Reports of the grid’s demise greatly exaggerated

I’ve seen several reports recently asserting that Labour will be scrapping its news management ‘grid’ in the coming election.

The grid seeks to control the news agenda by mapping out a sequence of proactive stories for each daily news cycle.  It played a crucial role in Labour’s 1997 election victory, alongside the immediate rebuttal of opponents’ claims, and has been used by Labour in government ever since.

Alex Hilton, writing in PR Week, argues that Labour would be wrong to scrap the grid. He is right. It is easy to see a link between the relaxation of the grid approach (with each main government department expected to provide a ‘story a day’, and No10 selecting one of these to be the main government item for the day) when Gordon Brown took over and pledged an ‘end to spin’, and the government’s woeful public relations ever since.  Every day the government looks to be responding to the news agenda rather than setting it as it used to.

But I think reports of the grid’s demise are greatly exaggerated.  If you look at what Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election co-ordinator, actually said in the Guardian last week, he was simply noting that the grid approach of 1997 – where the morning papers set the battelground for the day and the evening broadcasts reflected on who had won  – is not enough anymore.

Fewer people read the daily papers and watch the evening broadcasts.  With established 24 hour news outlets and online media increasingly breaking stories, plans to set the news agenda need to be more flexible and imaginative.  So tactics need to change.  But the concept of mapping out a sequence of stories to tell a broader narrative is here to stay.  The question this year is not “who will have a grid?” but “whose grid will win the battle to control the news agenda”?