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In this latest episode of our Big Noises series, we hear from best-selling author Amy Kean. She’s now CEO and Creative Director of Good Shout, a company that helps people communicate better. Amy is also a self-confessed weirdo and she argues that media could do with more weirdos to stem the tide of painfully undifferentiated products.
You might take exception to the term ‘weirdos’ there; after all, everyone likes to think they’re wholly unique and incredibly different to everyone else out there. Amy’s point, though, is that ‘weird’ is an arbitrary value ascribed by the powerful, and that people who deviate from what is considered ‘normal’ have to work harder to get their voices heard.
Amy and Peter also spoke about fear, ego, jargon and how to spot a good weirdo rather than someone that’s going to be an HR problem. It’s a really great chat, and frankly I hope that this time next year we’ll have to do another pass on what counts as ‘weird’ – because the media industry will be weirder by any definition, and healthier because of it.
I’m not sure how seriously publishers are taking Twitter these days. It’s never been a big driver of traffic (despite what its owner apparently thinks) but it’s also had an outside influence on journalists and their careers. One thing that is clear though is that advertisers continue to disregard Musk’s increasingly terrible social network – and publishers are inevitably paying attention.
Lots to say about this – and I’m sure we’ll do a special episode on it in the near future – but this is an interesting look at how Le Parisien is looking at the skills it deems necessary for its journalists. I would say that video production is probably a nice to have for news publishers, given the pressure to create articles and the incipient arrival of AI-edited video, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the replies.
Here’s the problem with the total lack of media analyst sites these days – there aren’t enough people around to keep abreast of all the misbehaviour. So thank god that The New European was keeping an eye on this one. We’ve known for a while that The Telegraph was happy to take Russian money in exchange for pro-Putin content on its site – but it’s now quietly trying to get rid of those archives.
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