The Ayr Advertiser is a Scottish weekly that dates back to 1839.
It punched well above its weight last Friday with the following headline:
“Turnberry hotelier tests positive for coronavirus.”
The hotelier in question is of course Donald Trump, who bought the South Ayrshire hotel and golf course in 2014.
What the paper did was to give the biggest story in the world a local touch. It’s funny too, of course.
Hacks are better than flaks at this sort of thing (we’ve got to be better at something).
We are looking for the small thing that brings the bigger picture to life.
Flaks are too often trying to do the exact opposite. They want to pretend that a local issue is global, leading to the sorts of material so well mocked in Private Eye’s Desperate Marketing column.
If there isn’t a connection between Donald Trump testing positive and your clients latest wheeze I can’t see the point in pretending there is one.
A related point. I quite often suggest to flaks that the story they are punting would work well for the Evening Standard. Nah, they say, we’re going to send it everywhere. Leading to the story appearing absolutely nowhere.
Isn’t it better to toe-poke one goal over the line than to fire 300 long range efforts that score zero?
