News Media and Public Relations in the Digital Age

The Empire Club Presents

Dr. Laura Toogood & John Cruickshank: News Media and Public Relations In The Digital Age

June 2, 2015

Head Table:

Distinguished Guest Speaker:

Dr. Laura Toogood, PhD, Managing Director, Digitalis; Author of Journalism and PR News Media and Public Relations in the Digital Age

Guests:

Mr. John Cruickshank, Publisher, Toronto Star; President, Star Media Group

Ms. Emilia Di Luca, Student, Post Grad Corporate Communications Program, Seneca College

Dr. Gordon McIvor, Executive Director, National Executive Forum on Public Property; Director, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Bruce MacLellan, President & CEO, Environics Communications

Mr. Rick Murray, Managing Partner and Chief Digital Strategist, NATIONAL Public Relations Inc.

Ms. Andrea Wood, Senior Vice President, Legal Services, TELUS; President, Empire Club of Canada

Welcome Address by Andrea Wood, President, Empire Club of Canada

Ladies and gentlemen, we are very fortunate to have today’s guest all the way from London, England—the big London: Dr. Laura Toogood is a communications professional and digital commentator with broad academic and industry experience. She is Managing Director of Private Clients at Digitalis Reputation and the founder of luxury lifestyle publication, The Sloaney.

I first heard of her through our President Elect, Gordon McIvor, whom you have met. Gordon told us that her book, Journalism and PR: News Media and Public Relations in the Digital Age, was sending shockwaves through the communications community and was the new must-read for all communications executives. Who knew? I am a lawyer. I do not know this stuff. Gordon, thank you for sharing it with us.

John Cruickshank apparently agrees with Gordon’s assessment, and we are very grateful that he has agreed to join us today to discuss the book with Dr. Toogood. You will all have heard of Mr. Cruickshank. He is President and Publisher of the Toronto Star and President of Star Media Group of Torstar. He is a veteran media executive and has had a long and accomplished career in journalism, having served as CEO and publisher of the Sun Times Media Group, publisher of CBC News and Managing Editor of the Globe and Mail. This is just a small sampling of his career highlights, but the thing that is really exciting about John is—and I learned this—he has a TED Talk. How cool is that? Not just any TED talk, but one that is directly on point today: The threat to democracy posed by an increasingly technologically distracted public.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please, join me in welcoming Dr. Laura Toogood and John Cruickshank to our podium.

Dr. Laura Toogood & John Cruickshank

JC: Welcome to this side of the Atlantic. Good to have you.

LT: Thank you, John.

JC: This is the book, Journalism and PR: News Media and Public Relations in the Digital Age. Laura, you and John Lloyd are authors. Tell us a little bit about the background to the book. Why did you write it?

LT: Well, so I wrote it with John Lloyd, as you said, who is the co-author, and John has won many awards as a journalist, and he is currently a contributing editor to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, my background is very much in technology and the digital revolution and online communications, and that is where I was doing all the academic work and, increasingly more so, some work in the business space with Digitalis Reputation. And John and I got our heads together about both industries, journalism and PR, and we figured that they are changing dramatically. Journalism is experiencing crisis times. PR is growing and growing in strength, and there was not a huge amount of academic work out there or literature about the change and why it was happening and where it is really going. So, with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, we set about coming up with an idea of potentially, actually, an academic paper to start with, so, you know, a small piece of work. But, as is with these things, we interviewed lots and lots of people from the PR industry and the journalism world, and it gathered momentum, and grew and grew and grew, and 18 months later, we had a book. So, it is a release, and that is why we stand here today.

JC: Tremendous. Now, a subtitle might be “The Rise and Fall of Journalism and the Rise and Rise of Public Relations.”

LT: Yes.

JC: Give us a little bit of the history.

LT: Yes, I suppose we are in a world now where technology is changing so many industries, particularly, with journalism and PR. If we rewind 10, 20 years, journalism really did have the upper hand. PR executives were writing their press releases and trying to go for coffee and lunches with journalists in the event that they would potentially get their brand or the person that they were representing onto the radar of the journalist. But, ultimately, the journalist was the person who had the power and, because it was a case of communicating in audience of one of too many and there was relatively limited reciprocal dialogue from readers, the power was with journalism.

What has happened is that technology has meant there are so many more communications channels now emerging, and many of these are social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter—blogs even—Instagram, YouTube. And it is giving consumers and readers and the general public a greater voice, which also means for PR that there are lots of different channels where they can actually access the market. So, no longer do they always have to go to the journalist to gain coverage about their brand or to position their argument. They can actually use direct access channels, and that is, I suppose, one of the key changes; that is, technology is facilitating the ability for you to actually reach your audience in a different way and not always via broadsheets.

JC: Right, okay. Now, we will come back to the broadsheets, but you said something very, very interesting in the midst of the book about how the communications people are now sitting at the big table. They have gone from being people who did press releases to people who are now strategists. You cite people like David Axelrod, who I remember as the former Chicago Tribune reporter. Go figure. Talk a little bit about that movement from the communication person, the press release writer, to the number two, literally, in politics.

LT: Well, I believe reputation has become a lot more fragile in today’s world, and that is one of the reasons that PR has become a top-table profession. The likes of Twitter and Facebook and other communication channels means that consumer perception can change very quickly; it can gather momentum. If you are going through a crisis situation, you are expected to react and respond very, very quickly, and we have a big challenge, certainly, from the corporate side of things, because many of the board directors have not grown up around this type of technology. They are not used to this type of technology, and they do not necessarily know how to use it and how to engage it. Communication is now sort of fundamental to a lot of corporate policy, and I suppose that is why it is now vital that you have good PR advice from the very, very beginning. And you really need to have a strategic approach to communications because it can go wrong very quickly.

JC: It does mean that corporate leaders, just like your politicians, have to have a little bit of the actor or actress in them, does it not?

LT: Yes, and there is nowhere to hide in the social media world, and that was something else that we discussed at length with PR executives in the book, the fact that there is this pressure to communicate and pressure to have a presence.

Research we recently released through Digitalis Reputation in London actually focused all about the search engine results pages and where people are looking for information. They are no longer always going to the mainstream publications or these types of established news media sources; rather, they are Googling somebody’s name or Googling a brand. So, just imagine that you are walking down the street; I am sure everyone is aware that if someone stops you and asks you a question, and you do not know the answer, then just type it into your phone. Type it into Google, and it will be there.

But, of course, we are seeing this difficulty, then, with how we position ourselves, and how we position our brands. And I think over 86% of people now trust what they see on the first page of Google, and over 92% or 94%—I cannot remember the exact figure off the top of my head now—will be impacted if they see something negative, which just shows how fragile reputation is and how the online life is really important in how we are portrayed in online media.

JC: Absolutely. I have to admit that that was really the only relief I felt in the book—that there is nowhere to hide, which used to be our role. But, the fact is—and you do get at this—is there is nowhere to hide both from truthful information and mistruth. It becomes more and more difficult to sort it through.

LT: Yes, social media presents that challenge where it is wonderful for engaging what we have called in the book the ‘citizen journalist’. So, now, the media have access to a greater amount of reporters in regards to sort of the general public, really, and the people that are there, on the ground, experiencing real life events. One example, which I should mention—and I cite it in the book—is that I was in Val d’Isère, which is a ski resort in France, and there was a big chalet fire, and it was filmed by a skier on his iPhone. He then submitted this to the BBC, who, in a few hours, ran it as one of their headline stories in the news summary. They did not have any reporters out there, and they did not have access to the story other than through what we would call now the ‘citizen journalist’. So, it is great for being able to document history and real- life events and have more sources available. But, as you quite rightly say, there can be this struggle with misinformation.

I was speaking at the Canadian Public Relations Society Conference in Montréal only a couple of days ago, and one of the examples I cited there was in relation to the Sandy Hook school killings, where, initially, the wrong brother was actually named as the murderer. Now, while that was an error that I believe was made by a press agency in the first instance, once it reached the realm of social media, it grew and grew and grew and gathered great momentum, which caused problems for the accuracy in reporting the story and, needless to say, for the reputation and implications of the wrong brother.

JC: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And we saw another version of that in the Boston Marathon. Yes, absolutely. One of the other things that you get out of the book—and I think is so interesting—are the challenges for the traditional media. And you do not really suggest that there is anything but traditional media, news media, and I think that is useful. So much is happening at once, and that undermines both the business model and, to a certain extent, their capacity to be authoritative. I want to talk a little bit about that. I mean, you have sort of glanced at it already: The fall of advertising as well at the enormous increase in competition.

LT: Yes, there are so many more channels available for people to get their news from, to get their content from, and a lot of it is freely published as well. And it is people writing, because they want to write; they love to write; they are not trying to make money, and this puts great stress on the industry of journalism—a lot of the editors and the reporters, you know, need to make it work from a commercial sense for it to survive.

JC: The publishers do, certainly.

LT: Well, yes, exactly, the publishers.

JC: I am not going to rely on the reporters to do that.

LT: Yes, that is true, actually. It is interesting that you should say that because a lot of the time the reporters are not really interested in making money at all; they just want to write and tell the story.

JC: Get at the truth.

LT: Get at the truth, quite. No, but I think it puts a lot of pressure on journalists, then, to perform when it comes to outputting high-quality content. This is what we are seeing. The big publications that re-surviving this change and coming out well and progressing well are really focusing on top-quality investigative journalism and focusing on, fundamentally, what they are very, very good at, which is, as you quite rightly say, telling the truth. And I think that the reputation of the main newspaper brands, the main television brands and the credibility and the authority that they bring definitely should not be overlooked.

And there is, arguably, a tendency nowadays, certainly with PR, to become preoccupied and obsessed with social media, with getting enough information out on all of these channels and with managing it. But the endorsement of the high-brow publication still does hold a lot of value, and you may speak to, certainly, from a financial news perspective or a bank’s, and they would be much happier with potentially two or three lines in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal than lots and lots of information out on blogs or social media feeds.

JC: Right. The structure of journalism in Great Britain, which was the primary focus with respect to how you kind of structured the thought about this, is quite different from that in North America. I mean, in Great Britain, you have got half a dozen national brands, and some of them are very, very high quality and are quite authoritative. The great bulk of people who read or watch television news in Canada or the United States are dealing with metropolitan newspapers and local television shows, so they are not big brands. Are we really moving to a point where you can imagine in the United States a New York Times or Wall Street Journal and not much else?

LT: Potentially, like I say, although the mainstream publications do have a great reputation and they do shine through, and they can often be considered a leading light in what is a crowded space, one of the advantages of the digital revolution is it has given the opportunity for new sites and new domains and new voices to garner more attention. So, for example, the Huffington Post, you know, has now become the very creditable site for news. And that started as a free media domain and still, you know, is basically running on the blogging material.

One of the other key focusses that we looked at actually address this idea of every company becoming a media company. What is happening, certainly in the UK market—and I would say this is not exclusive to the UK market—is a model that can be and is being rolled out in other countries as well. It is the idea that people are now looking to brands, and brands are looking to journalists to bring them on board and to become a news site and a news channel. So, we have the likes of Red Bull, who obviously aligned themselves with extreme sports, so Formula One racing, and they will interview some of the best Formula One drivers and the best teams. They really act almost like a news site, a newspaper and in a journalist’s domain. This is actually supported by a brand that is subconsciously trying to make money out of that, but it is becoming a media brand and pulling people potentially away, in some instances—and arguably more in consumer- based PR and consumer-based journalism—from some of the major brands.

And there is this pressure now to be a media company and to put out a lot of content online, and so many people get it right; so many people get it wrong. We have Land Rover, the big car company. In the UK, they ran a very famous social media campaign under the hashtag ‘hibernot’. It is an incredibly simple concept because they are all about off-road vehicles and promoting the outdoor lifestyle. What they were doing was encouraging their social media community members to go out and take a photograph of them embracing winter, so, rather than hibernating, the idea is to “hibernot,” and the key here also, I suppose, is to make your own word up as well, so you can really own it, and it spreads like wildfire. That is really a great example of a brand becoming a media company, making this direct communication work, and taking the influence away from appearing in maybe the Times or the Telegraph or the Financial Times—because the impact and the reach of their successful social media campaign trumped, arguably, any article or feature that appeared in a newspaper for one day.

JC: Right, right. You have also gone from not only is every company, in effect, a media company, but many individuals are. They create great value for themselves by being their own brand, and PR professionals now deal not just with media corporations, but also have to deal with brands, with human brands, within media corporations.

LT: Yes, there are two points that are interesting that I should touch on here. Increasingly, we are now thinking when it comes to reputation, positioning and branding, it is one reputation and one brand. It is not about the personal brand and the corporate brand; it is about the individual as much as it is about the company. And companies are becoming wiser to this and more proactive in advising people about their online profile, about their legacy, about their digital communication for lots of different reasons: I think the security risks, but as well as almost wanting to own the profile and the digital footprint of their employees. The people are becoming very valuable to them.

But, in the journalism area, there have been—I was having this conversation with John Lloyd, my co- author only last week—instances where some key reporters actually gain more social media following and more social interest than potentially their publication. We have a couple of writers in the UK who have such experience. Kate Warren is one example. She writes three or four big, big publications, but her social media reach actually surpasses any of these publications, so, you get to a stage where you think, “Well, actually, she could go out, and she could create her own publication, her own news site. She does not need to write for the Times, the Telegraph.” She does not need to go on the BBC. She has got her own readership, her own followers, and why not just utilize that? One of John’s colleagues quite rightly pointed out, that when it becomes about the person and when you leave the safety and the environment and the support structure that a big organization provides you as a journalist, then it can be quite a nerve-wracking step, not only because you are under pressure, then, to commercialize your own model, but you leave yourself open from a legal aspect as well. So, whilst the journalists have become their own brand themselves, they are not necessarily wanting to make the step away yet— maybe it will change—from the big companies that are supporting them. And that is a huge value, I think, for the broadsheets and the news sites.

JC: Yes—although I wonder: Unless you have an inner commitment to poverty, it is very hard to see how someone creating their own brand can maintain their integrity. I mean, we had examples of people creating their own brand in the past. Iy Stone, for example, in the States. Extraordinary work he did literally on his own in Washington over many, many years, and he did not want to get rich doing it. He wanted to get at the truth. A lot of the people who are personal brand builders—their goal is the filthy lucre rather than the truth, is it not?

LT: I suppose. I mean, it depends entirely what industry you are coming from. Certainly with the journalists, of course, they write because they are passionate about writing. They report because they want the truth to be told, and they really want to communicate with the citizens. So, to them, there is not this desire, necessarily, to make lots of money by doing this. But, unfortunately, for them to go on, money does play a factor, and that is where we are seeing that one of the challenges that we are facing is this blur between editorial and advertorial, which is becoming much more of a problem as we move into the online world. What is actually the truth? We are living in a world of appetizing, where fundamentally, everything is being supported by a brand that has an objective to make money, and perhaps we can lose that level of objectivity and credibility—I mean, certainly, with the up-and-coming journalists and the up-and-coming citizen journalists and bloggers who maybe are not trained in the same way as their traditional press are. They are quite happy, again—more so with consumer PR—essentially to write about products, to write about fashion brands, to write about where they are going, what they are doing; meanwhile, they are probably being paid for this, yet they are not declaring it on their website. And some of these people have hundreds and thousands of followers, and they could be targeting the teenage market or the young adult market who, again, maybe are more naïve readers and do not realize that, actually, behind this newsfeed is a big, commercial pitch coming from various brands who are trying to make money.

JC: Yes, I think that is absolutely right. There is a wonderful section in the book. I was really fascinated by it. A great observation it seemed to me because I have been a little puled by in: In all of the rhetoric around native advertising, which I thought I once understood as advertorial, you make the point in the book and you make the distinction, I think, between the past and the present in that there is now so much promotional material out there. There is so much spin in all of our lives—some truth based, some not—that marketers are now looking for places of authority to associate themselves with, and I think the point that you were trying to make is that that is the reason the native advertising is now so attractive: Because it is nestled up against the truth or a place that has a reputation for seeking the truth.

LT: I think PR practitioners have been very quick to recognize this opportunity to push their products, their brands, wherever they are representing through this blur of editorial and advertorial. It has been going on now for some time. But, as you quite rightly point out, there is a little bit of a backlash against it because people, ultimately, are starting to ignore some of this content. They are putting content out there, and they know that somebody is endorsing it because they are getting paid, and perhaps they are not even declaring that they are getting paid. Then, it loses the value in the PR piece in the first instance because the consumer is going to be wise to that. And perhaps what we are seeing is more of a move towards looking for the truth and a pushback in the online media world against this sort of saturation of marketing content and advertising. That is where, ultimately, the journalism will triumph as an industry because, if they stick to the values and the morals of providing objective, high-quality, truthful content, then that is what the readers are looking for in the first instance.

JC: I think that is an optimist’s view of it, and I hope you are right, and, actually, there are some times of the day when I believe you are right. But, it is fascinating to me that is there not a bit of a paradox in pushing native ad? The push is completely understandable for a native advertising to sit with highly credible titles because, in the end, might it not undermine those titles? Could we get to the point where there is no authority?

LT: Perhaps we could.

JC: That is the pessimist side.

LT: Yes, the counterargument—I completely agree with you—is how can we make the model work from a commercial perspective, from a financial perspective? How can journalism survive without having the support and the convergence that we are seeing with the advertising and the PR model? And I think really, at the moment, it is still quite a muddled area. We do not know where it is going apart from there is definitely a trend towards the highly specialized publications, the targeted audiences. This idea of the Madonline, well, is very well known in the UK, but I am sure Madonline having now come outside and tackled the American market had an online model that has been very successful. It is a good example of a publication that is just trying to get as many readers as possible. It is using a lot of SEO, search engine optimization. It is making sure that its websites are picked up in lots of different territories with local content, celebrity content attracting readers.

And for a long time, I think people felt this push towards extended reach was the answer for journalism, and that is how it was going to survive—by reaching as many people as possible. But it is my view that, actually, now that the payable, protected content is going to triumph over that because now when we start to live in an environment where it becomes the norm to pay for high-quality content, then that is where people are going to move towards. Equally, the advertisers are also going to see that, but they can perhaps follow an advertising model that is more similar to the traditional model that we have in the offline world. I think the key for the survival is the specialist publications with the high-quality needs, and, arguably, a smaller condensed following will work.

JC: Fascinating. Yes, I had been concerned. When I look at the daily mail—at some point they are going to run out of starlets in swimsuits, and their readership is going to totally crash.

LT: Are we dumbing down?

JC: Right, because there is not much else going on there. The problem with the model that you are talking about, the highly specialized model, is that it has to be subscriber based presumably, and so your revenue has to come here. I mean, frankly, it becomes very, very narrow. It is a return to, like, complete narrowcasting, and it is probably going to wind up being highly elitist. Again, that might be a model that makes some sense in a British environment where you do have a small number of… and you have a sort of concept of there being a national market.

For North America, there is a national market, but it is very, very, very thin, and the thick market is local TV news and local newspapers, so it is a matter of how we reconcile those issues. That, I guess, is the real challenge for the future.

LT: What is your view on where it is going to go, because as a publisher…?

JC: I think it is wonderful!

LT: Am I allowed to do this? Can I swap? Can I be the person questioning?

JC: Sure. We have announced at the start that we are making a big bet on the tablet and on a tablet app because we see there—from looking at what our friends and colleagues at La Presse have done—an opportunity to engage a younger audience. We do not have any trouble engaging an older audience and a wonderfully high quality older audience that is one that stretches across the whole of the wage spectrum. But, we are looking for the creation of the next generation of journalism, but we have come to the conclusion that you cannot do that with a paid model, not if you want to get a real substantial chunk of the market, and we do. And we do, because we think that you have got to have an engaged citizenry to actually run a democracy. You have got to have a lot of people there. And so, we have been very lucky. Our company has put a lot of resources and tremendous enthusiasm behind this push. That, for us, is the next thing.

LT: One of the key problems, actually, is as soon as you go behind a paywall, it becomes a subscription model. Because there is so much content out there that is freely available—and some very good quality content out there—you lose the reader, and the reader goes to what they can have for free because they think, “Well, why am I going to pay for this?” But then, we have touched on briefly the advantage of having the investigative reporting and putting the resource behind investigative reporting, because that is something that you can do as a journalist, and you can do it really, really well. You are not necessarily going to be able to do that level of reporting at all as a citizen journalist. You are not prepared to operate the same way, so, arguably, I suppose people will be attracted to the brand based on the fact that you are producing quality.

JC: Yes, although our experience has been and what we are seeing in North America, certainly, is that even when you have very high quality, if you put it behind a wall, you are actually limiting that portion of the audience that you can get. Essentially you are not going to get anybody under 50. They just do not feel that they should have to pay for digital journalism no matter how good it is.

LT: And that is partly because of social media, the way their consumption habits are changing. The fact—I am sure it is the same here—is that people have a certain loyalty to a brand of newspaper, and, previously, before social was around, you would go down to the newsstand, and you would pick up your copy, and that was it. That would be your news that you were consuming. You would not take much notice of the competitive brands or other areas. But, now, if people are logging on to their Twitter accounts, potentially they are following lots and lots of different publications, lots and lots of different reporters and, increasingly so, lots of, I am afraid to say, lots of brands now who are coming up with the interesting features and the news content. So, if you exclude yourself from that space, it can be quite difficult.

JC: Yes, no question about it. Listen, I do not think we should exclude the rest of this audience here. Are there folks with questions?

Questions & Answers

Q: Terrific discussion, Dr. Toogood and Mr. Cruickshank.

I would be interested in your thoughts on what the true authority is just to build on the discussion to that point. Is it not that people are looking for a variety of choices in their information to not have to make an assessment of, “Yes, the Toronto Star believes we need to move this direction—knocking down the Gardiner Expressway—or needs to move in this direction on something else?” I think we saw in something interesting in Canadian politics last week with respect to a politician retiring, Peter MacKay: Universally, the story was the same, except one journalist, Andrew Coyne of the National Post, took a very different point of view and was very negative. My sense is that both in North America and in Europe there is a hunger for people to have this variety of different points of view. They are not just looking for one point of view, but they are interested in the thought that somebody has that expertise. But what is truly the authority? Is it the person himself or herself? Is that the reason that we are finding that we are not comfortable with one authority?

LT: It is interesting, the fact that the technology side of things has opened up so many more avenues and so many more forums for people to voice their opinion. And as you quite rightly say, is it giving a more diverse news output? Yes, I think it probably is and, perhaps, we are in a more competitive news world now where to attract the attention of all these readers, you need to take a different viewpoint. You cannot be so narrowly focused on certain stories or certain agendas.

One thing that has come out of technology that is very positive is this forum for people to express themselves differently and engage readers and, potentially—I do not know—raise the intellect of readers as well and consumers, if I may go as far to say that.

JC: I think, though, you have to make a bit of a distinction because I think what we have discovered is there is a small percentage of people who are interested in the point of view of a news organization, and it is absolutely viable to the identity of the brand, but it is not what builds a very broad audience. What builds a very broad audience, I think, is a very diverse agenda and one that is both useful and, to some extent, entertaining and engaging. I think it has to be all those things and clearly, at this point, news organizations are going to have to do that with a multi-media approach, which is why we found with the tablet an opportunity inside an app, a closed app, to bring to bear all of the tools that are now available to us to try to engage, entertain, delight and inform.

I think the challenge from the social side is that to have the certain small group of people who are going to choose the six best websites in the world to read every day, is a very, very small group. The benefit that we have had over a very long period is attracting the people who are reading and reading at a deep level or viewing television news at a deep level and in that way—actually, educating themselves as citizens, actually knowing what is going on, right, knowing who the mayor is, being able to tell you where Syria is on a map. Those kinds of things. And that is what we risk losing, it seems to me, unless there is a more deeply engaged readership or viewership in the news for the future. Does that ring with you?

LT: Yes, I think something else that I just thought that could be worth mentioning here is the fact that the reader has become a lot more mobile. And certainly in the UK rather than it being a case of the newspapers and the editorial conferences leading the news agenda, in some situations, we are actually having the reader and the public influencing the news agenda. So, one example we had of this was Ched Evans, who is a professional soccer player in the UK, very, very top level, and he was convicted of rape and served two and a half years of his sentence in prison but never actually acknowledged that it happened and up until a certain point denied that it had taken place. When he came out of prison, he was a convicted rapist, and he came out of prison and a top-level club tried to bring him back into sport again at the very, very highest level, and it caused public outcry. We had politicians, we had Olympic athletes, but, more to the point, we had the general public Tweeting disapproval, setting up Facebook campaigns, and it was a situation where the news story, it ran and ran and ran. It ran for days and days and then even into weeks, and it is all because social media has mobilized the reader. So the journalists, when they are looking at what is going on in the world, what matters to citizens, they can see it very clearly, and it gives them a much better ability to gage public opinion. And what we have now is an environment where, in some cases—and I am not sure if you would agree with this—it can be led by the reader, the news agenda.

JC: Yes, the scariest moment for me in reading this book was the algorithmic news of the future, the thought that the news agenda would actually be created by a machine, which is responsive and learning as it sees the taste of the audience. I find that terrifying because I fear the descent into the lowest denominator—aside from you would not need editors and publishers.

LT: That is true. No, the technical side of online media and reputation management is—I do a lot of work in that area, at the moment. We are moving towards sort of the cyber era and how privacy is so valuable for many, many clients and individuals. So, when I first started working in this industry, it was all about social media and “Let us get the message out there; let us put content out there; let us talk, let us engage,” and five, six, seven years later, people are suddenly thinking, “Whoa, there is a lot of information out there about me, about my company. How do I control this? How do I manage it? How do I maintain some level of privacy, or am I forced into the spotlight and forced into communication all the time?” Inevitably, as reader habits move towards search engines for finding their news, by algorithms, Google will control what is most relevant or what is perceived as most accurate about your brand or yourself as a person or a certain news story. And it can be based on a whole host of factors: The amount of key words that are mentioned in an article, the amount inbound links, the amount of social shares. But it is all algorithms. It is all data, and, before we know it, we are moving into an era where, as I often say, if you do not manage your reputation or your company’s reputation, then a search engine is going to do it for you, and a computer is going to do it for you, basically.

JC: One of the interesting things is, if you leave it up to the algorithm and up to the computer, they will make decisions that are based on a kind of reasonability or reason that may be really damaging.

We had a mayor in this city until recently who had a drug and alcohol problem, which was something that we raised repeatedly in the Toronto Star. Our reporters had even seen a tape of him snorting with his brothers and had let people know, but it was fascinating. We broke that story, and there was tremendous backlash and a very well-organized campaign against us. And we had actually did some polling with our own readers in the middle of that, and more than 50% said that they did not believe our story. At that point you think, “Okay, do we throw the hand in?” But of course, you cannot. I am afraid the algorithm might say, “Okay, well, let’s go on to Miss Brazil!” We stuck it out and eventually, as it turned out, we were vindicated. You do not get vindicated in every circumstance, but you still have to have that deeper commitment to the truth.

LT: Exactly, and the legacy of the online footprint is a real concern for many at the moment. What is to say what story is most relevant to an individual? The individual may have been engaged in media activity for four, five, six years. An article that is five years old may rank number one or two for their name. Yes, it could be a completely negative article; it could be factually incorrect, but when people Google that person, that is what they are seeing, and this online footprint is a real concern, especially when you move away and, as you say, take away the human element and the human control or interaction.

JC: Fascinating. Other questions?

Q: Thank you. My sense is that people are curating all of this vast information by drilling down vertically into silos of interest, and they are not reading as broadly as they were when they were reading in print. I would like your comments on that.

LT: Yes, I mean, well, it is difficult to know. I think the fact is that social media has changed the way people are consuming their news. Whether they are not reading as broadly, I am not sure, but they are certainly probably not reading as extensively. And I mean that when you are working with platforms such as Twitter, where it is 140 characters or less, and that is your news bite for the day, and it is being continuously updated, you are getting very cutting edge and progressive news updates, and you know what is going on, and you can engage it, but there is something to be said for losing that ability to read a 2000-word feature or 1000- word feature that is very, very in depth and tackles the debate. And this is this whole concept around whether the digital age is actually dumbing down news and changing the way we consume it.

There is an argument that is taking place, and we see it with, as you were talking about with the Madonline, which, yes, is a newspaper that does play a role in tackling very, very serious issues, certain political issues, the criminal reporting, whatever it may be, but online, they have got a model where the entire right- hand side of the page can be scrolled and scrolled and scrolled for ages, and it is all about bikinis. It is all about photographs; it is all about lifting Tweets from celebrities’ accounts. It is sort of a contradiction, really, when you see that next to what is a very, very serious news story. Even more worrying is how many people are clicking on the pictures of the celebrities compared to how many people are clicking on the index features.

JC: I think physically, the gestalt of a newspaper—and we feel like we are rediscovering it with the tablet—is so very different than the way in which the website leads you to drill down. But certainly, the other thing we do know both in Canada and the United States and in most of developed countries—and the information is also sketchy—is that young people say they need the news today at a rate of about half of what their grandparents had. Self-reporting, they say they are spending about half the time that their grandparents did and, of course, they are voting at even at less than half the rate that their grandparents did. So, we have lost breadth and depth.

LT: That may be down to the fact now that as we see and move away from the traditional print press, people, the younger generation, are not necessarily going and buying their broadsheet newspaper and spending Sunday morning or all of Sunday reading it. And they do not have so much of an affinity to the actual print publication. Instead, they flick through their Twitter very, very quickly and get all of their news updates, and, therefore, they feel like they are educated about certain issues.

It is a different type of consumption because, arguably, if we go back to just reading the detailed analysis that you would see in a broadsheet newspaper, yes, you have got a comprehensive understanding of the issues, but it is not as up-to-date as the Twitter community are and the Twitter user. So, it is different, but we are certainly losing that feel, maybe, for spending all day Sunday, really breaking down into the issues, and it is all about a fast, rapid society, and that is, I am afraid, the world that we are living in now.

Q: Great information and great investigative reporting on our former mayor. I told Michael Cooke, at the time, “I believe you. Keep going.”

My question has to do with my 12-year-old son, who came up to me the other day and said that he had monetized his YouTube site, that he has 222 subscribers and that he had made some video for Minecraft that had 17,000 views. He just received his first pay cheque last month for $10 from YouTube. So, it makes me think how do we kind of prepare the young? I want to know how we can engage these young people who are our future, our future voters and our future readers to think about education. How can we make them want to go to that next step? And how will the digital arena play into how they are educated moving forward, because if they are doing that at 12—I mean, I got my first email at 24—it makes me wonder.

LT: Children’s use of technology is an area in which I do quite a bit of work, and I do have to say that it is a frightening world, I think, to grow up in now, and to have all of your social networks online with all of the vulnerabilities that that brings with it.

We have had a lot of discussion in the UK, and I think as well over in North America about revenge porn, for example, and sexting and the many threats now in the digital landscape. I think we cannot run away from technology, and we cannot bury our heads in the sand. It is not going to go away. Only a couple of months ago, I had somebody come up to me and say, “Is this internet thing really staying around?” I am afraid so. I am afraid so. So, I think the answer is now that we have to understand and do our best to educate ourselves about technology, and we all come from the generation that use it, so the awareness is vital, and it is the way of accessing the young people, so we cannot run away from it. We cannot bury our heads in the sand, but we have to all the time think of new ways of engaging them in the right way, and that is crucial.

JC: These are great tools, but the thing that is really exiting, from a newsperson’s perspective, is that these are great tools with which to engage young people and even their parents and grandparents.

Note of Appreciation, by Bruce MacLellan, President & CEO, Environics Communications

Thank you. Before I thank our two speakers, I want to mention that this is Laura’s first visit to Canada, and she is accompanied by her mother. So, I want to first thank Mrs. Toogood for being here and for bringing Laura into the world. So, well done.

So, I was recommended Laura’s book several months ago by a colleague in our PR industry and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The topic of PR and journalism is an interesting one, and you have chosen to write about what I consider this never-ending difficult marriage of the relationship between PR people and journalism.

I, as a young political assistant back at Queen’s Park many decades ago, remember an equally young Globe reporter in John at that time, and I always knew John to be a friendly journalist who was always willing to hear another story or get to know someone better. Thank you for hosting this discussion because you have not changed, and it is great that you are now in such a leadership role in the media.

Laura, you have raised some very important issues in your book and in your discussion today. Both PR and journalism are at a transformative stage of our history. We are both trying to understand how people build trust and maintain trust and attract attention and can get paid a living for it, so, our two professions are in your title. And it is great that we are having this dialogue together, and it is great that you have taken such a leadership role in writing the book and writing it in your spare time as you work, as you are a marathon runner as well. And I am sure you do lots of other things in your life. So, it is easy to feel quite modest around you, but it is an honour to have you here, and we have really enjoyed the presentation. I know I speak for everyone in the audience in thanking you. So, thank you.

Concluding Remarks, by Andrea Wood, President, Empire Club of Canada

Before we all leave today, I would like to take a moment to thank our generous sponsors, Environics Communications. I would also like to thank—sorry John—the National Post, as our print media sponsor. This meeting will be broadcast on Rogers TV.

Please, consider becoming a member of the Empire Club. The perks of membership include reduced ticket prices to our lunches, advanced notice and priority seating at events and invitations to member-only events. To make it easier for you, for the balance of the season, we are offering a special promotion: Join us, and we will throw in a lunch. This is the last month of our season this year, and we are planning to go out with a bang. We have a great lineup for the next couple of weeks. We are hosting Mayor John Tory next Monday. He will be talking to us about the future of the Gardiner, and so, we hope you will come to see that one. On Tuesday, June 9th, Jim Balsillie, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff will be discussing the lessons learned from BlackBerry. The Governor General is coming on June 19th, and Victor Dodig, CEO of CIBC, one of our bigger banks, will be coming to speak with us about technology and banking on June 23rd.

To learn more about membership and about upcoming events, visit us online at www.empireclub.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at @Empire_Club.

This meeting is now adjourned. Thank you all for coming, and we will see you soon, hopefully, at one of the next lunches. Thank you.