The journalist and broadcaster Mary Ann Sieghart held up the front page of the London Evening Standard and pointed to Tuesday’s splash story about the Get London Reading campaign, run with the literacy charity Beanstalk. “That says to me it’s a slow news day,” she said. “News is about events, and this isn’t really news.”
She was introducing a debate at the Media Society this week entitled Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Charities and Media Engagement, with two other journalists and three representatives from charities. Most of them – perhaps surprisingly – took a less hard-bitten line than the chair.
Matt Baker, head of media at Oxfam, talked about its effective use of celebrity supporters and the growing phenomenon of development charities providing overseas footage to TV stations – a subject that deserves a whole debate of its own. The director of communication at the Media Trust, Gavin Sheppard, made the point that charities can’t expect special treatment from the media and have to learn how to work with it. He lamented the decimation of local media and mentioned Community Newswire, the service run by the trust with the Press Association to help charities get their stories into the media.
My contribution was that charities and the voluntary sector get more serious national coverage than they used to because of the public service reform and big society agendas of successive governments and the establishment of the Office for Civil Society. More generally, charities get the press they deserve and often score notable hits with clever pitches or surveys – for example, Girlguiding UK got a page-lead interview in the Times with its new chief executive, Julie Bentley, saying the Guides were the ultimate feminist organisation – what newsdesk could resist it?
Dianne Jeffrey, chair of Age UK, talked about how charities can take advantage of the “the explosion of media space” and how one of its campaigns, Spread the Warmth, had sparked 2,000 articles and won an award this year from PR Week, one of Third Sector’s sister magazines.
But the main attraction proved to be David Cohen, the Standard’s chief feature writer who runs its three current campaigns. He accepted Sieghart’s point that hard breaking news will always push aside a charity story, but described how the paper has broken new ground by sticking with its charity-linked campaigns instead of making them one-off events, often just at Christmas. “We aimed for £1m, but we’ve raised £9.3m in less than three years,” he said.
For Matt Baker, there was a special consolation: he expressed bemusement that the departure of his chief executive Dame Barbara Stocking had attracted coverage only on Radio Oxford – so I was able to whip out and present to him a copy of this week’s Third Sector, with Barbara’s exit interview flagged up on the front page.