After #milifandom, my experience of tracking down unlisted telephone numbers and addresses

You’d have thought News International would have learned after the phonehacking scandal, but a new problem has come about, following the accusation from the 17-year-old girl who started #milifandom that The Sun and Rupert Murdoch is bullying her.

The girl, who has only identified herself as Abby, is too young for the electoral roll and had not disclosed her location when The Sun turned up on both her doorstep and that of her 70-year-old grandmother.

Understandably, she’s a bit miffed.

What I remember

Over a decade ago, I was working for a newspaper organisation on a freelance basis and was trying to track down relatives of some of the contestants of a reality TV show.

This was pre-Facebook and Twitter (and much other social media), so the online resources were nowhere as good back then.

However, one thing we had access to was a database of UK addresses and their inhabitants. You could basically put any name in and it would spit out all the addresses that contained someone of that name.

It showed all the residents of each address and how long they’d been registered there (including minors), regardless of their electoral roll status (I don’t know how).

No telephone numbers, though. For that, we started off by going to 192.com and putting in the specific address we’d identified. More often that not, we found what we were looking for.

However, I remember an instance when I couldn’t get hold of the details I was desperately searching for. Fortunately, there were other methods.

A full-time colleague handed me a telephone number and told me ‘not to shout about it’, but just call with the name and address details.

Sure enough, the bloke who answered did a bit of tapping on his keyboard and came up with the number.

In fact, I’d managed to write down the wrong number of the house on the piece of paper I was using, but he calmly said: “Are you sure you mean No.15? There’s someone at No.18 with that surname, not No.15.”

I got a landline and a mobile number and it cost around £100 (although I wasn’t paying out my own pocket, of course).

This was over 10 years ago, so I can’t believe for a second that things aren’t more sophisticated now.

Will the General Election 2015 sound the death knell for traditional print media influence?

Sun front page 1992It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice in the UK that there is a General Election about to happen. There has been coverage almost everywhere on all possible media channels.

But how you have engaged with the election is the thing that may well have changed in 2015.

For years, the daily newspapers have wielded huge clout. The infamous Sun front page in 1992, after Neil Kinnock failed to unseat John Major’s Tory government is a classic example.

Fast forward 5 years and Rupert Murdoch’s endorsement of Tony Blair in 1997 was considered enormously important to the first Labour victory since James Callaghan in the 1970s. 

And it’s not hard to see why. Up until the mid-2000s, front pages of national newspapers were seen and read by millions.

This was, of course, before the mass adoption of the internet and, specifically, social media, both of which have contributed strongly towards the huge decline in newspaper circulation.

To give you some idea of the seismic dip, here are the 1997 and 2015 figures for four popular newspapers:

Newspaper 1997 2015 Drop (%)
The Sun 3,877,097 1,978,702 ?49
The Mirror 2,442,078 992,935 ?59
The Telegraph 1,129,777 494,675 ?56
The Guardian 428,010 185,042 ?56

The campaign in 2015

Not all ‘old’ media is taking a hit, though. TV is still an extremely important medium for all political parties. Although ‘linear’ watching has declined with the rise of catch-up services, the viewing figures for the ITV Leaders debate shows that people are still switching onto important events.

However, as demonstrated above by dwindling newspaper figures, the sway that newspapers hold is much smaller.

And where newspapers’ influence is shrinking, so their fear of online is becoming clearer and clearer. Case in point this week was the news that Ed Miliband was interviewed by Russell Brand for his YouTube channel The Trews.

The reaction of the right-wing media has been, frankly, hysterical, as shown by tweet below.

And the reason for this is quite simple. To misappropriate a popular ad campaign from the 80s: people like Russell Brand reaches the parts of the electorate that newspapers can’t reach.

Brand’s online demographic is the young, the disaffected, the new generation of voters who couldn’t give a stuff about what The Sun or The Telegraph is saying.

The newspapers fear this. And the only way they can think of to counter this is stir up their own brand of fear (pun not intended).

How the web is unravelling spin

What’s also noticeable during this election is that only the most robust of facts is being allowed to stand.

On 27 April, The Telegraph published a letter signed by 5,000 small businesses saying they support the Tories.

Before the end of the day was out, it was revealed that the letter had been orchestrated by the Conservative party itself, contained duplicate names and not every signee agreed to have their name added.

Once again proof that the power that newspapers once had has been slowly undermined. The media landscape has changed so greatly that they will never achieve that might again.

Do all brands have to be human in their communications?

My mate Rob tweeted a spectacularly cold and impersonal text message from his insurance company the other day, asking quite understandably where the ‘humanity’ was in this particular brand.

One of the replies we got (after my retweet) was as follows

As a believer in companies having a strong tone and voice, Oliver’s reply made me stop and think. Obviously, insurance isn’t a sexy or even particularly personal industry, but does that absolve those sorts of companies from being ‘human’ in their communications? Continue reading “Do all brands have to be human in their communications?”