By Don Gordon-Brown
You’d think after four decades in journalism that I’d be able to get my facts straight, wouldn’t you? But I came a bit of a cropper over that city council PR stunt that offended McWhirters traders so much on 2 February. It’s the one I wrote about last issue where Lord Mayor Graham Quirk and his LNP candidate for Central Ward, Vicki Howard, spent 40 minutes having their pictures taken with a new garbage-munching machine.
Thanks, by the way, to the many people who pulled me up, praised the column piece and expressed absolute agreement that it was a pretty thoughtless thing for the two of them to do just metres away from where people’s livelihoods are going to putty because of the closed Waltons walkway. But back to my sloppy journalism, based on an assumption I shouldn’t have made. When I take photos for the Indie, I’m like a pimply teenager on his first real date: in and out as fast as I can. I’m a one-shot man – I give it my best shot – and it’s not until I get back to the office and find that the subject’s eyes were closed or the lens dustcap was on that my photojournalism skills come into serious question.
Others may shake at the prospect, but for someone like me (who can be a little pushed for time wearing the hats of editor, reporter, sub-editor, distributor, ad sales rep, local coffee taster and photographer) drive-by shootings would be ideal. The snapper I spied on 2 February spent some 40 minutes taking countless photos as Graham and Vicki pushed the machine this way and that. The absence of any other snapper at the time made me rethink the event in the days that followed, especially after the two publicity seekers staged another full media event with the same machine the following Thursday.
So that’s the assumption I made... that this whole photoshoot just had to be an internal LNP gig to get promotional images for the looming council poll. And seeing I’ve never won a Walkley award yet – and God knows, I deserve one – I fired off some questions to Graham and Vicki just to make sure their party had covered the council costs involved in the exercise. It would not have been cheap to get the machine to and from the mall, let alone the time and labour costs for the machine operator and the council’s PR hack to be on hand.
Well, did those two promptly put me in my place! The photographer was in fact from Quest’s City News. There was so much egg all over my face I felt like asking them both if the big green machine was available to clean it off.
But then, on further reflection it seemed to me that I was wrong yet right at the same time. Let me explain. I wouldn’t exactly call the purchase of a few mall cleaners rivetting news, would you? But council obviously did. We now know that they staged the first stunt in the mall on Friday 2 February for the benefit of just one media outlet, at not inconsiderable cost to ratepayers.
It seems the first stunt was organised because City News would have been out on the streets on the morning of the second stunt. But I’ve got this little idea for any council administration that had really wanted to use its ratepayers’ money wisely: you should have held just the one stunt on a Monday or Tuesday to suit City News’ timelines. Much cheaper, surely? I believe that first stunt was pulled for no other reason than an election is looming and its sole purpose was to try to give Graham and Vicki some exposure, especially for Vicki seeing City News allegedly services the ward she’s seeking.
By the way, do you know what City News thought of the stunt in the long run? Maybe the snapper got annoyed with the attempts to insert Vicki into every other shot, but the paper didn’t run a word or image the next week. That’s how newsworthy they thought it was. Now I’ve never run a political media unit but I’ll say this. If I was going to allocate sizable council resources and people’s time to an event that favoured one media outlet, I’d extract a commitment to some coverage, wouldn’t you?
So I still think that it would be nice if Graham and Vicki threw some money into the council’s coffers for the costs incurred in staging this unnecessary and ultimately fruitless PR exercise.
And council should probably be thankful that most of the media at the second stunt only turned up because the traders told them they were going to stage a ruckus. They would have been entitled to be pissed off as second-rate media outlets if City News had indeed run this non-story that morning.
And, finally I'm going to try one last time to explain to Graham and Vicki why McWhirters traders fumed over their antics on the Friday and why they angrily tried to hijack the second media event six days later.
I’ll give them a clue by paraphrasing one Oscar Wilde: “To stage one stunt that offends struggling traders may be considered unfortunately stupid, but to do two was offensive and highly unproductive politics all round.”
