February 2010 – Paradise Circus

Tufty Shit

Maybe I’m romancing it because I’ve never been formally trained, or glimpsed behind the curtain of the modern newsroom. But I carry the naive notion that a journalist should be a Jedi wielding TRUTH like the Force and ramming the lightsaber of FACTS up the arse of all that is corrupt. I know it can’t be easy, not only do you have to meet deadlines, smoke fifteen packets of cigarettes a day, and wear a hat with a small ticket that says ‘PRESS’ on it but you also have find interesting things to write about every, single, day. So its not surprising that many journalists fall for the Dark Side of PR.

Like this story here http://tinyurl.com/ykn7639. The story is about a squirrel that has been banned from a popular Midlands theme park. Now this theme park is only mentioned twice, but once is in the headline and the entire story is about a new ride — that, apparently defying all common sense, is so good even the fucking squirrel enjoys it. They even named the squirrel after the ride making sure the journo HAS to mention it at least once. Interestingly, the technique they are using to this thrill-seeking rodent is the same one that some supermarkets were purportedly using to keep teenagers away from thrilling Car Parks a few years ago. The one which the manufacturer says has no effects on dogs.

PR stands for Public Relations and it used to be the PR person’s job to be the public face of the company. That can helpful and, dare I say it, good. They can act like the conscious of a large corporation, the little Jiminy Cricket pushing the people they represent to give to charities, start recycling initiatives, or even encouraging discussion and dialogue between companies and their critics. Unfortunately on the flip side it is far less effort to seed newsrooms with press releases with just enough quirky news worthiness so on a slow news day can be picked up and actually printed as facts.

Now I’m not saying I know for definite that the journalist wasn’t down at the theme park listening in on park wardens’ conversations and shouting ‘What a scoop!’* when this particular gem was mentioned. Just that I find it far more likely to be the centre of a Venn diagram. Sitting where the circles of slow news day, lazy journalism, and the social disease rash of PR overlap.

*yes, my experience of journalism is purely from black and white American films, what of it?

The opinions of Danny Smith do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers of this blog, its affiliates, or any sane adult human beings. He currently lives in your cupboard, watching, always watching.

Sabres of Paradise

Fans of vague marketing talk and transparent attempts to make the public feel as they’re in control really should head over to paradisecircus.co.uk and marvel at the property developments Argent.

Apparently Argent and the Birmingham City Council have an ‘exclusivity agreement’ and if that brings to mind the result of an awkward conversational from a couple of Uni friends that have been occasionally drunkingly ending up in bed together, then you wouldn’t be far wrong. Argent and The Council have promised not to see other people, but on the promise that Argent phone their mates and check they don’t mind. The ‘mates’ in this analogy are us and the phone call they have promised to make is the website, its feedback forms and a small presentation they made in Paradise Forum.

I went to this ‘public exhibition’ which consisted of all the different pages of that web site on four-foot banner posters and collection of smarmy PR drones, I believe the collective noun of which is a ‘toss’. Not so much an exhibition as a talking down to. These guys talked in non-committal terms about improving the ‘flow’ of pedestrian traffic from Victoria Square to what’s behind it. Now, considering what’s behind it is/will be the library they are having to build because of the redevelopment, the exhibition centres and Broad Street, the question is do we really want to improve traffic? That is if its mainly going to consist of bored business tourists looking for lap dancing clubs and red faced Broad Street louts spewing WKD vomit like sprinklers? Or should we actually dig deep trenches filled with flaming tar and post irritable machine gunners every fifteen yards.

OK I’m being facetious, but if improved pedestrian flow is one of the major concerns — do we really think that having to walk through an enclosed shopping area is such a barrier? Are blank-faced pastel people drinking coffee in a way no English person actually does going encourage this flow? And could we not just put up better signs?

This stock photo ridden example is the most patronising and indicative of the vagueness of said drones. Hilariously suggesting that shops cafés or bars could move in, exactly like Argent’s other development, Brindleyplace. Only this time all the major bar, café and restaurant brands are already represented in Birmingham, and in this economic climate nobody is opening those sorts of businesses any more – just look at Broad Street, where nearly every other unit is a gutted smeared window, a tombstone to another dream dying.

After a while of looking at the site you notice how the entire text of its prefaced with words like ‘possible’ and ‘potential’ Is this because they so really want to avoid giving away the dirty reality? They’ve already decided what’s going to be done, and nothing will change that.

Not even protesting.

I was born in 79 so I grew up with Thatcher smashing the unions and images of policemen beating up picket lines, by the time I was a teenager student protest had become a bad cliché, and as an adult saw the biggest civil protest this country has ever saw roundly ignored as we were taken to war. So sure, email your opinion if it’ll make you feel better and part of the process, that’s what it’s there for.

In fact that’s the only reason it is there.

Up Bournville Boulevard

Last Tuesday Jon sent me to cover the BBC WM public forum debate about the Kraft takeover of Cadbury, it was held in Bournville. Bournville, for those of you that don’t know, was built by the do-gooding Cadbury family who thought booze was the devil’s piss. Subsequently it’s dryer than Gandhi’s Black and Decker belt sander. Jon sent me for three reasons; one, Jon is a cruel bastard; two, he had a strong idea that I would find it a boring waste of time; and three, if he and Carl Chinn actually meet the universe will turn inside out and reality itself’ll get torn a new arsehole.

The reaction to the news across the the media has ranged from the predicable hysterical cloying nostalgia of ‘oh no they’re going to make wispas taste of Stilton and and shoot curly wurlys into space, how dare they mess with things from my childhood’. To the sort of surprising cynical capitalism normally reserved for European baddies in Die Hard. Myself, although concerned about the job losses, didn’t really give too much of a toss. Cadbury’s as a company has been floated as public stock since 1962 where it set about swallowing smaller businesses with almost religious zeal to, ironically enough, control the American market.

I was shocked when I arrived to find a grey horde — my presence bringing the average age down to about sixty. Seeing as, to me, the only real issue was the potential loss of jobs. There was a surprising lack of people who actually work there, as opposed to used-to-work-there or my-family’s-been-working-there-since-we-made-chocolate-from-pterodactyl-eggs.

I’d be hard pushed to call the meeting a debate as everyone in the room obviously agreed that the takeover was a Bad Thing. The main argument then came between the capitalist apologists personified by Eddie Large look-alike Lord Digby ‘biggest dog in the world’ Jones and Carl Chin, tonight looking like a Vulcan making a guest appearance in a Bristow cartoon. Carl stormed the platform with a series of terrific sound bites and gesticulations, he also managed to cover the first two rows in socialist spittle which is a clear sign you’re getting your moneys worth.

One woman stood up and said that she “didn’t want to see it [Cadbury] turned over to the yanks” as if they were going to force her to wear ten gallon hats and pitch baseball instead of knit. The banter between the panellists turned nasty when LDJ explained there was nothing the government can, or should do to stop overseas investment in this country anybody who said otherwise he said, referring to Comrade Chin, was offering ’empty promises’.

It was was about then the atmosphere changed, before it had been one of pleasant — but excited — solidarity, like Marks and Spencer’s during a blackout, but as the feelings of betrayal came out people started to get upset. The man next to me sniffling in a touching but also gross and really really annoying way. These was no real argument, they just felt hurt, confused and while at a loss to understand the complexities of big business they understood also the inevitability of it. They had questions to ask but what they really wanted was reassurances and to be told it was all going to be all right.

It wasn’t a good way for the residents to express their feelings because the issues were complicated enough to leave no clear pariah to shout at. It wasn’t a good way of disseminating information because there wasn’t really any, and as representatives from neither Kraft or Cadbury turned up, and it wasn’t even a good way of finding out what your average Cadbury worker thought of it all because everybody that still works there was either there working or had an early night because they had to work there in the morning.

What does the future hold? Well, on the 2nd of Feb the votes will come in and the shareholders will have voted unanimously in favour of the sale. That’s seeing as almost 25% of the shareholders are hedge funds that stand to double the worth of their stocks.

Will there be great change? I don’t think so, well not immediately. You don’t borrow a huge amount of money to acquire a company like Cadbury without respecting it as a brand, a brand with an identity, a story, and an ethos. You don’t pay £11.9bn and start fucking with its soul.

If anything Kraft workers in Illinois should be out the front with placards because the money has got to come from somewhere.