News and PR

PR

Notes from How News is Made by Dale Dougherty

First, most of what we call “news” today starts out as a press release, which then becomes a headline, a sound-bite, and eventually a story.

Second, reporters like to ask good questions for which there may not be good answers. However, they’ll force an answer because you can’t say “nobody knows.”

The third is that everybody loves numbers, regardless of where they come from, and these are the best kind of answers, regardless of whether the numbers are true.

So, always ask the fundamental question of rationality: What do you think you know and how do you think you know it? In particular, ask if they’re forcing an answer to their question.

Breaking News: Things are NOT OK!

What we call the news is really a business that understands that you cannot make money by telling people that things are, on balance, going to be OK. The point of news is to make money by scaring us - and it does this brilliantly. It may be trying to inform us, but its chief aim is to ensure that we’ll be panicked enough to keep reading and watching.

But we need an antidote and we can find it in a resource that is on hand to remind us that difficulties are not new, that troubles can be survived and that it has in fact been a lot worse than this: an antidote that goes by the name of History.

– Things have always been as bad, The Book of Life