A couple of years ago I asked a flak how her business would survive once newspapers had died and there were no hacks to try and control.
Or when clients figured out they didn’t need to talk to hacks anymore, since our influence had been eaten by Facebook.
I was too pessimistic, not foreseeing how badly Facebook would manage to wreck its own reputation.
Or how hard newspapers such as The Times might fight back against Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Today’s Sun approvingly quotes the PR man at Wetherspoon’s saying he’d prefer a story in The Sun or The Times over a tweet, “any day”.
And Ashley Highfield at Johnston Press, reports an “exceptional performance” from the i newspaper and says at least some advertising is switching away from digital companies and back towards trusted media brands.
The i has started to get ads from Maserati and Amex, a new, encouraging development.
So perhaps we’ll be with you longer than I thought.
For flakland, perhaps this means that nothing much has changed, that they will engage with us as much as ever, and with digital start-ups less than they expected.
Good.
