How-Do Weekly Wrap - 14 October 2011 - Josh Scherzer

Friday 14 October 2011

We’re all in the same business here. How-Do is for North West professionals who inform, influence and entertain people by trade. Our methods and aims may vary but not what we do. We’re communicators. So here’s a challenge fit for a professional communicator like you: try to make today’s news understandable to a North West resident living 100 years ago.

International headlines would be hard enough - “A BlackBerry outage? They’ve gone and electrified fruit?” So let’s start with local media headlines. Try telling a Salford resident in 1911 that Salford will be a major centre for kids’ TV.

Televisions weren’t commercially available until the 1920’s, so you’ll need to explain how moving images are now transmitted directly into the home for private viewing on boxes shaped like headboards. Next, you’ll have to tell the story of the amazing transformation of Salford Quays from Manchester Docks to the home of a powerful, multi-media, national broadcaster chartered in 1922. You may want to add that children today spend less time fetching coal than they do in front of these talking headboards.

Try telling your listener that our manufacturing sector (and global influence) has been surpassed first by America and then by China. Explain how the Far East’s economic might is now so great that no global city can ignore it. Now reveal the news that a company called Video News Agency has produced a movie-style promotion designed to interest Chinese investors in the city’s housing market. People living in China investing in houses in Manchester? A home as an investment? For bonus points, try explaining the recent housing market bust to your now bewildered friend.

Manageable so far? Well, then try to help a Cheshire resident from 1911 understand the following titbit: Cheshire-based Venture photography will be releasing a host of social media and mobile phone apps to allow customers to view and share their online portfolios. Mobile telephones? Apps? Social Media? You could simply say that we’re now too busy to talk to each other face-to-face.

Not all would be incomprehensible. Photography was already in vogue in 1911, so the news that two North West photographers have won prestigious awards would surprise few. The North West has long been home to talented people, after all.

To be fair, some of our top stories would still be understandable: ministers behaving badly, European nations squabbling, trouble in the Middle East. Some things never change.

Josh Scherzer is head of copy at PH Media Group

Stories on How-Do since last week's Wrap