Document(s) 11 de 11

The Press Campaign

The first step to publicizing the Brazilian Youth and Democracy study – which began in November 2005 and was conducted in three stages over a one-year period – was to understand the nature of the survey. The study’s goal was concrete and clearly defined since the study was designed to produce results that would influence public policies.

Another key facet of the survey was that it was intended to detect the opportunities for participation available to young people, with an eye on the democratization process underway in Brazilian society. It was not simply designed to profile young people in the major urban centres, such as other work carried out and published on youth in recent times. From the onset these two features pointed to two key target audiences: public policy-makers from throughout Brazil and young people themselves.

Once these parameters had been laid out, the press advisors worked to give the greatest possible exposure to the study’s results and conclusions. They also worked to bring official information to the general public and, more importantly, to these interested groups. One constant concern voiced from the onset of the study was how to minimize the risk inherent in making any study public, which is the mistaken or distorted interpretation of the results. Therefore, the challenge became how to best make the results and conclusions ‘newsworthy’.

^* Rogério Jordão is a journalist and press advisor to Ibase.

Defining a strategy

A decision was made to avoid exclusivity (journalistic jargon for making the results available to only one publication or channel, with the idea of gaining more editorial coverage) with any media outlet. This decision guarded against the fear that if the interpretation was distorted a good part of the publicity work would also be undermined. Additionally, once material is published exclusively by one outlet, their competition is unlikely to be interested in the material and the results of the study are brought only to the attention of people who read one particular part of one particular newspaper.

The second step taken was to design a plan on how our regional partners would participate in publicizing the findings since the survey was conducted in seven metropolitan regions and the Federal District by various local organizations and institutions. The national press campaign was therefore designed to run in coordination with the local campaigns. The regional partners would work with their local data, but before they released this information to the local press, they would receive the interpreted national findings.

In some cases, the press office advised people by telephone on how to work effectively with the press, and what information to highlight and how to do so. The partners were e-mailed a step-by-step guide to getting press coverage. We all shared the single goal of ensuring the widest possible exposure without distorting the findings. Articles appeared in newspapers in all the metropolitan regions covered by the survey, adding to the wealth of interpretations.

The regional campaigns were an important step, which in addition to the national press, eventually secured a substantial presence in the press of all the metropolitan regions polled. With only rare exceptions, the regional campaigns followed the same lines as the national campaign, which was advantageous since it sent across a more clear-cut message.

Step-by-step

As soon as the report was finalized, the press advisors met with the national coordinators to draw out the study’s key conclusions and information. Next, an eight-page press summary and draft a press release were prepared.

At first, the main key message communicated to the press was the phrase that opens the press release: ‘Young people in the big cities are willing to participate more in public affairs and collective action – as long as these yield benefits to society (and suitable channels are available for them to participate).’

In the press summary we included the information about participation first. The survey showed a potential for participation, but it was only clear after a comparative reading of the final report. That is to say, although it was evident when the information was qualified, there was no single datum pointing to that conclusion. Therefore we highlighted the fact that, despite a clear disbelief in formal politics, the desire to participate was present although diffuse.

The information which we emphasized included data on opening up channels for dialogue (85 per cent agreed with the phrase ‘Channels have to be opened up for dialogue between citizens and government’); following political affairs fairs (65.6 per cent tried to keep themselves informed about politics); and how the Dialogue Groups were perceived – the qualitative stage of the study revealed that the young were eager to ‘do something’, especially actions with visible results.

Synthesizing the findings about participation was fundamentally important. Much of the data if taken in isolation could just confirm the common notion that young people are uninterested, which is certainly part of the truth. However, the real, original value of the study was just the opposite. It revealed a willingness to participate, and this provided an opening and opportunity for public policies.

There was no question of playing down what we did not want to show. In addition to the summary which was given to the press to facilitate the journalists’ work, the full report was always available to anyone interested. Our intention was to organize the information so that it would be understood by a broader audience. The experience demonstrated how important it is to offer the press a self-explanatory and quickly understood summary of the results when working with this kind of study.

Results

Three press campaigns were run in the space of one year. The first was designed to win over political editorial staff. Generally speaking, the press faithfully reproduced the study’s main findings. This was a bonus because it is not uncommon for journalists to pull out certain points and shift the interpretation.

The first newspaper to publish an article was O Estado de São Paulo, which has the fourth largest circulation in Brazil. Under the headline ‘Youth disapprove of politicians’, the reporter stressed that ‘Most politicians do not represent the public’s interests. That is the opinion of 64.7 per cent of young Brazilians. Nonetheless, 85 per cent of them feel that channels must be opened up for dialogue between citizens and government, because politics is an indispensable avenue for securing rights’.

That first news item – which very often has a cascade effect in influencing subsequent coverage – was helpful in that it emphasized the information on participation. Particularly it emphasized young people’s understanding that dialogue is important, thereby countering the common notion that young are just not interested. In addition, it was strategically important that the article appeared in the newspaper’s politics section, rather than the youth section, which is read by a more restricted public and whose coverage tends to be less political.

A few days later, a second piece came out, this time on the most-watched channel in the state and in Brazil, RJTV (the Rio de Janeiro news programme on TV Globo). It opened by saying that young people ‘would like to participate more in public affairs’. The theme of participation was echoed by other leading media outlets. Agência Brasil, on the federal government’s Radiobrás channel, titled the piece ‘Survey signals young people’s readiness to participate in politics’. Folha Online, the Internet portal of the daily Folha de São Paulo, posted an article headlined ‘Young people show potential for participating in public affairs, says Ibase’.

Dozens of interviews were given to newspapers, TV channels and radio stations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (the core sources of national coverage), as well as in the regions involved in the survey. This initial coverage had a crucial effect, because the press actually did interpret the findings in the same way as the researchers, helping to present the study in the correct light. One of the main challenges in putting a study across to the press is to manage to get the conclusions (and not just some random data taken in isolation) into the ‘news’– and to get the media to help rather than hinder the process.

Ibase’s review Democracia Viva

In February 2006, three months after the first articles were published, the survey reappeared in the press in the daily Folha de São Paulo, which has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Brazil. The interest of one of its journalists was rekindled after reading about the survey in Ibase’s bimonthly review, Democracia Viva, which had devoted a special issue to the study. This example illustrates the importance of developing integrated communication strategies, where institutional communication – in this case, by Ibase – and press advisors work in harmony.

What prompted the article in the Folha de São Paulo was a graph published in Democracia Viva showing young people’s occupation rates. This piece of information was highlighted, because it showed – and this was the paper’s front-page headline – that ‘27 per cent of young people neither work nor study’. The prominence of the news piece spurred a new wave of exposure for the study – this time focusing not on participation, but on the realities facing young people in Brazil’s big cities.

After the Folha article, the survey was mentioned a number of times over the next few months in opinion pieces and articles in a variety of newspapers and on radio programmes. Once again the regional partners played a key role as the local press began to contact them looking for a local angle on the numbers of young people who have no occupation.

TV and alternative media

The third wave of coverage came in August 2006, nearly one year after the survey’s official launch. This time, it took place in the context of Brazil’s presidential elections. The time was ripe because the researchers had now put together a primer of youth-policy proposals (the main aim of the whole exercise) based on the survey results. The booklet was circulated to policy makers all over Brazil and to the presidential candidates. This move helped kindle a new spark and generate news and bring the theme of youth into the electoral debate.

In this third stage, the information distributed centred on young people’s demands and their proposals and it was captured by alternative press publications. The first to carry the news was Brasil de Fato, a left-wing newspaper with national circulation and penetration among social movements. This was followed by articles in Agência Carta Maior and in youth publications such as Viração, Onda Jovem and others.

Agência de Notícias do Direito da Infância (Andi, a children’s rights news agency) made a significant contribution by redistributing Ibase’s press release to its own mailing list. Andi, which commands enormous credibility among journalists and policy makers specializing in children and adolescents, even went so far as to use the research summary at a national seminar for communicators.

During this third phase, it was the TV news programmes more so than the printed press that took an interest in the figures, with the latter having covered them a year earlier. The survey was spotlighted by TV Globo’s Jornal Hoje, which reaches a national audience. From then on, the researchers were called in to speak on TV and radio talk shows all across Brazil, riding the momentum of the election campaign climate. By making its way onto television, the campaign had passed a key threshold and was now reaching young audiences. According to the survey, TV is the main source of information for 84.5 per cent of young people in Brazil’s metropolitan regions.

Document(s) 11 de 11