As someone within the coffee industry it is categorically impossible to read an article about coffee without getting frustrated.
This applies to lazy journalism – such as the Daily Mail’s recent brief rehash of the Independent’s article on the flat white - through to more serious journalism like God in a Cup
Why do we get frustrated? Because they never write about what we want them to write about. The interesting things we find screamingly obvious they ignore, instead focusing on topics we’ve tried to guide them away from during the interview.
Perhaps this is our first problem – journalists are more interested in the things people don’t want to tell them. In most interviews the things people want to avoid are probably pretty interesting but when most of the coffee industry is interviewed we are usually trying to somehow educate, using the article as a vehicle. If you go back and look at just about any coffee article you’ll see what I mean – and this isn’t a criticism, as it is something I tend to do as well.
Journalism has changed a lot recently and rarely do you see well thought out, thoroughly investigated articles hitting the press – regardless of field. (In fact I am not sure when you last did.) It isn’t unusual to see press releases copied almost verbatim, the need for words to fill space more important than the value and interest within them. Worse still, because I can forgive people working under pressure and stress for taking the occasional shortcut, is journalism with an agenda. From film’s like Black Gold, or coming back to articles like the Independent’s brief piece of the flat white, it makes me almost angry when people decide on a fixed opinion and their journalism entails generating quotes and supporting material for that idea.
I spoke to the journalist from the Independent for ten to fifteen minutes, and in that time it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t saying what she wanted to hear and as such my opinion was discounted (as was my status as the first British WBC apparently). What I had wanted to communicate is that it wasn’t about a drink, this wasn’t a fashion thing, it was merely one of many indicators of a growing movement, a small but significant change in London’s coffee culture. What she wanted to hear was that flat whites were fashionable and we should all be drinking them.
Given the choice I suspect most coffee professionals would choose to have an article about them, or their business, written by the mainstream print media rather than the web or tv (in what is often a throwaway segment on the news). Print media had credibility, people trusted it, valued it – or so we felt.
Newspapers are undoubtedly on their way out. Some we are glad to see go – such as free paper The London Lite – and others will be mourned. Print media finds itself in a similar situation to music labels ten years ago. The revenue model has changed, and they are no longer able to create the same income due to competition from free online sources. James Murdoch’s recent comments about the BBC indicate that his corporation is as out of touch, and stuck in old mindsets, as the labels were (and to some extent still are).
I hope that News Corporations plans to start charging for content across its websites are indeed doomed to failure, not solely because I dislike the corporation, but because I think it will only delay the inevitable. People will get their news for free. When it comes to interacting with the media I think we need to look ahead and start to develop communications.
The power of the newspaper hasn’t just been lost in its current affairs. It has been interesting to watch the democratisation of reviews. It isn’t just in food and drink, but in all aspects of culture from film to music. Bloggers are the most immediate example but sites like tipped, qype and yelp – despite their flaws – are gaining credibility and trust with users. Of course it doesn’t take long for PR companies to figure out whose blogs get read and to inundate them with incentives for saying what they want them to say. It also doesn’t take very long for a readership to spot when a blog has been ‘bought out’.
As broad spectrum media slows, as an industry we are left with narrower but more direct channels to communicate with the public. The idea of permission marketing is nothing new. Focusing your energy speaking to the people who want to hear what you have to say makes a lot of sense. What was once a smart marketing tactic is looking more and more like the probable future as people strip down the vast quantities of available news down to just the categories or events they are interested in. I am sure I am not alone in running Google keyword searches as a news feed.
We’re never going to get the newspapers to write what we want them to write. So many have tried, some have come close, yet no one has succeeded completely. Their likely use in the immediate future is more for exposure than communication, less a channel to offer education and insight to the public and more an opportunity to pique the potential interest of a small percentage of readers. Their returns do not match our invested efforts and I think we’d be wise to pursue other routes to communicate with the consumer.
