The London media diary

British media's response to terror was a lesson in good reporting

London has been on my mind for more than one reason. The coverage of the terror attack on Westminster and the reaction of both news media and politicians in the UK were dignified and firm. There was none of the jingoism and loud rhetoric such attacks see on news television in India. For many hours after the attack the BBC did not speculate either on the identity of the attacker or the number of dead and injured people. It waited till official data came in. It was an exercise in good journalism that should be made mandatory for Indian news channels prone to following leaks, rumours and fake news.
 
That, along with other work, is what had taken me to London for a week, just three days before the attacks on Westminster. Along with meeting people in the media industry, I attended The Guardian Changing Media Summit, the eponymous newspaper’s flagship media event. The theme this year was “how the media industry can begin to rebuild trust between publisher and reader, brand and consumer, and agency and brand”.
 
Jeff Jarvis, professor, City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, began well. Jarvis teaches, consults and is at the centre of the action between publishers and platforms. (Watch out for my interview with him later.) He propagates an open web and is against Twitter or Facebook or anyone editing or curating whatever goes online. He reckons it is up to us, as users, to develop norms of civility. One couldn’t even begin to have a discussion on civility with the ranters populating social media in India. There was another good session on Lessons from the EU Referendum, which had Ameet Gill, former UK prime minister David Cameron’s head of strategy and part of the Remain campaign. The second panellist was Paul Stephenson, former director of communications for the Leave campaign.
 
My personal favourites? A nuanced discussion on whether the rise of artificial intelligence in the form of algorithms and bots is a threat or opportunity for media. Though the discussion did veer off to non-media areas, too, it was fun. So was a talk on the Psychology of Truth by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London. It focused on something that fascinates everyone in the information industry today: How the open web, instead of helping us challenge existing views, confirms existing beliefs, making us more narrow-minded. What does this distortion mean and how to tackle it?
 
The one on vlogging (video blogging) touched upon issues that Indian content creators need to start thinking about. Brands like to associate with vloggers and that is how the latter make their money. But vlogs, which do not clearly mark branded and non-branded content, have raised the issue of regulation.
 
There were many disappointments, too. For instance, I was really looking forward to a session on the client-agency relationship for two reasons. One, earlier this year the marketing head of Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s largest advertisers, asked media agencies to become transparent or risk losing business. Two, last year K2 Intelligence, a US-based consultancy studied media transparency issues in the American advertising industry on behalf of the Association of National Advertisers. It found many examples where media suppliers (read print, TV, online firms) paid rebates to agencies or affiliated firms. These rebates — in the form of cash, professional fees for “services” or free media — amounted to 1.67 per cent to about 20 per cent of aggregate media spending. These were not always passed on to the advertiser. But the chat at the Guardian summit was bland, almost pointless and did not get into any issue in detail.
 
A session on metrics was annoying because it kept harping on viewability to the exclusion of everything else. There are many metrics; their multiplicity is in fact a bugbear with marketers, as the P&G marketing head, too, mentioned in his criticism of agencies.
 
The quality of discussions then was a mixed bag but the topics were bang on. Truth, reality, distortion, technology, fake news are things that India, one of the world’s fastest growing online markets, needs to flag.

Twitter: @vanitakohlik