It’s intriguing to see if attempts to hold large private gatherings to a request of confidentiality can still achieve its aim in these days of Twitter and Facebook.
Earlier this month the pro.manchester lunch which boasted Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King (below) as the speaker was preceded by a polite but firm request for any media in the room to toe the line on non-reporting.
The order had already been Tweeted in a very negative light by Business Desk NW editor Chris Barry, who was not present. The Manchester Evening News business editor Kevin Feddy was present at the lunch, but given that he was not ‘working’ and merely networking, seemed to leave during the dessert and before the Q and A.
Not that King said anything earth-shattering. I found him a reassuringly steady presence, if wittier than I imagined about the need for banking to be boring in future.
I don’t think I am upsetting any applecarts by observing that he used a rather elegant football analogy to present various projections about the economy.
This non-reporting order is happening more and more – not so long ago, Manchester’s CityCo organisation held a breakfast event at which the audience for King’s fellow Bank of England grandee Sir John Gieve, were also asked not to report what was said.
Again, it was all quite interesting, but you really wondered what the non-reporting issue was all about.
So, with official journalists observing the order, would King’s speech survive unremarked in the rampaging tidal flows of information sweeping the world?
I set up a search on Twitter and there’s been nary a Tweet. Not a single one.
Which could mean one of several things. That the pro.manchester edict was intensely absorbed and loyally observed by its members and their guests in the audience; or that King did not say anything anyone thought worthy of passing on to their social networks; or maybe that lawyers and accountants just haven’t got the Twitter craze yet in the way that us media types have.
A final observation: if King had said anything which would have really made big news, any journalist in the audience would have simply reported it, and to hell with the protocol. That’s journalism.
Tags: journalism, social media
