unspun
THE VIEW FROM INSIDE PR Name: Mary Maguire Job description: Head of press and broadcasting at Unison
Local impact of biggest cuts in a generation
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E
ver since my first newspaper run sold out, I’ve been fascinated by news. I was eight years old and had written, designed and printed 10 copies all by myself. It was mainly school news, what was on at Saturday morning pictures and a cake recipe. As an incentive to my embryonic readership, I’d stuck a penny chew on the front of each copy with sellotape. Since then, the way news is relayed has changed dramatically, but intrinsically news is, well, news. As a union press officer, the news (and views) I furnish to reporters highlights an injustice, a rotten boss, a bad law, or unearth corruption. And, hopefully, it raises public awareness of a key issue for us. So many times I’ve worked up a news story, full of people, detailed effects and lots of wow stats. But along comes a z-list celeb arrested for knocking off a bobby’s hat, or a minor royal crosses the channel on a breadboard, and it’s all wasted. A big story leaves little room for anything else in newspapers. So it is for broadcasters, who have to squeeze the story into air-time, counted in seconds. A press officer feels the same way a reporter does when a story is spiked. Gutted. News is more celebrity driven and, with 24 hour news, the internet, twitter, and other social media, it has
to titillate and entertain as well as inform. And as unions are not very good at sex and drugs and rock and roll, we have to constantly think of new ways to interest the media. We know what reporters want – a news story that their editor will want to publish or broadcast. We try to help them uncover the truth that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret, to quote Lord Northcliffe. And so it was with the cuts story – 40 per cent chopped off public spending with the prospect of 750,000 jobs to go (government figures) and the impact. Write the story once, and what’s the encore? It didn’t matter how much we protested, warned, estimated, there was nothing new to report. Threaten to strike and you were in, warn of the impact on communities and you were out. We didn’t have something tangible and immediate such as 30,000 people losing jobs overnight and a Woolworths chain closing. And that clever bit of coalition government spin that ‘there is no alternative’ created a brick wall. The part the banks played in the crisis was a distant memory. The worst cuts for a generation wouldn’t happen in one go. They would
come in dribs and drabs but to every community. So we worked on local impact, keeping local and regional media informed. And we continued to pump out an alternative vision. Fast, accurate information about what was happening on the ground was vital. Our researchers produced detailed analysis of how many unemployed people chased each job, broken down by town – a good local story. Next was analysis of how many local businesses depended on the public sector for work, showing an interdependent economy. We looked at the impact of cuts on local people, on public services and on local economies. We regularly briefed commentators, leader writers and specialists. I had case studies coming out of my ears, but occasionally the case study had the wrong colour eyes, had too many children, or too few, earned too little, or too much, or just didn’t fit the script. Sometimes, they were too frightened to speak out. Eventually, after months of leg work and picture stunts galore, the needs of the media and the union collided and we had a good running story of broken promises, cuts, devastation. Libraries, hospital wards and care homes closing, a frontline crumbling (they were sacking nurses, for Heaven’s sake) and a generation’s future blighted by mass unemployment. Of course it wasn’t just a Unison story. The hug-atree crowd, the save-ourlibraries campaign, sister unions, many community organisations were involved. The challenge is how to keep the story alive...
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