SEMINARS Passia Seminar 1999 Media and Communication Skills

 

 

 

 

 

Rami G. Khouri[1]

 

 

 

A.            The Nature of Information

 

Information that is transmitted via the mass media and communications channels can be divided into different kinds of materials:

 

1.     Factual Information - facts, figures, statistics, and other information de­signed only to increase the knowledge of the target audience. This ma­terial is usually free of values; it tries to report or inform, without ideo­logical bias or political aims on the part of the communicator, e.g. infor­mation in a sta­tistical yearbook or an encyclopedia, or a weather report.

 

2.     News - anything that is new and/or important and thus is useful for peo­ple to know. News must include the element of being ‘new’, whether a new event that happened yesterday, or new information about an event that happened in the past (e.g., new information about who killed Abu Jihad or John Kennedy). News must be important or relevant to the life of the audi­ence; being 'new' is not enough, i.e., a new tree planted in someone's gar­den is not news, but a new forest planted in a neighbor­hood playground is news, because it impacts on the quality of life of the community, or takes away parking spaces, or attracts wild animals.

 

3.     Entertainment - anything designed primarily to amuse, please, or enter­tain people, without necessarily giving them information or news. Enter­tainment is the fastest growing segment of the mass media and com­mu­ni­cations (mass-comm) industry. Most kinds and forms of communi­cation must be entertaining in order to catch the attention of the audi­ence, espe­cially today when people have so many sources of information at their fin­gertips.

 

4.     Opinion or Ideology - anything designed to offer ideas and opinions, and usually intended to convince someone else of your views or positions. This kind of material is often part of a political contest or argument, or part of advocacy efforts for a viewpoint or a cause. Opinion/ideology does not have to be aggressive; it can be low-key and soft, but is always designed to give information in order to change the mind or viewpoint of the target audience.

 

5.     Attacking or Accusatory Material - material that is aggressive against someone else or in defense of your own position, usually designed to dis­credit someone else or to hurt their credibility in the context of a situation of conflict. This kind of material is dramatic, action-packed, and aggressive, designed to create controversy or evoke a reaction.

 

6.     Public Relations - any communication process designed to create an image or evoke a favorable sentiment amongst the target audience. Public relations material may not always aim to have the target audience react by taking an action, but instead it may only want to create a positive impres­sion of you amongst the audience (or sometimes the aim of PR is to change a negative impression into a positive one, i.e. if an airline company uses PR after one of its planes crashes to give the public information and to inform them of plans to compensate the dead and wounded).

 

 

B.            The Form of Information

 

Information can be transmitted to the target audience by many different means, or in many different forms, such as:

 

1.     Electronic and direct mass media: television, radio, film, video, audio cassette, theater, music.

 

2.     Printed materials: newspapers, magazines, newsletters, books, leaflets, brochures, flyers, educational materials.

 

3.     Word of mouth: speeches, lectures, talks at religious or tribal gatherings, gossip, rumors, jokes.

 

4.     Electronic personal media: e-mail, Internet, beepers, cellular and normal telephones, voice mail.

 

5.     Public spaces and actions: street signs, billboards, painting on walls, T-shirts and hats, street banners, flags, balloons, marches, sit-down strikes, demonstrations, charity walks.

 

 

C.            The Type of Information

 

You can communicate to your target audience using several types of in­formation, which are a combination of the above two lists:

 

1.     Newsy materials: news stories, television reports, and other news re­ports that are generated by journalists.

 

2.     Light features: stories in the press that are entertaining but also about a serious subject, such as a feature story about children who are learning three languages at once in their sports classes. Light features are gen­er­ated by journalists, but often at your suggestion or using materials you pro­vide them.

 

3.     Paid advertising: material in the press that you pay for (unlike the first two above which are not paid for). Paid advertisements can sometimes look like news stories or features.

 

4.     Personal opinion or testament: people with respect and credibility in so­ciety can be used to spread a message, and that message will be better received than if it were offered by someone who is not well known, i.e., Haidar Abdul Shafi is more credible as a communicator about peace-making for Palestine than a Palestinian student in Europe.

 

5.     Public events: special events can be created to attract the attention of the news media, including press conferences, marches, political action, lectures, and other events that are used as a vehicle to transmit your mes­sage to the target audience.

 

 

d.            How to Communicate Successfully and to

Send your Message to your Audience

 

Which combination of the above types and forms of communication should you use to send your message successfully? This depends on

 

a)       your goal,

b)       your audience, and

c)       the material and human resources available to you to send your message.

 

The most successful combination of communication types and means will be that which is

 

a)       most able to reach your target audience,

b)       is most credible to your target audience, and

c)       will achieve your intended goal.

 

 

1. Setting your goal(s):

 

In designing any mass-comm effort, you should first decide what results you wish to achieve, and set some primary and final goals. The primary goals will include things such as: Do you wish to inform your audience? entertain them? Change their mind? Make them sad, angry, curious, or happy or some other emotion? Get their attention? Shock them? Make them sympathetic to, or proud of, your cause? Make them critical of a third party? Once you decide your primary goal, you can then determine how to achieve it, by choosing the most appropriate mass-comm channels, but you also should decide your final goals. For example, if your primary goal is to make your audience feel proud of your organization's work for the na­tional development of Palestine, your final goal might be to generate finan­cial donations to your work or to have people become members of your organization. Final goals are those things that you want to happen as a result of the communication process, such as people spending money to buy something or to donate to a cause, taking political action (voting or protesting), supporting you verbally or emotionally, etc. It is important from the start to determine how you can measure progress towards attaining your primary and final goals – otherwise you will not know if your mass-comm efforts have been successful or not. You can measure success or failure by using polls, surveys, focus group discussions, and other means such as counting new donations or members of an organization, new cus­tomers, inquiries received, visitors to a center, etc. It is always important to develop a measurement system that can tell you if any changes in the be­havior of your target audience were caused by your mass-comm efforts or by other efforts. For example, you might launch a promotion strategy for your organization and find that your membership increased by 25 percent in six months, but was this due to your strategy or to other reasons that had nothing to do with your efforts (a new president, a new project you launched, etc.)?

 

 

2. Determining what is credible to your audience:

 

Messages sent to a target audience will prove to be credible or non-credi­ble depending on the following factors:

 

a)    The state of mind of your audience: a happy audience cheering for a foot­ball team will not be receptive to sad messages about poor children; a sad audience depressed about economic stress will not be receptive to messages asking for financial donations. Know the state of mind of your audience before you send them a message, and when you do send a mes­sage make sure it is in line with your audience's state of mind.

 

b)    The quality of your information or message: the message you send must be accurate and factual, and relevant to your audience. If you send infor­mation that is not true, your audience will not listen to you the next time you try to reach them. Moreover, if your information is not relevant to them, they will not even start to listen to your message in the first place, e.g., do not send a message about the demolition of Palestinian houses to American opera singers, but do send it to some American International Law experts.

 

c)     The quality of the messenger: the person or institution sending the mes­sage must be credible and appropriate, or else the audience will not bother even to listen or receive the message. A message about the dangers of nuclear radiation will not be well received if it is sent from the headquarters of a football team, but it will be credible if it comes from the physics de­partment of a university. Make sure the messenger is credible before you send any message.

 

d)    The context in which the message is delivered: the medium or channels you use to send a message should be appropriate. If you want to raise awareness in Israel about the problem of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, you would do better to get information into the Israeli Hebrew press than into the Palestinian Arabic press.