Salt knows the value of a bright new social trend, be it tree changing, sea changing or now Nettels.

Yes, folks, Salt has interrogated the data (generously provided by taxpayers) and discovered (drumroll please) that many people are time poor.

Of course, as startling as this insight into our society might be, its not going to get more than a cursory media treatment without something to ’sex it up a bit’.

And that something is an acronym which is also a word. Very cute, very media-friendly.

He probably spent hours or days on it, perhaps he worked with a creative consultant, perhaps it came to him in a shower moment.

All this is great for Salt and great for his business.

And it’s another example of the marvelous value-add of PR.

The NRL is trumpeting an increase in crowds and television ratings for 2009.

The league says crowds are up five per cent on the same time last year and have totalled 1,688,948 so far in 2009.

It says game one of the State of Origin series reached a record average of 2.322 million viewers across the five capital cities, 177,000 better than the previous best, for game three last year.

Weekly television ratings for NRL games are up 21.7 per cent in Brisbane and 14.2 per cent in Sydney.

And club memberships have grown 27 per cent with nine of the league’s 16 clubs achieving record numbers.

Of course, it helps that the competition is even and the quality of the football is high. And the publicity, even bad publicity, keeps it top of mind with the sports-loving public.

The media is at its rancid worst this morning bemoaning the technical absence of a recession when everyone reeaalllly knows the whole place is f#cked.

Ross Gittins defends his right to call it a recession no matter what the data say. Interestingly, a week ago he was writing on the need for positive thinking and the Government’s cleverness in spinning it’s budget message to accentuate the positive.

Last week he also said: “We’re still in the phony war stage of the recession, where everyone uses the word but we’ve yet to see much evidence of it in unemployment.” But today? Whoa, what happened Ross?

The acid test for recession is not quarterly movements in gross domestic product, it’s what’s happening to unemployment. This has risen by 1.5 percentage points in 14 months. That’s more than 160,000 extra people without jobs. Not in recession did you say?

Actually, I think you pointed us in that direction, Ross. From not much evidence of it to burgeoning jobless (as the headline says) in a few short days.

At the Australian, Michael Stutchbury seems personally miffed by the rogue GDP result and concludes rather snarkily:

But this won’t stop unemployment from rising, which will hit consumer spending. The record net export boost won’t be repeated. And business investment is collapsing.

Australia will be battling recession for the rest of the year.

Thankfully, the Australian also has George Megalogenis who is a notable exception to the ‘we wuz robbed’ tone of much of the media commentary:

Funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to twist good news? There is a relentless negativity in our public debate about the economy at present that defies what our own senses are telling us.

Australia remains the only developed economy with a fighting chance of avoiding a deep recession, but we don’t want to believe it.

The most plausible case from here on is for a normal recession in an abnormal world.

In other words, a soft landing in which unemployment does not race too far past 8 per cent.

In fact, many in the markets are far more positive than the doom spruikers in the media:

“Rumours of the death of the Australian economy have been highly exaggerated.

Every other major developed economy went into reverse in a big way in the first three months of the year but Australia actually grew,” Commsec economist Craig James said.

“The worst of the economic slowdown is now over.”

Advertising supremo, Harold Mitchell, who possibly has even more contact with the ‘real’ world than Ross Gittins, also tells it as he sees it (to borrow a bit from the Gittins prose flowerbed) in the Age this morning, and it’s a very different perspective:

The real news about the real world of today is that confidence in the economy is returning but we will still get some bumps along the way.

Marketing people are always more interested in the future than the past and I am with them. I never found a way to make money out of the past anyway.

Only economists worry about the past and so they should, given their recent performances.

As to the politics of it all, Peter Hartcher gets that exactly right:

For a neophyte prime minister with no experience in economic policy, this is a vital political trophy. It gives Rudd a new credibility as an economic manager. It will help entrench him as a competent leader in difficult times.

The researchers noted that even “in instances of smoking being reflected in a negative way, particularly among younger characters, could have an impact on prompting children to smoke cigarettes.”

If anyone really believed this then surely we would immediately cancel all those anti-smoking ads?

The research found that during 400 episodes of the Simpsons there were 795 instances of smoking:

• Smoking was shown in a positive way in two per cent of the cases.
• In 35 per cent of the cases, smoking was depicted in a negative light.
• 63 per cent of smoking scenes were considered neutral.

So, the Simpsons is overwhemingly anti-smoking.  A big D’oh to the researchers.

We’ve seen a bit of this stuff locally too. For instance, the Gladstone Observer has a useful piece, “Tackle recession blues with books“, the fairfax media recently had a piece on the trading-down phenomenon that is now confronting retailers and the Australian has a piece arguing that savings has become fashionable again. The Shane Warne musical is the latest recession victim. Earlier this month we had the frugal fashion week (an oxymoron surely) and, my favourite, the return of ‘nanna know-how’:

DID you know that cold tea makes a great furniture polish? Or that half a cup of bicarbonate of soda in the tub makes a relaxing, effective — and extremely cheap — bath wash?

No I didn’t and I don’t think I wanted to know either.

Optimists spend more time with newspapers than any other medium, and they probably recycle it, too. They’re 51% more likely to go out of their way to purchase recycled goods, 34% more likely to drive a luxury car and 30% more likely to have bought four or more PCs in the past two years.

Dynamic people rank as the largest group of newspaper readers, followed by leaders.

Macnamara said the data showed 30-80 per cent of media content was sourced from, or significantly influenced by, PR practitioners, depending on the outlet, with estimates of 40-75 per cent common.

The definition of PR material included all information released to the media by outlets such as PR companies, corporations, statutory bodies, government departments and ministerial press secretaries. Quality newspapers and broadcasters relied least on press releases.

Using them most heavily were smaller outlets such as suburban and rural newspapers, some types of magazines, trade press and specialist publications.

The heaviest users of all were travel magazines, which in some cases were overwhelmingly dominated by handouts published with barely a word changed.

In fact, this survey itself was released, or promoted, in order to generate publicity for an event organised by the Public Relationas Institute of Australia.

Nothing wrong with that. 

Nevertheless, the sheer size of the PR contribution has to make you wonder about the value-add of many media outlets.

The value-add of the media is not supposed to be just about distribution, journalism should be part of the deal.

Yet faced with declining revenues and increasing costs, the media has tended to cut back on its investment in journalism and rely more and more on all that ‘free’ content from PR.

Journalists end up being little more than media release sub-editors. 

No matter how good PR content is, and it can be very good and it can be awful, it’s not the same as journalism.

I believe the audience can sense the difference, not in every instance but more generally, and the public’s ability to know that they are getting advertising dressed up as journalistic content might be one reason why they find media less compelling and engaging than a generation ago.

Even when social media is used, it is more for broadcast purposes and it’s one way. The Obama campaign used social media very effectively but it did not let the great unwashed inside the policy tent. They were happy for the social media participants to help with the sell but not with the product. Obama adopted a thoroughly contemporary corporate approach to social media.

Corporate blogs are largely adjuncts to PR efforts, they have not wrought a great change in corporate communications culture. Ditto for facebook and twitter. When organisations get interested in social media, they mostly want to know how it will meet some existing measure (leads, sales, reputation index). That is, they approach social media from inside the box. They are not looking for change.

The breakthrough hasn’t happened. We are still waiting for that revolutionary moment. In the meantime, we have hope. Good luck to all the social media footsoldiers out there spruiking the revolution. You have to admire the faith that drives them to talk as if it has happened.

Maybe the change will come. It will be good for all of us. But I don’t see it happening. The reality still is that when an organisation talks to you they aren’t looking for a conversation, they just want to sell you something.

Bankers, London’s favoured sons during the boom years, are now far more likely to be associated with greed and ineptitude than success. Their diminished standing is to be underscored by a rebranding campaign for the capital aimed at diverting the world’s attention away from its financial services district, The Times has learnt.