Just how believable are our newspapers?
Posted on August 2, 2009 by Mo Elzubeir in Opinion
According to an online consumer survey by Nielson, people trust people. There are no surprises there, but it is interesting that consumers are also willing to trust reviews posted online by ‘people’ (who could possible be corporate). After all, if the Israelis are doing it, who is to say corporations aren’t?
Even more astonishing is the percentage of people who totally or somewhat trust editorial content in newspapers. This number, globally is 69% whereas it is 84% for the UAE. I think it is mostly astonishing because we often forget that most people who are not in the media industry rarely get a glimpse of what really goes on before a news article appears before their very own eyes.
I’m not sure whether we should be happy or terrified. The fact that our dailies are littered with press releases (a trend that is recently and very slowly changing towards more investigative reporting) makes one wonder, just how gullible are consumers in the UAE?
For a PR agency, this is validation. It is saying, here, 78% completely or somewhat trust print advertisements whereas 84% completely or somewhat trust editorial content. That means, your press release will be believed by more people! Did I just mention that it is far more cost effective than going by some inflated rate card?
It also says that journalists need not worry about their “integrity” being called into question. The public doesn’t know that you haven’t written that press release that has your name in the byline. In fact, they trust you.
This does remind me of the research we have done for Aldar where we looked at trust and PR. We made our recommendations and we saw trust levels in Aldar shoot up. It admittedly felt too easy. The results were clear and the surveys validated our insticts, but I still felt that it was too easy. This report now explains to me why it was so easy. People are too trusting.
There is a fear, however, that this would backfire. Experience goes to show us that whenever something is going too well, it’s about to come down crumbling.
With a background in business computing, Mo Elzubeir is the CEO and founder of Mediastow, one of the fastest growing media intelligence agencies in the Middle East and North Africa region.
