Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Poetry and Public Relations

If ever you get commissioned to write a renga (collaborative Japanese-style poem), remember Andy Philip’s cautionary tale, and prepare yourself to smile from within your white dressing-gown and slippers.

Bizarre! Really...
Poetry and PR don't mix. That's an age-old truth.

5 comments:

Colin Will said...

To redress the balance, none of the rengas I've been in (more than hot dinners etc) have been like that. Neither have they been a group of saintly bhikkus communing with each other and the nature spirits, like in Kerouac. It's the PR plonkers and the newspaper photographers that are the problem. When I was at The Botanics the press pariahs used to seriously P me off. If there was a gimmicky angle to a photo or story they'd use it. If there wasn't, they'd make one up.

Rob said...

Yes, the PR is the target of mirth, not the renga in itself.

Matt Merritt said...

On the one hand, I should defend my profession. On the other, I can't! In 13 years working for newspapers, I never ceased to be amazed how they were obsessed with the design and look of the things, and not the content. Hence the demand for supposedly quirky, staged pictures.
What's really odd is that at a time when newspaper circulations are falling pretty much across the board, the success stories are the ones that keep it simple, and stress content over style. The Daily Mail, much as I hate its politics, continues to increase its circulation, and I suspect it's because they've cottoned on to the fact that people want to read something they haven't already heard on radio, TV or the net. So they are happy to publish very text-heavy pages, which most page designers throw their hands up in horror at, and in doing so give a lot more background and depth to stories. On local papers, the Wolverhampton Express and Star was the same until very recently. 'Old-fashioned' design, and big circulation.

Rob said...

That's really interesting, Matt, especially the comments on the Daily Mail. You are essentially saying that what everyone assumes people want isn't what they want at all.

Matt Merritt said...

I think so, yes. Newspaper editors seemed to get carried away by the advent of colour printing, etc, while at the same time deciding that readers' attention spans were shrinking. Even the broadsheets, a lot of the time, are guilty of it. As I say, 24-hour news channels and especially the net mean that papers are rarely first with the news now (or at least, not hard news), so I think their future lies in providing background, comment, radically different angles. I think the Mail, although it frequently wastes double-page spreads on tabloidy stuff, hysterical ranting or blatant plugs for books, does manage to do that at times, and it's practically the only national with a consistently rising circulation.
But the Mail group's provincial papers generally don't seem to follow that format, so maybe they have no idea of what they're doing!