What makes a story worth printing? Richard Slater on pitches, award entries and spotting AI a mile off 

Richard
We decided to put on an awards event for Lancashire. I booked a room that had a capacity of about 250, 300, and on the first day of putting ticket sales out, we sold all those tickets. I’ve seen a deal, an 80 grand deal, happen over a pint because it’s that old journalism story, isn’t it? We were told that behind every door there is a story. Rubbish. Behind every door, there are about 200 stories. You just have to go digging for them all.

Tony
Welcome to PR in the Real World with me, Tony Garner. My guest today started his career in the same newsroom as me, just weeks apart. Then he set up his own PR agency just months before I got the idea of Viva. Later, he built one of the biggest regional business titles and awards events in the entire country, and he’s still doing that today. Richard Slater joins me to talk about why journalism still runs through everything he touches. He talks about exactly what he’s looking for and what makes him bin a pitch on site. Let’s get into it.

Tony

Richard Slater and I started our careers in the same newsroom, the Lancashire Telegraph, within weeks of one another. Richard Slater and I started our PR companies within weeks of one another about 25 years ago. But then Richard’s career has taken a different turn. He started a business publication which is required reading for companies in the Lancashire area. He’s also created one of the biggest awards events in the country. So it’s really useful to get Richard in the room so we can talk about what makes a story worth printing, what makes an award worth winning and what makes a PR’s pitch worth reading. So let’s get into it. Go on, Richard.

Richard
Well, thank you for inviting me, first of all. And, yeah, it is weird when you. When you frame it like that. We did start within a few weeks of each other at Lancashire Telegraph. I think, you know, I was on the news side when I got there. You would, you know, were already enveloped in sports.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
And then I do remember you ringing me up and saying slots last. You started a PR business. What’s that like? And I remember you coming around to my house and we talked about it, and there we had. We had two little businesses firing out, Slater PRs on one side, Viva on the other side, just firing out. Starting on our first adventures in. In self and business running.

Tony
So, I mean, lots of. Lots of different experiences. Loads of different experiences. When you watch a PR now pitch something to you, what do you. What do you look for and what do you see? Do you think that they can’t perhaps, given that knowledge and experience?

Richard
Well, I think it comes a little bit earlier than that. Actually. One of the. One of the things that’s a little bit frustrating can be when you’re not pitched. You just delivered to. And I think there’s an awful lot to be gained from actually having conversations with the media that you’re trying to engage with, pick up the phone. And there is a reluctance, I think, just to pick up the phone and say, is this going to flow with you guys? Because I think that’s fundamentally. Fundamentally, what it is. But I think, you know, I think perhaps the question that you’re wanting me to answer is slightly different to that. And it’s. It’s really. I want to see stories. I literally want to see a story in a story arc, you know, something that is on message for our audience. That makes.

Richard
I get it needs to make sense for your clients, but it certainly needs to make sense for our audience and remember who we are and what we are. We’re not the Kent Messenger, we’re Lancashire Business View. So the stories need to be appropriate to us. I don’t. It’s, you know, it’s one of those things, but you put. You get. Put on big mailing lists, so you receive stuff from out of town. I get that. But when it’s more. More, you know, most of the people who deal with us are pretty local to us. We get some agencies from out of town, out of the county, wanting to engage with us. But I think fundamentally, let’s have a story, not just a message that’s being repeated on behalf of the client. And I think that requires a little bit of strength from.

Richard
From the PRs, not necessarily to print what the. The client wants, but to print what they know is going to work. So I think that. I think that’s what it. I think that’s perhaps where I’d land is be strong with your clients. Be strong when you’re talking to the media. But negotiation is the wrong word. But Is this going to work? Is this idea going to work for you? And then. Then, you know, where might it work for us? You know, we’re online as well as in print. I think the print is the credibility function of what we are in some respects, but we have events as well. It might be better that your client is facing a live audience. You know, think about the channels that we have, and not just us, but other media as well. What channels do they have?

Richard
What is appropriate for your clients? What are you? What are you trying to achieve?

Tony
Yeah. And I guess one of the things that you’re really strong on is audience first, not client first. And consider that when you’re talking about channels, it’s what audience is going to be reading or at that event, or so. And I guess when they, when we get it wrong as an industry and we, you know, we ain’t got any hair loss here at Viva. But when we get it wrong, what does it cost us?

Richard
Oh, that’s a good question. Because what we like, what the media likes, is working with people that they can work with on various levels. Does it feel like this story is going to be decent? And it, you can be coloured by who has sent you that story. I’m not sure it costs you anything, but I do think it has the potential to make journalists think, they’re not quite getting this. Who are they representing? Are they understanding what we are? Because we do our best to explain what we are. And you know, what you can’t do in journalism is hide what you are because we show it in our, in what we do, our outputs. So I think it’s making sure that. I don’t think it’s a cost.

Richard
I just think it becomes a little bit tiresome if it becomes a regular thing where somebody’s presenting material. It isn’t going to work for us, and having to explain again why that’s not going to work for us and how. But then again, you know, it comes back to that negotiation or that conversation piece. We can help with that. We will help you make it fit better for our audience. But I don’t want to be rewriting stuff as if a PR would. I want to be doing journalism.

Tony
Yeah, that’s interesting journalism. You’ve talked about the story with an arc and so on. Can we get under the bonnet of what is a story in your eyes? I want to touch readers a story. I’ve just had that thought as were doing that kind of like trot down memory lane. The first time I came across Richard was. I heard about him, I, I hadn’t actually met him yet, but Richard had gone up to Newcastle on the training course for the Thompson Newspapers training course. And on his first day into the offices there in the centre of Newcastle, he’d seen a fire engine, followed it and ended up with that day’s page one scoop in the Newcastle Chronicle. So I hated him, obviously.

Richard
Yeah, well, you flatter me. But it was within the first three or four weeks of being on that training course. But I’d already had it drummed into me. If something looks interesting, go and have a look. Don’t. Don’t go the other way. Go and have a look. But this ambulance flew past me at massive speed. Just. I was coming into Newcastle and so I just followed it. And by the way, that’s a habit. It took a long time to break that habit. I can now not chase a fire engine, or I can now manage it. But it is true.

Tony
But I mentioned that really, because you’ve got an instinct for a story, I think an inbuilt instinct for what good looks like. And get impatient when other people haven’t got that instinct and that kind of knowledge and experience, so help them. What are you looking for?

Richard
So this is sometimes the problem with PRs and with journalism, actually, is that the story gets buried. We lose the story in a flurry of we are delighted. You know, we are thrilled to announce that we’ve employed a junior technician. I don’t want to be thrilled.

Tony
Just.

Richard
Just tell me the story. That’s you being thrilled. It’s not a story. What is a story is that we’ve employed a junior technician. This person is going to contribute this. This is why it makes our business better. This is why it’ll make it better for our customers. We can carry some of that. But the “we are thrilled” is hard work.

Tony
And then what? What are the things that kind of genuinely excite, that take a mundane or a run-of-the-mill thing up a level?

Richard
Even for us, as a business title, there’s a human-interest element, you know, and if you look through the pages of the magazine or online, you know, we’re still a people product. I think it’s nice to have great pictures of beautiful products and machinery, but really, what does it mean to the people within the business? What does it mean to people outside the business? What does it mean to Lancashire as a whole that this investment is being made? You know, it goes beyond the numbers into something a little bit wider, I think. And so, what am I looking for? I want to feel like there’s a reason to publish. It’s obvious, I could say it’s something new, and most times it’s not something new. Most times, it’s a variation on something. And that’s all right.

Richard
But as a business title, we want the obvious things. We want to know how much has been invested, what is invested in, where it’s going, why it’s going to improve your exports, blah, blah. It’s the nuts and bolts. Are still important to us.

Tony
Who, what, where, when?

Richard
Who, what, where, when, why? And start. You know, we want you to start with the best thing, you know, that’s how we try to tell a story. You know, our features are slightly different, but our news stories are very much driven by the very old-fashioned. They’re not old-fashioned, the new-fashioned values of who, what, where, when, why.

Tony
Obviously, these days we don’t need to know any of that. We, we just, we’ve got ChatGPT, and you know, we can just fire that off to you, can’t we? And you’ll be well happy with that.

Richard
Love it. There’s nothing that makes me happier than seeing a bit of copy that’s clearly AI-written.

Tony
Telltale signs.

Richard
That’s the obvious things. Headers, you know, subheadings, sentences that are all very similar length. Triplets this, that and the other. A summary line at the very end that makes it feel like you’ve just read a very modest thesis. The thing is Tony, right, machines aren’t reading these things. Human beings are reading these things. And human-written language has a rhythm and a cadence that is easily recognised. I don’t think you have to be trained in the media to feel that maybe that could change, maybe that could change, but I don’t think so. So if you are going to use A.I. You know, I get it, we use it for a research tool. We use it for all kinds of reasons. But the one thing we don’t use it for is writing. But you can see it, and it is.

Richard
Yeah, folks, you write, you’re writing for people, not for machines.

Tony
How does it land when you receive something, you know, what does it mean for you guys?

Richard
Well, I don’t have to do. I do some of our editing. I don’t do an awful lot of our writing, but I do some editing. And this might be in an editorial format rather than a traditional format. And you just know when it lands. It’s going to take me longer to sub-edit AI material back into human English than it will to rewrite some modest quality advertorial copy. But you know, that copy can often be driven by too much of the we are thrilled kind of stuff.

Tony
Yeah. So, I guess though, if you know, we’re in a landscape where the scarcity element is space, you can only fit so many stories in, and you’ve only got a limited amount of time to be subbing stories. I’m guessing AI drivel might get knocked off the page.

Richard
Yes, it can. And part of the reason for that is that I’m not sure that AI necessarily understands the objectives behind why you’ve given us that story. And there are conversations that take place before press releases are sent out, and we’re trying to achieve a thing with this thing. Those objectives are much more clear and the stories are much more clear and the storytelling is much more clear when it’s done by a human hand and when it’s, when it does have little quirks of grammar or quirks of punctuation. Those are all. That’s okay, that’s. That’s better for me than receiving this pristine copy with this, that and the other, and summaries and subheadings throughout a story.

Tony
You set up Lancashire Business View 20 years ago. You know, it’s a. It’s a well-respected regional business tile now. What were you hoping to achieve and what was, what was the spark behind it?

Richard
Well, I think. Can I go back one step from that? So it’s the birth of Lancashire Business View. It wasn’t my idea. It was literally brought to me. I was working in an agency when I first heard this. I was, you know, an advertising and marketing agency. I was working in after leaving journalism. And it was brought to us was this idea by the Chamber of Commerce who said, we’d like you to produce our house magazine. And my boss asked me my opinion, and I said it would be good fun to do this, and we could definitely do it, but I’m not sure that we should because it will be clearly a house magazine. It’ll be clearly from a perspective, and it’ll be difficult to put what I wanted in there, which would be independent journalism stories, proper stuff.

Richard
Stuff that I was brought up on.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
So anyway, we pushed back on it, and then the opportunity came to me again when I set up my PRs business. And then, from the same people came to me and tried. Tried it again, and I said, I’ll do it, but whatever you’re thinking of investing into that, give me some of that and let me do it as an independent title. I’ll give you a voice in there, and I’ll make it clear you connected, but let me go independently with it. That was really important to me because it allowed us to be storytellers, not message repeaters. Yeah, I guess so. That was, that was the birth of it. And we started exclusively as a print title, with I can’t remember how many were printing this out, a few thousand. Probably.

Richard
Probably not much different to what we’re printing now, to be honest. But I think what it evolved, and I still need to remind myself that I don’t lead a business magazine, a leader, a business that has created a business community or has contributed to creating a business community through online, through events and through a business title. But if that’s the difference now, it’s that we’re not a multimedia business. It’s not that we’re a business community where we’re there to, in some ways, support the Lancashire business community, in some ways to challenge it. But fundamentally, what I see in my job is how do I connect Lancashire better? How do I get Lancashire talking to each other? Because I got. I got really hungry. You’ll know this. Anybody in Lancashire will know that I have a catchphrase, I have a couple. But the one that I really like is if you can buy it in Lancashire, buy it in Lancashire. And I’m literally saying, you know, you can engage law firms and PR businesses and marketing agencies and web developers, and they’re all here, they’re all on our doorstep. Let’s try and support our business community best as we can without becoming overprotective about the boundaries.

Tony
Yeah. I mean, it’s a fabulous ethos, and I know it. You do walk the walk. As well as talk the talk. You’ve got one flyer out of council together, but you. You actually do bring people together and, you know, make those connections, and we’ve talked about it in the past that good days for you are when you hear about deals that are being done from the people you’ve brought together.

Richard
There is nothing better than somebody saying, great example. I’ll put an advertising example. Somebody. It was a massive double-page advert. It was a great advert. I remember it running for a government body. It was Rosebud, actually. And that attracted one of their biggest clients, which was Panache Cruises, one of the biggest businesses of its kind on the planet. And that brought them together. So that was good. So knowing that. Knowing that people are talking as a result of things we do, but it’s, you know, also big deals that happen as a result of the work that we do, I put some, you know, in a roundtable conversation environment, I really encourage people to keep talking after the event. That’s another thing we should perhaps talk about later is the idea of I don’t see things as fixed here.

Richard
And now see them as stepping stones towards something bigger that you don’t necessarily know what it is. But yeah, I think our job is to connect a community or connect the counties with. That’s another one of the phrases. We are here to connect the county in order that we can bolster the strength of the Lancashire business community, which is, you know, it’s pretty strong.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
You know, we’re just behind city region of Liverpool in terms of GVA, which makes us, you know, perhaps people miss that, is that Lancashire is a strong economy, we’re a mixed economy, which gives us plenty to talk about. We’ve got a bazillion local authorities, which gives us plenty to talk about. And local government reorganisation is very much in our minds.

Tony
So.

Richard
Yeah, but. So I suppose it started as a magazine, going back to the question. Started as a magazine. Events were brought in, online was brought in, socials were brought in as these things happened. But we’re a small business.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
You know, we’re not mega, we’re independent. There’s not. You’ve been to our offices. What are you, you know, you count the freelancers, and everybody else is nine or 10 of us. It’s not like we’re 150 people generating this. So we have to work hard at what we do and prioritise what we do. And fundamentally, we prioritise: Is this going to benefit our community, and is this going to support our business?

Tony
Yeah. And obviously being a publisher brings lots of different challenges, but from a PR’s perspective, I guess you get thrown at you this accusation that you’ve got your own favourites in terms of, you know, the stories that you print, and how would you bat that away and how do you make sure that, you know, from an ethical perspective you don’t have favourites?

Richard
Well, it’s less; perhaps you hear it more than I do. That’s the reason. So, do we have a favourite? I think all journalists have favourites, but they are people who respond speedily. They are people who give you stuff that you know is going to work. There are people who make things happen, maybe act as fixers. And we do need our PR agencies to fix things for us sometimes, you know, we need help us with the client, we need a photo, give us a time and a place, that sort of thing. So that doesn’t mean protection. So we have to do difficult stories about organisations that we have a commercial arrangement with or a long-standing editorial story flow from. But what I would say is fair is that it’s good working with people that are good to work with.

Richard
So what you really want is quick responses. You want accurate material. You want sometimes for PRs or a marketing agency to help you fit, you know, be a fixer in certain areas that does make you feel good about certain organisations. There’s no question we know it’s going to come on time. We know that they understand our pressures as well as their own. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t do the difficult stories we do with exactly the same group of people on, you know, clients or businesses out there. If they do something that we need to report, that’s a difficult story, we will report that difficult story. And I think as I’ve got older-

Tony
Even if that was to cost you some advertising revenue down the line, it would, you know, we have to have that journalistic rigour.

Richard
We have, we have to. And that’s why I employ editors so that I don’t make those decisions. So I step back, and what the editor says is the final decision. So yeah, I don’t think it’s probably not as black and white as I’m making it sound, actually. But yeah, if there are job losses, we’ll do that story. If there are big losses, we’ll do that story. If there’s an industrial accident and it’s a, it’s our kind of story, we’ll do that story. There are some stories that aren’t our stories. You know, there might be some big in-depths that we see by a huge resourced media organisation that do touch our patch, but we can’t go quite that far.

Tony
Interesting. I mean, the other thing that you’ve mentioned already is events, and you’ve put on well over a thousand events, I guess.

Richard
I don’t know, actually. I suppose if I count, it must be way above 600.

Tony
Right. So, I would say you’re a bit of an expert at putting on events, and you know, for any of our listeners who are working in that PR agency world, are in-house, and they’re handed a small budget to put on an event.

Richard
Yeah.

Tony
What’s the checklist that they need to think about, or the kind of practical things that maybe ChatGPT wouldn’t perhaps tell you that you’ve, you’ve learned through the school of hard knocks?

Richard
I think pacing is really important.

Tony
Right.

Richard
So I like my events to run quick. I take a lot of inspiration from radio shows. You know, 12-minute blocks, right? You know, news 12-minute block adverts or in the BBC in-house adverts, another 12 or 13 minute block back to the news.

Tony
Where did you learn that?

Richard
I don’t. Just listening, right. You know, it’s just how I like to listen. The One Show is a good example of how you can do an event. You know, they’ve got 30 minutes or whatever it is, and they might get through eight guests and two cutaways. And so for me, I like speed. I like, I like lots of things for people to see and be engaged with. I also think that you need to entertain at events. And another thing I like to say is if they’re not smiling, they’re not listening, or you know, if I. You can tell when people are disengaged at an event, so you’ve got to work hard to re-engage them. So, speed entertainment space is really important I think events. So we like any good event.

Richard
I think one way of judging an event I think is how long have people stayed after you finish the event. That’s a good one because they’re talking. So what’s my job at an event? Yes, I’m generating editorial content for maybe a six-page feature. But also, I want those businesses talking to each other. So I’ve got to create space. So you’ll see at my award anything awards-related that we do, I don’t put entertainment on over dinner, for example. Now lots of people do, and I go to those events and they’re great, but I don’t. And the reason is that’s my time. I can give people an hour and a half or two hours at a big awards event, where they can go and talk to other people.

Richard
And if I’m blasting their senses through that point, at that point, then I’m reducing an opportunity to do what they want to do, which is to go and get some more work or say hello to an old contact or something like that. So I think all those things are really important. I do have a rule as well. I would say this for event managers. It’s the police rule, and it is don’t run. Don’t run anywhere in events. If you’re an event manager on Eventbrite, don’t run. If people see you running, it’s like watching a police officer run. You go, what the hell’s happening here? Yeah, so that’s the way. So you’ve got to be the swan. You’ve got to be. We know how stressful events are. You did start this question with somebody’s given a small budget to run an event with. I would. If you’re given a small budget to run an event. I instantly challenge the size of the budget. Anybody who commissions an event, as in who’s not done events before, has no idea how complex even the smallest event is.

Tony
Well, we’re talking about events we’ll move on to, like the biggest one that you do every year. The Red Rose Awards annually gets over a thousand people together in a room for you. What makes that special?

Richard
It’s an absolute joy. It’s really hard work. First of all, it’s not one night. It is, it is one night, but it’s now a 10, almost 12-month campaign. The red Rose Awards. We’ve had very little downtime from it. What makes it special is we, it is, it’s kind of brings to life everything we do in the magazine and online. It brings people together, and you’re right, you know, it’s a thousand people. It didn’t start like that. We didn’t imagine that’s what we could pull off. We, we decided to put on an awards event for Lancashire. I booked a room that had a capacity of about 250 to 300, and on the first day of putting ticket sales out, we sold all those tickets. So we had to shift into the biggest available room in the county, which is at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool.

Richard
So it’s special because it’s a coming together of so many things, but it’s the. My actual favourite part of the Red Rose Awards are the judging days. And so we do pick various stages of judging, but the final part of the judging is when businesses come to meet our judges. And I love those days because you can, we have them waiting in a chamber before they go in to see their judging panels, and you can have a business that’s turning over a couple of hundred million with a startup that’s turning over 25 grand.

Richard
And they’re both nervous, and they’re both a bit edgy, but I love those environments because in that environment I get to just get people talking in that anteroom and try and introduce people to each other and create conversation points because I want them to go away, whether they win or don’t win. I want them to go away with a bag full of new contacts, and they can do more business.

Tony
I think every PR listening to this will have spent their time writing, drafting those award applications on behalf of clients or the agency themselves. Producer Max here has been scribbling away for one of our clients all week for a trade awards, and credibility is everything. How do you ensure that the right people are getting the right awards? What processes do you put in place?

Richard
It’s quite lengthy. So bed in.

Tony
Headlines. Then.

Richard
It starts with a written entry. The only touch me and my team have is on that first written entry. And the only touch on that is are they eligible to enter? So are they based in the county? Might be. Sometimes they’re allowed to enter three, they might enter two and forget to enter the export award. So we’ll tell them, you know, you could have entered the export award as well. So that’s the only touch we have is to ensure that they’re eligible. Then we send the paper entries to one of our judging partners, which is a global RSM, which is a global auditing business. They do the first run. So we get independent people do the first run against the entry forms, knock our long lists down to 12, those 12s per category, then go to a judging panel.

Richard
That judging panel of four or five people will stay with that entry throughout the process. So, they will then do a paper exercise and bring that 12 down to six. So we’ve now got six finalists. Those six finalists are invited to meet their judging panels. And this takes place over two days. We have whatever, 24 panels. We have one panel per award. Most panels do two awards. And so the competitors then come to us or come to our judges. They get royally entertained by being introduced to each other, and then they go through that interview process where the real credibility comes in, I think, is that day they give us the winner. They don’t use scoring matrices. They can, and if they want to.

Richard
But we think it’s a much better system when it is by discussion and by negotiation and not by numbers.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
That is really difficult to wait. But the crucial bit is that every judge knows who the winner is in that room. And then they give us a piece of paper, we put them out. You know, they happily sign an NDA to not say anything, and that’s it. So the truth of the matter is, it’s credible because we don’t have an influence on it. The judges make the decision. Sometimes I get asked, you know, they’ll sometimes get called into a judging panel, so we can’t decide between A and B. And I’m basically saying, “that’s your problem.” They may ask me, have they won one before?

Tony
Before?

Richard
And I said, don’t look it up. That’s not relevant. Have they won another one in these awards? Again, I don’t know, but it’s not relevant. You’re picking winners, and it’s your choice, not mine. So I, we, all I do is give them the rules, guidance if they need it.

Tony
From your perspective, even though you’re not on the judging panel, you’ve had many years now being involved in these things. What makes a good award entry?

Richard
A successful winning entry, what they like are, is evidence. So they like a few numbers, they like a few anecdotes, they like a few outputs, and they want to know has it, is there a greater good element? That’s the vibe I get, or the feeling I get from the judges, is that little list. So I think storytelling is so important and the ability to tell a story. And again, I saw quite a lot of AI entries this year, and I don’t think they’re as strong as people think they are. They might get all the information down, but there’s again, you lose a little bit of humanity.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
So if you are going to use AI for awards entries, and frankly, why wouldn’t you, to get it going, go back to it and make it feel like it’s been presented by a group of humans.

Tony
But I guess if you’ve got that judging process, you can’t send the robots into the room to meet the judges. You’ve got to, you’ve got to be able to talk through it.

Richard
Well, you’ve got to stand up and describe, you know, you’ve got to discuss that written entry. You’re going to be probed on that written entry for half an hour by our judging panel. So you’ve got to know your stuff. And that again, one of the problems with AI, I think, is you generate all these words, but because they’ve been generated slightly to one side, you might not feel as strong about them as if you spent an extra half an hour doing them yourself.

Tony
When the trophy is on the shelf, what do most people get wrong or not? Do you know they’ve had a great night? Thick head trophies here.

Richard
End off well, end of is the worst thing you can possibly do. And I would urge the PRs who are tuned into this to remind your clients what they’re there for. And winning a prize is nice, but we’re really there for. What you’re really there for to support your clients with is business development and business support and whatever your objectives are. It might be that you’re working on the brand or you’re working on a storytelling campaign or whatever it is, but you’ve been engaged to help them make their businesses stronger in some way or another. Is the follow-up. Yeah, it’s the follow-up. If there’s no follow-up, don’t expect to win clients from it. And it’s not just about winning either. You’ve seen me talk about this.

Richard
If you’ve been a sponsor or a judge, a finalist or a winner, that’s your calling card to go back to all the other people, to go to the sponsors, the judges, the other finalists, and say, I was a finalist in this, like you fancy a cup of tea and start it there. So the follow-up is the most important thing. And again, reflecting on some of the great wins of Red Rose Awards, because I think, I don’t know if we’ve named it. Yeah, it’s Red Rose Awards. The great wins are the things that happen in the bar afterwards. It doesn’t matter if you’ve won or not. It’s just people meeting each other for the first time. I’ve seen a deal, an 80 grand deal, happen over a pint, and I went back the following week and said, did it happen?

Richard
Yeah, it happened. So you know that if you want to make it work, you’ve got to work it. Don’t think that’s it, and exploit it as well. Exploit it into your trade media avenues. Trade media wants stories, and a simple three-part story about winning an award in Lancashire will land. So why not do that? So do the media follow up, but remind your clients why they’re really there, and that’s to meet other people, meet other businesses and try and make things happen for their business.

Tony
Yeah. Reflecting on your kind of various hats that you’ve worn over the years. And we haven’t even mentioned Richard the Rock Star.

Richard
No…

Tony
But like, what’s the thread that kind of connects them? You think, you know, when you do take a moment and look.

Richard
Back and look through it, it’s the community element. There’s no question. It’s about bringing people together one way or another, whether it’s through words in a magazine, words and video, pictures, online conversations, on the socials, live spaces, or events. Trying to create a community that other people want to be part of and that I want to be part of. You know, it’s, you know, journalism, really. A nice round table. I don’t know if you can see it on there, but journalism used to sit outside the circle, and that’s the best place for it. But we’ve got one foot in it, and the one foot in it is because we are a business affected by the same decisions, reps affected in different ways. Or in the same ways, but we’re affected. Like every other business in Lancashire, we are a Lancashire business.

Richard
So we can’t help but have a foot in that community, and I think that helps us say the things on behalf of the council we want to say. And a lot of what we want to say is this morning I’ve hosted a roundtable about tourism and leisure, and we were talking about innovation and noise making. The things that we learn for tourism and leisure could be applied to manufacturing, education, and professional services. So, the things that. Can we just be useful? That’s it. Being useful is, is a big part of what I think. I think we are.

Tony
Yeah. I guess if an agency owner is listening to this or watching this, and they were going to take one thing out of the conversation, what tip might you give them to think about or to consider?

Richard
Do not be afraid of talking to us. Ask us, right, Tell us what you’ve got in mind. Come to us, talk to the media. We’re in the broad of the same game. We’re all, we’re all storytellers at heart. So talk to us. Yeah, talk to us. I think that’s the main thing I would say.

Tony
Yeah, I think it’s weird in there. We’re in a world of like multi communication devices, channels, teams, chats and all of this. But picking the phone up, pick the-

Richard
Pick the phone up. I know. Another thing I’d say is to challenge your clients, you know, don’t just repeat what they say. You know best. That’s why they’ve engaged you. Be a consultant, be that consultant. Have the strength to say, this isn’t going to land.

Tony
Yeah.

Richard
And then, as an example, we received this, which happens very, very rarely. But I’ve got a statement; it was a good story. Got a statement from a business, and they said, you must print this word-for-word. And I instantly went, well, that isn’t happening because it’s not especially well written, and it doesn’t fit our style, and it’s not what we’re expecting, and we’re not going to do that. Literally went back and said, no. And they said, oh, why not? So, because it’s not right for us. So, if you want to withdraw the story, that’s fine. It took about 15 minutes to come back and say, okay, fair enough. It’s not like we’re going to invent stuff, is it? Just, yeah, let us do our job.

Tony
As we wrap up. Just again, give you the chance to kind of reflect on, you know, you. You’ve got so many fingers in so many pies. I’m just curious to. To know which of the days that re you. You really like getting out of bed with a spring in your step, that you’re really looking forward to.

Richard
Well, there is no greater joy for me than to be invited through the door that says no entry. Just getting to look behind the scenes at things. And also, I’m at a point now where if somebody says to me, I’m going to tell you something now, but it’s a secret. It’s a secret, you know, that’s it. You know, I know that people trust me. It can take some people a while, you know, but I have to be honest with that. So the springing of step stuff is. Oh my golly. Oh my golly. Don’t say oh my golly. Try not to say bad words. Oh my gosh. I’m going to get to have a look behind the scenes at that. I feel that is an absolute privilege. I think PRs get that as well. And that urges all PRs to really look at everything.

Richard
You can go through every door and have a look right around the business that you. That you’re representing or the organisation you’re representing. Because it’s that old journalism story, isn’t it? Is that behind every door there is a story. Rubbish. Behind every door, there are about 200 stories. You just have to go digging for them. So I love seeing the stuff that other people are unable to get a look at.

Tony
Richard Slater, thank you so much. We could rant all day and talk about the old days all day long, and often we have, but we’ll not inflict that on the listening and watching public. But thank you so much for your time today.

Richard
Genuinely a pleasure. Thanks for having me. It’s been huge fun.

Tony
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