How news works
Posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 9:24pm. #
It’s not every day that you end up as a minor tech news story, but that happened this week to me. I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on it.
First, a bit of background. Before Christmas, we (that is, Virgin Radio, the company I work for) quietly made our radio player work correctly with the Nintendo Wii. The only mention - because I didn’t think it was worthy of a story at the time - was on my blog. We didn’t PR it, nor did we even put it on the website.
Then, thanks to a colleague who bought a PS3, we got the Virgin Radio player working on the Sony PS3. On Friday 30 March, in fact - because, once more, it was blogged here. Again, we didn’t put anything about it on the website; but I did wonder whether we might make a story out of it, so I mailed our PR team over the weekend.
Most of the things we’re proud of (the launch of the Virgin Radio Interact section for example) are technically ambitious, loved by our audience, and totally ignored by the press - I guess because they’re too complicated, too confusing, and not sexy enough. This, however, was different.
A call from John Plunkett from The Guardian resulted in the first coverage of the story. Once that story appeared, on 10 April, I had a few other calls from trade publications and one games website - and our press release went to anyone who asked our PR team.
What’s been interesting is how the story spread. It didn’t take long for BBC News to find the story, headlining it with “console tie-up”, making it appear as if we have spoken to Sony and/or Nintendo. (We haven’t, for the record).
Radio Today used our press release as the basis for their story; as did (I guess) Digital Spy - both of them similarly used the future tense - ‘Virgin Radio is to become the first…’, rather than saying we’d already launched with the service.
But news on the internet appears to run through a chinese whispers system. One news source will copy other news sources in order to add to their news. So, it is interesting following the story around. As an example, I didn’t speak to Radio Today at all (Roy always gets the story right, so I don’t need to); however, I’m quoted as speaking to Radio Today by many websites who use the story, like next-gen.biz, gamesindustry.biz, monstersandcritics.com, ps3news.ca, PC Advisor, tech.blorge.com and absolutegadget.com. Also crediting Radio Today are Portable Planet, whos story then gets used by Nintendojo.
Using a combination of our press release and our website as a source are iTWire and el33tonline, whos story then makes it to igniq.com. Also apparent users of our press release include MCVUK, who then get quoted as a source for PSPSPS and Pocket-Lint.
Clearly looking at Digital Spy’s “will be launching” text were PS3center.net and Hexus who were under the impression this was something we were planning to launch in the future.
AHN quotes the BBC news report; as does Aurum3, totalgaming.co.uk and Afterdawn.com who uses a Virgin brand (not Virgin Radio brand) logo, and claims it will be an update for the console.
Eurogamer quotes the subscription mad.co.uk report (one of the trade press that called me for comment), as do GWN.com.
Interesting how my job changes, too.
I get quoted as ‘Virgin spokesman’ by Palgn.com.au, and just “James Cridland, Virgin” by techshout.com (I’m not, y’know.). In a piece I can’t currently find in the archives, I’m even quoted as being “Virgin’s PR spokesman”.
Seemingly original content (at least, nicely rewritten stuff) from Wii-UK, a nice piece from The Inquirer, Cubed3, Play.tm, TUV Product Service.
So, what do we learn from this?
The main message of this appears, to me, to be summed up here - Paidcontent.org and Future’s tech.co.uk were the only ones to explicitly credit The Guardian’s story, who were first to break it. Being first seemingly doesn’t guarantee a ton of back-links. Perhaps the registration barrier is at fault; if you can find the same story on Radio Today without any registration, instead of on The Guardian with registration, then perhaps that’s an interesting reason to avoid mandatory registration.
As an aside…
Of our total traffic to the radio player since the announcement, 3.3% of that was ‘unknown’ platform (even beating all visits from Mac users). For the same period before the announcement, similar traffic was less than 0.04%. In the PR world, I guess that looks like a hundred-fold increase.
Thanks to you if you wrote and passed on the story; I’ve not included everyone who published it because, well, it’ll get really boring.
