Who is writing your business’s story? And who is reading it?
I’ve spent most of the past 12 months writing tenders and grant applications – satisfying work – but I did have the opportunity recently to contribute to some PR and advertising campaigns.
It was fun, because I had assumed PR had morphed into marketing and metrics, and AI had subsumed writing. I now know it’s still possible to use old-fashioned methods to gather the attributes of a business or organisation and outline them in fetching fashion.
Business writing reinforces the impact of storytelling, but managing expectations remains crucial to the PR landscape. The clients in my recent PR experience on one hand expressed delight at the coverage they received, but on the other questioned why some of Australia’s bigger media outlets didn’t run “their” story.
It prompts cogitation on newsworthiness. Humans creating a narrative has some history. Rock art recalls ancient experience, expresses spirituality, and allows us to explore the emergence of the modern human mind.
Fast forward quite some millennia and Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral also preserves the human experience. When a fire in 2019 destroyed most of the medieval edifice’s wooden roof and severely damaged its upper walls, it was front-page news around the world for days.
A year later, Rio Tinto’s destruction of the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara incited global outrage but was a minor front-page story in Australia. Notre Dame continued to receive front-page coverage during its restoration and then at the completion of its reconstruction in December 2024. But no such luck for Juukan Gorge.
Rio Tinto’s “incident” destroyed evidence of possibly the oldest site of human occupation in the world and highlighted the vulnerability of Indigenous cultural heritage sites in Australia. But it didn’t stay newsworthy for long. Just like the spent arrow, the spoken word, and the lost opportunity, it was gone forever.
All heavy stuff, but it reinforces the gravitas of stories and the power of their legacy. Social media, marketing, and AI can all play a role in compiling and disseminating an organisation’s attributes. But the insightful storyteller is still central to any creative narrative.
Contact me at halagecopy@gmail.com