John Bishop's Communications Line 4Oct 2007

Dynamic communications market

In the job market for communications professionals, good people are hard to get, and this is pushing up salaries. Good candidates are getting multiple offers, which is putting pressure on employers to make quicker decisions on candidates, according to Annabel McCallum and Lindsay Jackson, recruitment consultants from Powerhousepeople. They addressed to the Public Sector Communicators Network in Wellington last week and reviewed the current job market

There were more contracting roles and people even at a junior level were seeking contract roles. The main shortages were in senior media roles, internal communications and social marketing. A new role in stakeholder engagement was being created, but reputation management was not (yet) a distinct discipline.
Senior journalists were continuing to exit media organisations to corporates, and press secretaries in Parliament were also looking to move.

The pair noted that pay packages were now largely cashed up, but employers were being flexible about hours worked in order to attract and retain the people they wanted. Candidates were also being attracted or deterred by the behaviour of the people on the interviewing panel.

More candidates were applying from overseas, which was widening employer choice, although the level of local knowledge required for a position was a limiting factor. Overseas candidates, particularly from Australia, were taking a position and quickly building a local network enabling them to move on and up.

Length of stay in a position was now about 18 months to two years, and a series of short stay positions would no longer be taken as indicating flakiness.

Salaries are now around $40k-$55k for entry level positions, $55k-$75k for advisor level, $80k-$95k for a senior advisor, and $100k-$120k for a communications manager and up to $140k for a position with staff responsibilities. Web editors were getting $60k plus and writers were in the $50k- $75k range. Media and issue management people were getting $85k - $100k in solo positions and $90k - $130k for positions with staff.

$130 to $150 per hour was the top of the market for contractors, with most positions being filled at lower rates than that.

Fun on the job

I was interviewed recently about what makes for good communications in the workplace. Among other things, I said that good communications reflected a commitment to people and their worth. “If you respect people and their importance to the success (or even just the effective functioning) of your organisation, you will take the time to communicate with them properly. If you regard them merely as instruments of the organisation then minimal effort to communicate will be thought sufficient.”

The Best Places to Work surveys consistently show that staff want to know about the goal of the organisation (the vision if you like), then about the strategy or the road map – how are we going to get there - and then to have their role explained. What do I have to do, what’s my contribution? Where do I fit in and how does my bit contribute to the big picture?

Explain those effectively and as a manager, you’ll have a willing and capable contributor. The fourth element that shows up in the surveys is that people want to have fun, or at least to enjoy coming to work. Work doesn’t have to be drudgery and if it is, the result will be a weak and listless performance by an indifferent workforce. That will be reflected in morale, the quality of service and the strength of your brand.

Lively Student Media

Last month I had the pleasure of being one of the judges in the Aotearoa Student Press Awards, which cover the newspapers produced by our universities and polytechs. I got to appraise the features section. I found the entries were lively, generally well written, and quite diverse.

They ranged from beach cricket and surfing through to an exposé of Wanganui (why bother I ask), interviews with John Key, experiences in a refugee camp and an hilarious account of a visit to Rio (“Some friends of friends have let themselves into the apartment, and are enjoying some background trance with the help of a joint, rolled from one of the enormous bricks kept in the freezer”).

It was a sharp contrast from the features in the QANTAS Media Awards which I judged earlier in the year. Here the entries were on much weightier subjects (road deaths, didymo, and every conceivable social issue), and were much longer pieces. The writers took themselves very seriously indeed. So they should, and the quality was certainly impressive, but sometimes the desire to write well got to be more important than the need to tell the story.

I can’t tell you who won the student awards because I don’t know. The awards ceremony is on Saturday. It’s a good bash apparently and Fairfax is picking up the tab.

Makes you think is right

A 10% fee rise at Vic equals 5 less text books for each student. It makes you think. That’s the message on the poster, protesting a potential rise in student fees at Victoria University. The “It makes you think” is the catch line in university’s advertising campaign. Hang about. Shouldn’t that be 5 fewer textbooks for each student? Why students can’t write properly? Certainly makes one think.

Journo PR sniping

“Some journalists see PR people as a wall and as the enemy, and some PR people help to feed that perception.” That’s the verdict from David Young, TVNZ’s Business and Economics Reporter in Wellington, delivered during a media panel discussion at the Media Relations Conference in Wellington last week.

On the question of how to cultivate a reporter, Young said PR people should leverage off what they had. He was not adverse to a lunch, and liked to be ahead of the game, “to be the reporter who knows about what’s coming up. But not ‘I have a lot of interesting clients I’d like to talk to you about’ – that won’t work.”

“Calls about some random release a few minutes before a live cross into the news is an example of a lack of appreciation of how newsrooms work.” He said that TVNZ had a 9am editorial meeting and a second meeting at 2pm. “We now have a 4.30pm bulletin, and I am sure that you will all be rushing home to watch that.”

The resources were being stretched thinner. “We now have bulletins in the morning, at lunchtime, at 4.30pm, 6pm and there’s the late news. We now have only a few hours spare when we are not filming, writing and editing.”

Alastair Thompson from Scoop Media said that Scoop was the PR professionals’ best friend because it displayed the original and complete news release as issued. This enabled PR people to track what was being said about a client or an issue. That helped PR people to formulate a response because they could see what was being said before it was broadcast or printed.

Nevil Gibson from the National Business Review said a lot of corporate news was compliance driven, companies and organizations fulfilling their statutory responsibilities. “Everyone gets that sort of news at the same time, which makes it hard to get exclusive stories. Clients of PR firms wish to minimise drama, which is precisely the opposite of what journalists want.”

On the role of PR people he said “readers are generally not aware of the role of PR people and perhaps they don’t have to be. In the case of the recent bid for Auckland International Airport, there were two major PR firms involved and NBR got close to them both; ditto with Sky City Casino and its issues recently.”

Grilled Cheese Heaven

“Is there any pain quite as sweet as the one caused by a steaming drip of cheese oozing from between slices of just-grilled bread and onto your lower lip?”, drooled the food critic of the New York Times this week.

“Buttery, salty and enduringly simple, the grilled cheese sandwich stands unrivaled in the universe of simple gastro-pleasures. “ He goes on to talk about the various styles of melted cheese sandwiches available in the USA, but this was the bit that took my fancy.

A cheese enthusiast oozed …“It may very well be the ultimate comfort food, and one thing Los Angeles is about is insecurity. If you have to live here for your job, your entire career is predicated on insecurity, because you’re either going to be replaced, fired or exposed as a fraud. What better way to get comfort than grilled cheese?” Truly what we eat says who we are.
Tax the rich (and then give it back)

According to answers to written questions from ACT’s Heather Roy, two thousand people paying the top rate of tax are also receiving assistance under the Working for Families package. That was in the 2005/06 tax year. Figures for the 2006/07 year aren’t available yet. In the 2005/06 year these people paid $37 million in tax and received back $3 million in Working for Families credits, according to the IRD. On the face of it, this is a bizarre money go round (although the sums aren’t huge,) but why it should occur at all isn’t clear. The number of children in a family may be a factor.

The current income limits for a family with six children are $130 420 for the Family Tax Credit, $157 720 for the In Work Tax Credit, and $196 827 for the parental tax credit. From 1 April this year earning under those amounts makes a family eligible for assistance. Is it really impossible for parents to raise even six children on those sorts of incomes?

PC Divorce

The electronics revolution is affecting how marriages and relationships are ended. Digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases, according to Levene Breaking News.

“Spurned lovers steal each other's BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other's e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities. Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients' adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.

"In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence," said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. "It has completely changed our field."

Shocks in the US election

The startling news of the week is that for the first time Hillary Clinton is raising more money than Barack Obama - $27 million to $20 million in the last quarter. She remains comfortably ahead in the polls of Democratic voters, with Obama second and John Edwards a poor third. Even so, Democrats continue to worry about Hillary’s polarizing effect among voters.

On the Republican side the continuing lead by liberal republican Rudolph Guiliani is giving the Christian conservatives kittens, to the extent that they are now seriously considering running a third party candidate if the presidential race becomes a Clinton/Guiliani contest.

Third party candidates are spoilers and are often accused of delivering the election to the “opposition”. Liberal Ralph Nader was said to have delivered the 2000 election to Bush over Al Gore. His 2.3 million votes were many times the margin between Gore and Bush. Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 probably helped Clinton beat George HW Bush. George Wallace, the segregationist who got 13.5% of the popular vote in 1968, very nearly let Hubert Humphrey win.

With the Electoral College system, popular votes aren’t an absolute guide to who might have won or lost. However the risk for the fundamentalists is that a third party campaign might take away enough votes from Guiliani in enough states to put Hillary into the White House. It is a reflection of the despair of the Christian right that a third party bid is even being considered.

The language of the right

This is an advertisement from Human Events – a right wing Christian publication which is currently crusading against Islam and talking up the Christian foundations to the American constitution. They want to make the case that Islam is violent in order to buttress the case for invading Iraq, and also to support fundamentalist positions on prayer in school, the US as a Christian country and the importance of religious values in public life.

These are in contrast to the separation of church and state, no established religion and secularism.
In Religion of Peace?, Robert Spencer expertly dismantles the case for "moral equivalence" between Christianity and Islam, exposes the multiple absurdities of the "Christian theocracy" scare books, and shows that the violent passages in the Bible have never justified or inspired violence as the Koran most certainly has (and continues to do).

Spencer also makes a powerful case that Christianity is the indispensable source of the freedom and dignity we enjoy. Finally, he appeals to everyone who doesn't want fall prey to the jihad to rally around the banner of the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West.

In New Zealand the Destiny Church (and perhaps a few other like minded people) take this stuff seriously, but in the USA it is taken very seriously indeed, It’s at the heart of the culture wars that have divided that nation so bitterly for the last decade or more.

Bloodiest day in US military history

Not D Day, not Pearl Harbour, not Iwo Jima, not some day of devastation in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. In fact it was Civil War battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862. Union forces repelled a Confederate invasion of Maryland. 23,100 were killed, wounded or captured, and it remains the bloodiest day in U.S. military history.

Email petitions are chain mail

Do they work? I got one this week from David Farrar campaigning against the Electoral Finance Bill, and one to support the uprising in Myanmar. I don’t (usually) flick chain email on to others (and that includes jokes) unless they are very important or very funny. We all get too much stuff already.

Gum is good – dentists say so

The USA’s largest dental group now says gum can be good for you, as long as it's sugar-free. The American Dental Association has awarded its seal of acceptance to Wrigley sugar-free gums Orbit, Extra and Eclipse - based on studies funded at least partially by Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. It's the first time the ADA has allowed its seal to appear on gum. (Levene Breaking News)

What’s next? Nutritionists endorsing fried chicken – as long as it is fat free? It’s not that silly. Many cardiologists endorse red wine (in moderation of course.)

J

John Bishop - Communicator
Professional speaker, communications consultant, writer, trainer and facilitator

Email john@johnbishop.co.nz

Web www.johnbishop.co.nz

ENDS

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