The Big Stories

Every media outlet has its own list of 'big stories'; the core of the work they do. For daily news media some of the big stories are constantly running, for others it's something they come back to on a regular basis.

Today 5/11/13 Immigration has returned.

The BBC Website is reporting on a UCL study into the benefit of immigration. The report suggests that immigrants since 1999 were 45% less likely to claim benefits than the 'indigenous' population.

And now the cat is amongst the foreign pigeons.

The difficulty with the 'big stories' is that there are default narratives connected to them. The right wing press will shout that it's only since 1999, and immigrants from outside the European Economic Area are a drain to the system because they tend to have larger families. The left wing press hail the report as blindingly obvious and something that they have been saying for years.

So we're no further on. The argument continues and immigration remains one of the 'big stories'.

How can a PR professional, Marketing department, or business leader use the 'big stories'?

Identify them. Look at the websites of your chosen outlet, whether it's a trade story, or a wider news theme, and see how it's reported.

Add context or confirmation. It allows the story to change within their defaults and gives another bite of a story that lots of the journalists will be bored of.

Offer content that could break one default, but lets them build it into another. For example, one of the comments on the BBC website story suggests that undereducated indigenous young people are being passed over in favour of older more qualified migrants; this feeds the 'big story' on education and the slipping of standards. It gives the journalist the ability to change the story but remain on message.

When the sector 'big stories' appear you should be ready.

We Can't Afford Pensions.

This morning (1/11/13) The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 was discussing a planned strike by Fire-fighters in England and Wales. It's a dispute over pensions.

As soon as pensions were mentioned I snorted and thought "well, no one can afford pensions these days...". Then I took a moment and realised that I'd been sucked into one of the great financial narratives of recent times.

No one can afford pensions....

Organisations across the country are changing their pension plans due to "short falls" or in other words "we trusted our investments would work, but they didn't" and employee after employee has seen the value of their plan fall.

When I was in the BBC I saw my final salary scheme come to an end, and I accepted it...

The problem is... This isn't a story about pension deficit this is a story about pension entitlement and redundancy, but it fits so neatly into the default narrative of pension black holes.

I immediately wrote it off as another organisation stung by the financial down turn moaning about bad investments that the financial world said would be fine and then were ruined by another group of financial experts. You know, the old story.

Default Narrative is hugely powerful, it informs out gut reactions to complex stories, it makes us see stories from the wrong angle, with the wrong colour, and the wrong shape. When we remove our default, (like getting the person seated in front of us at the theatre to remove their comedy oversized 'My Fair Lady' hat) we can see the whole story and not just the bits that press our buttons.

Default Narrative - The basics.

Default Narrative - The basics in one handy video. follow me @johnrockley