Want a headline? Then challenge received wisdom
There's nothing so sure to grab a headline as the slaughter of a sacred cow, says Dougal Paver. A story in today's Telegraph proves the point neatly.
Warning stories are a classic PR ruse: tell folk that unless they do 'X' then 'Y' will happen and you've generally got a good platform for catching the media's attention.
Global health bodies are good at this. How often have we seen warnings about some pandemic or other that has failed to materialise? Meantime, governments have been duped in to upping funding for research in to said problem. Kerching.
The other side of this coin is to contradict a widely-held belief. Controversy is hugely effective, but just make sure you've marshalled your facts so that your contention holds water.
There's a corking example of this in this morning's Telegraph - made all the more impactful because the chap saying we really ought to eat meat is one of the country's most strident eco-mentalists and a former vegan warrior.
Read the article - it's highly instructive. From where I'm sitting I particularly liked the comment from Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University:
"We should ask ourselves, in restaurants or supermarkets, whether the meat on offer has lived a sustainable life, but it is a question often impossible to answer. Almost all the meat we currently consume is intensively farmed."
Not all, of course: game meat is entirely free-range, most of it is virtually fat-free and the cost of landscape management needed to sustain game birds' delightful living quarters (woods, hedgerows, heather moorland) runs to £250m a year. Shooters spend 2.7m work days on landscape conservation and £2bn a year on goods and services.
Thankfully, the Game's On and Game to Eat campaigns have led to a huge surge in game consumption in recent years as people have realised the health and environmental benefits of this wonderful natural resource (pheasant, partridge, woodcock, wood pigeon, grouse, snipe and all manner of wildfowl).
I have my first day's shooting with clients on Wednesday and am looking forward to doing my bit for environmental sustainability - not to mention giving my new (well, 50 years' old) AyA 16 bore a run out.
Game pie all round in Paver Smith's offices from here until February 1st...
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