some of the reporters even signed off their articles with "Hurrah!" But most horrifying, to me, was the link on their homepage labeled "flashback" that directed readers to a blog of sorts that I can only describe as a wannabe Buzzfeed (only with less interesting stories). Not sure why such a trivial link would be posted as their main content on the home page....

I wont categorize every UK publication as being this poor in content, but I have seen multiple British publications report their content in the same manner. (I recognize the BBC and a few others have adequate reporting)

After we discussed the social cognitive theory in class, I wondered if British citizens are modeling their general or even political views after these biased reporters. Why hasn't there been a movement to improve mass media in this country? What are journalistic standards for writers in the UK and how come competition hasn't fostered more credible reporting?

The Daily Fail (I mean Mail)

This past Thursday and Friday, my romantic literature class went on our excursion up to the Lake District. On the way up there, Lauren and I decided to split the cost of a newspaper. We settled on a copy of The Guardian, but the only reason that we knew it was a reputable newspaper was because last year, I had heard that The Guardian was the publication that had broken the Snowden story. If I had not known that, I might have passed right over newspaper, thinking it was just a worthless tabloid.

After purchasing the paper, we sat down next to Dr. Camilleri. When she noticed that we had bought the paper and we explained to her that we were keeping up with British news for the sake of our Grady Seminar, then she started to list off other reputable news sources that we could go to. She obviously named The BBC, but she also mentioned The Daily Mail and The Huffington Post, which was surprising to us.

Most of us at the table clearly had negative perceptions of those two papers. The only time that any of us had encountered either of those news sources was when they showed up on our Facebook feeds in the form of gossipy entertainment articles or overly-opinionated opinion pieces.

Now, obviously Facebook filters out what it puts on our feeds. All the time I spend reading buzzfeed articles might lead Facebook's program to think I want to have those opinion pieces promoted on my feed; or perhaps one of my friends just might think the 350th opinion piece on marriage that the read was absolutely the one that they needed to share. However, Facebook's programming and my friends' inclinations are another conversation for another time. The thing that I realized in this conversation with Dr. Camilleri is that the context in which I am presented with a news source greatly affects my opinion of that news source.

The fact that every Huffington Post piece I read was an opinion piece shared by some guy from my high school caused me to read it with a grain of salt, especially if I didn't agree with the opinion. But, I read an article from The Guardian that I didn't agree with and I gave that article a thorough read, finding myself open to the comments, because my preconceived notion of the publication was that it was very reputable.

It's clearly to the disadvantage of The Daily Mail and The Huffington Post to be shared on social media so liberally, or at least, it's a disadvantage when they're trying to gain me as a reader. However, should it be this way? They can't necessarily control where they are shared, and a censorship of their Facebook trending material would likely lose the publication a lot of readers. So what is the answer - or do they even need one? That is my question.

First Class in Oxford

The Grady at Oxford Social Effects of Mass Communication class met for the first time on Tuesday, July 8.  We're starting on an adventure of learning about British media and how media affects human behavior and attitudes.  The class is: (back row l to r:) Nia Washington, Ashton Adams, Sara LaChapelle, Nicole Castrellon, Pat Semanie, Ethan Williams, Lauren Gourley, Lauren McDonald; (front row l to r:) Katie Huffman, Brittany Futch, Caroline Erickson, Kaitlyn Peel, Ashlyn Skaar, Tori McKenney, Sara Adams, Erin Cavalli.