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I hate my job...
running an Online Market Research News Service
Nevertheless there are some little things about the job that are not quite so wonderful. To say I hate them is perhaps an exaggeration, but they do occasionally make me reflect that I might have been better advised to become Editor of The Times or Director General of the BBC.
Among those little things are the following.
- Online is undoubtedly the future of publishing; however, the technology presents disadvantages as well as advantages. One disadvantage is that, given different computer set-ups in different countries, Web publishers cannot be sure that the pages they see are exactly what readers internationally see.
- Another source of irritation is the apparent inability of some eminent readers to grasp elementary technical rules governing use of an online news service. The publisher, naturally, has to choke back any discourtesy when explaining where the customer has gone wrong.
- On the Internet side the most irritating thing is the flood of spam threatening to drown normal email interchanges. I feel particularly threatened because some of my outgoing mail is handled by one Internet service provider email from which was for a time blocked by another ISP because of what it called .'excessive spamming from abuse in the USA..' The problem was not eased by initial blithe denials by my ISP's support staff that there was anything wrong. But then, as all reporters and researchers know, nobody can be trusted to tell the truth.
- This brings us to another group of pressure points that have nothing to do with Internet technology but are common to all journalistic enterprises. I have space to list just three, beginning with the large number of press releases written by people who clearly do not wholly understand what they are talking about. I should add, however, that some research PR is very good.
- Another bugbear is PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint may be a nifty piece of software but, in the absence of a speaker, is not an aid to understanding. Certainly most PowerPoint summaries used as press
releases are fairly incomprehensible.
- Conferences are a good source of news for the MR journalist, but mainly through contacts made between and after formal sessions. Papers delivered at these may or may not be interesting, but very little conferring about them takes place. This is an old gripe and likely to disappear only if and when conferences, as well as reporting, move online. But where then would we find excuses for fun trips to Prague or Lisbon?
Market research is, of course, a wonderful industry, and market researchers are wonderful people. So I am very happy to be running an online news service for and about them. [! Hate! This is the 'Hate' article! - Ed.]
I love my job...
as Editor of an Online Research News Service
'London, UK - 10th August 2004 - The Editor of an online MR news service has announced that he loves his job.
‘Company N, the leading provider of news for research professionals worldwide, has a policy of delighting its staff rather than simply keeping them happy. Company N's owner and co-founder I.M. Smug, MBA, PhD, commented on the news 'I am not surprised he loves it - everyone here at Company N loves their job. However, the fact that he has chosen to announce it is excellent news for Company N's clients, who can be assured of even better service in the future from Company N. Company N Company N Company N did I mention the company name (Company N) enough?' A £15 discount voucher for services from Company N is attached.'
OK so I hate quite a lot of press releases, but generally I love the job. The following are possibly the main reasons:
- I love rewriting press releases so that they actually present a version at least of the truth - it's not possible on most stories to investigate the source of the stats provided, but at least where wholly inaccurate conclusions have been drawn from them, one can write one's own instead and nobody seems to come back about it
- I love the process of chopping unwieldy releases down to size, especially the moment of realisation that a paragraph or two can be deleted in their entirety as they consist exclusively of corporate woffle by the company boss
- I love the follow-up interviews, which take me back to the old days of doing depths - I always enjoyed these, and now that I have my journalist's hat on, I am no longer obliged to be impartial, probing, on-the-ball or accurate, which makes for even more fun
- I love it when stories come in that actually are groundbreaking, especially when we are first with the news, and when readers comment that they have learnt of these epoch-making events via our emails. Where were you when President Kennedy died? or the Queen was crowned? Or Malcolm Rigg joined the PSI?
- I am fascinated by the content of survey results press releases: to have at one's fingertips the cold, hard facts about what interpretations researchers put on the things the public choose to tell them about what they think is going on in the world, gives one a feeling of omniscience and enlightenment second only to that when an error message pops up in Microsoft Windows and you click on the 'More details' button
- I like it when those submitting press releases come back to us and say they've had contacts from the articles, or when I get an email from someone who's found the service useful, or who feels better about MR as a profession because the news makes them feel 'part of a community', for example. But alas, I'm beginning to sound like a press release myself...
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