Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Arrested

Farzana Baduel (00:08):

Right. Hello. Hello. Welcome. It is a fabulous Friday. I can't believe we've finally got to the end of the week. What a long week. My God. Now welcome to the Week on span. The Week on Span is a weekly live look at the world through the eyes of the PR professional. That would be us. And my name is Farzana Baduel. I'm sitting in London, but my two brilliant co-hosts, David Gallagher, who is also in London with me and Doug Downs somewhere in the magical wilds of Canada.

Doug Downs (00:43):

How are you?

David Gallagher (00:46):

What a week? What a week. But hey guys, it's good to see you on the other end of the screen. Thanks for taking us in Farzana. I just want a quick reminder for people who are new to the show, which is all of you, since this is our only our second episode. But this is, I think the world's only live stream looking at the world through the eyes of the PR professional, and we draw inspiration from a few sources. First, there's this mega chat, the advisory club, WhatsApp chat, 1200 professionals around the world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, feeding observations about things that they see. So we draw very heavily from that community, and I hope that those from that community that are here will feel comfortable commenting in the sections. We also draw from GaN Farzana Stories and Strategies podcast series. And I will say this in a way that they might not feel comfortable. I think it's the best in our business. And I would, oh, go on, encourage you,

(01:42):

Sincerely encourage you to download it wherever you get your podcast. We try to draw some inspiration or at least some ideas from our own little heads. And again, we would really like this to be a conversation. So please put your observations. If you think we got something wrong and you think we missed something, please put in the chats and we'll do our best to bring them up onto the broadcast. So getting right into it. What a crazy week. And Doug, you might remember on Monday we were talking about this loose ball at a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game. Yeah,

Doug Downs (02:16):

Baseball, Karen, that was going to be the story. Baseball Karen.

David Gallagher (02:20):

And then we had the Trump Epstein birthday card, then we had the Israeli attack Airstrike on Doha. We had the British Prime Minister to the United States resigning. We had a Russian drone strike in Poland. Maybe I'm updating Farzana for the first time in real time possible life on Mars, or at least the best indication so far. I

Doug Downs (02:46):

Saw that

David Gallagher (02:46):

We had so much to choose from. And then the story emerged on, was it Wednesday, Thursday? Did reprehensible awful killing, shooting murder of Charlie Kirk in us. And I really think that's where we got to go first. And I know Doug, you've got some thinking on this, so I think you should take the first story today.

Doug Downs (03:07):

Well, there is. Thanks David. There is actually some breaking news on this too. Go ahead and roll video whenever you have a chance. The FBI has officially now, it was broken by President Trump this morning on Fox and Friends that a suspect is in custody. And I think most of us were okay until the FBI corroborates this, not so sure officially. Now the FBI director Cash Patel says they do have a suspect in custody's 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He was arrested within 33 hours of the shooting. CNN says he's politically unaffiliated. But this starts to begin the process of helping to fill this vacuum of information that's been out there because we really still don't have an official motive. I think most of us have leapt to conclusions on this. We sure as hell know what the motive probably was on this, but we don't know for certain.

(04:07):

I think that's one of the things we need to talk about, that we're in this vacuum of information right now. And there's misinformation, there's blatant disinformation out there and an awful lot of people trying to control the narrative. I thought President Trump was extremely divisive in his messaging. Here's an opportunity for a president to try to help build bridges guys. And he's been extremely divisive. I know he has to play to his audience. I get that. And they're banging for blood. But I thought the Democrat leadership was more, this is wrong. This is awful. End of sentence. I have seen some commentary particularly on Blue Sky that's basically saying, yes, the shooting was wrong, but have you heard some of the things that Charlie Kirk said in their effort to control the narrative? Can I just say that is horrible to do right now? Here's a simile to that. The shooting is wrong, but Charlie Kirk was a bad guy. Here's a simile to that. A woman was raped. That's awful. That should never happen. But if you've seen what she was wearing, that to me is the same context. How do you both feel about this control of the narrative that people are trying to establish?

David Gallagher (05:24):

Well, I'll jump in. I hadn't thought about that, that kind of comparison until you mentioned it before the show. And I'm still processing whether I think it's exactly analogous or not. But I take the point. I do think that the first thing that happened when this news broke on my timelines, which are pretty heavily American, was really kind of a lot of assumptions about what had happened and what it means. I think that's just human nature. I was in a conversation with somebody that I think in any breaking news story, we bring our own biases and prejudices into the frame and then we start looking for information to confirm that. So immediately people assume, oh, he was killed because of his political views or because his comments on other issues related to race or gender. And that could well be the case. But we don't know that that was the case. Other people said, oh, he is killed because he said bad things. We don't know that that was the case, but I think it almost didn't matter once the hair was let loose, we all started kind of forming our own theories about what had happened.

(06:34):

And YI know Farzana wants to comment as well. The other thing that I thought was interesting is that I think most of us got our news, I'm guessing on this. Most of us learned about this not from an actual news source, but social

Doug Downs (06:46):

Media on Twitter on X.

David Gallagher (06:49):

And sometimes they were breaking links to actual news sources, but a lot of times it was news creators, kind of influencers telling in case you didn't hear this happened and that automatically put it off into a direction that maybe wasn't entirely, but yeah, truly remarkable. Truly

Farzana Baduel (07:05):

Remarkable. From a PR perspective, when somebody passes away the obituary and what is said after they pass away, it forms part of their legacy. And so what you're also seeing playing out is you are seeing people who are attacking that legacy and others who are defending that legacy. And so that from a PR perspective, people have always often thought about how will they be remembered after they passed away? Often they would start thinking about that towards the latter part of their life. I mean, of course over here in this instance, we've had him taken in the prime of his life, which is incredibly sad. The other thing I wanted to also say, which is quite disturbing, is I have a teenage daughter. And so she just came home from school and she said, oh, I just saw the video. I just saw the video of him actually being shot.

(07:58):

And I said, how did that make you feel? She said, well, I wish I didn't see it. And I said, well, how did you see it? She said, oh, well a friend source sent it to me because it popped up in her feed. So now you also have a situation where you have previously these sort of images, very disturbing, very disrespectful as well, just to see that you think about his family, you think about his friends and you think about the emotional resonance of imagery like that. And that would normally be filtered or at least thought about, should it be put in the public domain, should it not, et cetera. But now what you are beginning to see is free reign with content like this, children having access to content on social media. And that gives rise to a whole different set of issues where

(08:42):

The impact of what people are seeing. And before you used to have producers who would sit and they would really think about the ethics of showing or not showing and thinking quite rightly about what about the friends and the family and the impact it would have, and do they all know fast before it goes in? But there is no filter content now has this level of velocity without filter. And in one way it's a great thing because we feel as if there isn't an agenda driven lens. And as the public, we want to be close to the truth or to the reality of what happened. But on the other hand, you also had this situation of children coming home from school and it coming up seeing it. Yeah, it's been WhatsApp to them or sent to them on Snapchat. And we think it's just us having conversations amongst ourselves, but there are children who are discussing this and also children who all of a sudden it feels quite close to home because it was done at a place of

Doug Downs (09:40):

Learning. So it feels

Farzana Baduel (09:43):

Different.

Doug Downs (09:44):

Another concern is safety and security perceptions. This was at a college, at a university, an organized event. It raises questions about safety policies, safety protocols, risk assessments, screenings. And can I just add in, will there be others who are willing to do this to be accessible in a public place and put themselves at risk? And still, I mean Charlie Kirk's whole shtick was rhetoric. It was argument for the sake of argument. And in that context, I can take it as healthy. Whether I agreed with Charlie Kirk or not, doesn't matter. It was argument. He had people who believed in what he was saying and he was offering rhetoric and I think he was killed for it. We don't completely know motive, but will others be willing to do the same?

David Gallagher (10:36):

I think it's a valid concern. Sorry, I mean to cut you off, Susanna mean, and again, it kind of speaks to how you see this. Was this a free speech issue? Was it a security issue? Is it a gun safety issue? Which is

Doug Downs (10:49):

All three?

David Gallagher (10:49):

It's all three and it can be all three at once. I am on an advisory board for a US university that has a concealed and open carry permit. And I've been worried not just because I don't know, this is a great idea, having kids walk around with guns, but for exactly something like this. So I have to think this has some sort of intended or unintended chilling effect on people's willingness to speak in public places.

Doug Downs (11:13):

And the risk of retribution for this too, of a revenge strike is high, very high. Right.

David Gallagher (11:20):

Well, and this goes back to your Yeah, and I don't think that the initial comments from the White House were helpful in that regard. I think in that moment, the time is to cool things down, wait for facts to come in, urge people to think about their families and their communities, not think about who they can punish. So I am worried that that kind of unleash them and not very helpful energy.

Farzana Baduel (11:44):

So question guys, who do you think got it right, who responded to it with empathy and not going down the sort of polarized route and scoring points? Who do you think actually you looked at their response and you thought, yeah, that's leadership

Doug Downs (12:05):

As an organized group? The leadership within the Democratic Party, what I saw from Bernie Sanders last night, it was a 12 minute video. He could have taken 30 seconds to say it,

Farzana Baduel (12:15):

But

Doug Downs (12:15):

He basically condemned the shooting, said there's no room for this in American politics or American culture, and it's just wrong. Took him 12 full minutes to actually spit all that out. He loves to hear himself talk, but that's the right way to go right now. So in this particular place, I thought the Dems got it right. I know Trump has to play to his audience. I know they're angry. I know they're banging for blood here and he's got to touch on that. But there was an opportunity to build a bridge here as a president, and instead he did everything he could to quash any bridges that existed.

David Gallagher (12:53):

Yeah, I thought he did a good job. I thought Ezra Klein, who's a columnist for the New York Times, had a pretty thoughtful piece basically saying that whatever you thought about Kirk, talking about your beliefs, whether people find them offensive or not, is how it's meant to work. And you should be able to have these conversations without risking your life, even if some of the things you say are about gun safety and gun violence and empathy and things like that. So I thought Ezra got it mostly right. The Republican governor of Utah, I thought had a pretty good press conference initially. Well, so yeah, I think

Farzana Baduel (13:29):

What was good about his press conference,

David Gallagher (13:31):

Well, same points. There's no room for violence in the political sphere, and he spoke very passionately as a Utah, I think that's what they're called. So I thought he got it right as well. No finger pointing, no retribution, no calls for war. I mean, there were literally prominent political accounts saying that this is the beginning of a war. This is the first shot of a civil war. And I get it. I sort of get it. Temperatures are hot fever. I had a fever pitch right now. I do think the news will move on, but I worry about it having kind of a longer term effect and you have no idea what sort of seeds have been planted right now.

Doug Downs (14:19):

He did make sure to mention that Utah has the death penalty though, didn't he? In his news conference. He pumped that out right away.

David Gallagher (14:26):

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if anybody got the state. That's funny, but yeah, he did. He definitely did. And so now details are emerging about this alleged shooter probably has a different profile maybe than some people would've expected. I think all too sadly, in many cases like this, shooters are usually troubled young men. I mean, this seems to be the pattern, and I'm sure people are going to parse through all of his posts and

Doug Downs (14:59):

Statements

David Gallagher (15:00):

And videos and try to see some sort of pattern. I'm guessing you're going to see something kind of politically ambiguous, and what you're really going to see was a very troubled, troubled young man.

Doug Downs (15:11):

Yeah, yeah. I'm already seeing posts calling him a Republican and posts calling him a Democrat and a socialist just all over the spectrum.

David Gallagher (15:19):

Well, in the big group chat, people were really quick to point out because there was so little information. The world was quick to fill in the information void with all sorts of theories and misinformation, and then the bots jumped in and then it became almost impossible to really see what was happening. So I saw everything from this was a false flag operation, this was a distraction. Literally the White House ordered the hit to change the subject from Epstein to, I saw all sorts of fairly outlandish theories, but picking up some traction in the conversation. And I think that's just the one thing. Last thing I would say is as an American worried about state of things, things are really messed up right now. I'm not naive. The US has a long history of violence, gun violence, it has a long history of political violence. This isn't that new, but it does seem to be really happening at a frenetic pace. And I don't know how to wind it back and I don't know what leadership is in place to wind it back or get us to a calmer level of discourse.

Doug Downs (16:29):

Amen.

David Gallagher (16:31):

Well, I dunno if we want to linger on that topic any longer. That was kind a obvious one for us to talk through. One thing, and I apologize for not mentioning this last week when we piloted this show, one weekly source of inspiration, I'm going to embarrass you both, but I like the way you stand back from the heat of the moment in the news of the day and look at bigger or just evergreen types of topics, issues that affect the PR community. I'm talking about

Doug Downs (17:02):

Podcast. Oh on the podcast. On the podcast, sorry.

David Gallagher (17:04):

Going back to your podcast. So story strategies podcast available wherever you get your favorite audio listening edification. I loved your conversation with Fred Cook, who's at the University of Southern California. I think that's my dream job. I've known Ed since we were competitors for a long time, and then he moved into academia and I really liked that conversation. And then your conversation with Heather Lindell this past week or this week, I literally stopped, I remember I was walking to the grocery store and this conversation about women leaving pr, not for all the reasons that have been widely discussed, but for because of menopause. And it makes perfect sense when I heard it, but I had never heard that before. And I don't know, did it just come up in the conversation?

Farzana Baduel (17:48):

Yeah, because we were talking about women leadership at a PR agencies. It is quite rare, especially international agencies. And so she said, well, they don't just leave at when they start having children. And she quoted some research that actually demonstrates that most women leave when they're at perimenopause and menopause. And it's often pickers. Companies don't have a policy, there isn't a wider awareness amongst colleagues in terms of the transition that women go through. And of course, one size doesn't fit all. Every woman goes through a different perimenopause and menopause different symptoms, and that's what makes it really hard. And so she obviously said that she's been championing this within her agency to ensure that that awareness is there. And she said sometimes women do not even know what they are going through is actually due to the hormone fluctuations during perimenopause. And even the word perimenopause, a lot of people aren't familiar with it.

(18:53):

They sort of know menopause. But perimenopause is that phase before the menopause and with the hormone fluctuations, it has an impact in all sorts of aspects of the way we think and we behave and not knowing what's going on in our bodies and not having a wider discussion and policies in place in companies makes it that much harder where women then end up sort of thinking there's something not quite right with themselves and then they end up just leaving the workplace. And it's incredibly sad. But I do think the silver lining is that we're getting to know about it. I didn't know anything about menopause and perimenopause. And then about five years ago, we had in the UK, this lovely late presenter called Davina McCall, she started doing all these documentaries about it, started talking about it, and all of a sudden you've had companies wake up and say, well, let's have a policy about it.

(19:46):

And it's all part of the inclusion agenda is to understand from an employee perspective the life cycle for the different types of employees that a company will have and understanding the points that they need, support and understanding and awareness and empathy for the coworkers. And I think that that will help in terms of retaining senior talent. And that will also prevent having organizations that are at the top just men because the women have left because there isn't much research or advocacy around perimenopause and menopause. So let's hope that with this conversation and many more to come, that awareness will change. But as men, David and Doug, are you, how familiar are you? Is it something that's new that's sort of coming to your sort of information sphere? What's your take on it?

Doug Downs (20:38):

Last couple of years for me, just where I'm at in my life, where my wife is at in her life as I gained experience to that, but through the, I had no, when I was managing teams and staff in public relations, completely blind to whether any of them were experiencing this. And I've been looking backward to think, wow, I wonder if that issue that I had at that point in time with that staff member, I'm wondering if I just mishandled that completely badly because I was blind to this call. It woke, if you will, but awareness is probably a better term. So I've just more recently become aware of this.

Farzana Baduel (21:19):

And Doug, you've came aware of it obviously with your wife. Now I've got a comment from Amanda Cole. Kenyon. She says, this conversation is so important to help normalize conversations regarding the changing seasons of women's lives and the impact it can have on careers and advancement. And it's a big topic in my coaching practice now. David, over to you. I wanted to just, if you can, what's your response to Amanda's comment?

David Gallagher (21:49):

Well, hi. Hey, Amanda. Thanks for that. It's always good to hear from my good friend Amanda. We worked together for a number of years and she's right. It is an important topic like Doug, it wasn't personal to me until my wife went through it and I began to understand what the real day-to-day challenges are. Interestingly, and just by coincidence professionally, I've been involved with hormone related conversations from a client that I worked with 25 years ago. And just yesterday I talked to a group of students from Boston University who were visiting here in London about a case study related to how hormone replacement therapy was used. This isn't a side commercial for HRT, but the conversation we had, we started the first attempt to get women to talk to their doctors about menopause, started with promoting science around the benefits of HRT to reduce certain types of certain diseases, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis.

(22:44):

And what we found is that the more we promoted that science, the more successful we were getting that science in front of perimenopausal, menopausal women, the less likely they were to have conversations with their doctor. And it wasn't until we started talking to women, we said, actually, let's not talk to the doctors. Let's not talk to the scientists. What are you interested in? What do you care about? And the things they wanted to talk about were remaining vital at work, remaining intimate with their partners, remaining some sense of positive feminine identity and talks about osteoporosis and Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease was exactly not what they needed to hear to have a real conversation with their doctors. And this is a 25-year-old case study. So we seem to need to remember time and time again that facts and science are important to put structure and validity to what we're doing, but how people feel is very real and actually more important for how they're going to receive that information.

(23:40):

All of which you said, I'm glad you brought it up. I'm glad Heather was so open and honest in our conversation with you, and I think it's an important thing for us to keep in mind. If you don't mind, I'm going to move us on because we've got a couple other things to get through. And I'm glad we moved the Charlie Kirk story up in the running list because I think it's important and it is breaking, and I'm looking at my phone to make sure we're not missing anything that's happening right now. But a story I wanted to talk about, and I actually been following this for a couple of weeks, which was originally framed and written by our friend Arun Sud Hamman in his excellent newsletter. It's pretty new, six issues out, I think called Earn First. And he wrote about something he calls the great unbundling, and it's this idea that really there's this surge of senior talent, almost unprecedented, maybe literally unprecedented in the PR space.

(24:33):

These are people who were leaving agencies, maybe they got tired of it, maybe the agencies didn't need them on the payroll anymore. But there are a lot of really, really good people in circulation out in the wild right now. And I think it's a more important story than we're realizing. I think it's shifting the communications ecosystem around a little bit. It means agencies have access to talent that maybe wasn't available for them. Now, free agents, I mean, some agencies are a little bit vulnerable because they've lost people that they couldn't keep busy 365 days a year, but they needed them for five days a year. And it's giving clients maybe a little more optionality in terms of how they bring people in. And this is a subject for another day, but that's kind of what our gate proposition is built on, that there is a lot of really good talent available now that wasn't available before. And I think this is as important in the short run is all the conversations we're having about AI because, and maybe it's the other side of the coin, but I hate pigeonholing it under ai, but I think it's a really important story and I really urge people to give Arun article look. And I dunno if you guys have a reaction to that or not,

Farzana Baduel (25:43):

But I think it's important. Yeah, I wanted to know why is there this great bundling? What precipitated this huge exodus? Is it ai? Is it costs? What's the

David Gallagher (25:55):

Reason a ruins piece was focused mostly on larger agencies that were merging, and that was kind of the focal point. And he talked about, I think there's a few different advisory firms have sprung out of the aftermath of some mergers and some kind of workforce reduction. So that's the lens that he looked at. And I think it's accurate and valid, but I actually think there's more to it than that. I do think we're at a place in the business cycle where senior people are expensive and agencies are under a lot of pressure to contain costs, and it's hard to keep some specialists billable 365 days a year. So I think there's a lot of pressure to reduce costs, and it means that people who are perfectly good, they've got really good qualifications, experience are, like I say, they're free agents. And so I think you're going to see more startup agencies. I think you're going to see more things like what we're trying to do at FO Gate. You're going to see people going in-house in different ways. You're going to see fractional advisors. So it's a pretty profound shift in the way senior expertise is distributed

(27:06):

Across

Farzana Baduel (27:06):

The market. So very agile, a lot more agile working. And I think also from a client perspective, gone are the days where you just have this annual retainer every year. You've got lots of projects coming in and out, and it makes it very difficult for resource planning. And then if you've got senior staff for resource planning and you cannot actually ascertain the revenue that will be coming in the next 12 months because of the lack of annual contracts, and you are left with bitty contracts, it's really hard, actually. So I totally get why

Doug Downs (27:36):

David is there ageism playing in there at all? Is ageism, that's a very real thing.

David Gallagher (27:43):

Yeah, I hear that. I hear people say that a lot, that they're made to feel less relevant, that they are made to feel less valuable. And I think that can definitely be a factor in my experience. It just means there's really good people and in whatever setting, if we can figure out ways to take advantage of that, I think we'll all benefit. I've done a terrible job of managing time and now we're down to three minutes and there were so many things I wanted to get into. I'm just going to touch on these really fast and I'm not going to give be, give justice to people who contribute this, but these are things that we talked about earlier that thought were interesting from the text chat, from the crisis and risk communications conversation, which is always rich, always got something interesting. There was a story about New York Times story, very well researched, very well reported about their relationship. I'm sorry, not the New York Times about the Bank of America. No, sorry, JP Morgan. I'm starting all sorts of rumors. JP Morgan's relationship with Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein over years and decades with billions of dollars moving back and forth.

(28:50):

A remarkable story. And what I ask about that is, are we misunderstanding reputation? Many organizations would not survive a story like this. And from what I can tell, I don't see that there's been much damage at all. It's just been reported. There's a lot more to come. But I just wonder sometimes we seem to think, oh, your actions speak louder than your words, and these were bad actions and bad words about those actions. And I haven't seen any reputational damage done to that. I think it's a big question.

Doug Downs (29:18):

I think so many more of the pots are made with Teflon these days. Things just don't stick right? And it's because we have less trust in institutional sources of information right away. Everything I see is where's that source from, right? Who wrote that? Who said that? And if it's a source, I won't name the ones, but if it's a source that I've come to mistrust, okay, C, B, C here in Canada, don't trust it at all, then I'm less likely to pay any attention to it, and I'm more likely to entrench. And that's why independent voices are rising up. I find the independent voice whose opinion is already my own, which makes me smart because they're saying the things that I already believe in and I'll spend more time with them. So we're just entrenching and burrowing and digging deeper holes. That's my thought on that.

David Gallagher (30:15):

Yep. I think you're right. I'm just going to quickly go through a couple more. We're not the bbc, so we could probably go two minutes over time without getting fined

Farzana Baduel (30:22):

By. Yeah, that's fine.

David Gallagher (30:26):

Probably. I know people have budgeted their time accordingly. There was a piece that I didn't know where it originally paired, but Andrew, Bruce Smith, who's a great contributor and one of the larger sub chats on artificial intelligence put it into the conversation. And it was from FT. Strategies, the consulting group at the Financial Times called the News Creators Project. And it was a look at, and this touches on the Charlie Kirk story, this rising cadre of social media influencers who are actually the source of news for an increasing, and I'm going to say

Doug Downs (31:01):

Not

David Gallagher (31:02):

Soon, majority source of news consumption. And they break it down into people who are doing investigative work, people who are explaining what's happening, and then people who are just commenting on what other people have done. And I think it's a really important document for us to look at. And I want to thank Andrew for contributing that. I mentioned he hosts this another chat on artificial intelligence. It's the second biggest chat in the group in the community. It's really a fantastic resource of new ideas, new tools, new services. They do little mini reviews. They give real, there's contributors around the world. It's a very generous, very open conversation. The only way to really experience it is to join that chat. And I'm sorry I can't do justice for it, Andrew, I'm sorry. It's kind of the Andrew show. He had suggested a book that he thought people should read, and I dunno if we've got a graphic on that, but he's been thinking about how work processes and workflows go.

(32:01):

This book isn't specifically about ai, but his point was, and there's a lot of great commentary on it, is that if you want to use AI to improve your workflow, you kind of have to know what your workflow is to start with. And most of us don't. And I run agencies and I've been asked to try to document what our workflow was, and it was pretty hard to do. It's pretty hard to even just get us to work to a standard methodology. So I thought that was great. My book of the week, my suggestion is by a US economist named Kyla Scanlan, it's called In This Economy. She talks about vibes and how vibes actually move markets more than facts or data. And I think that, again, our misunderstanding of the interplay with a rational mind, I think we assume that there's a lot more facts and data at play when really it's more five.

(32:54):

So her book is called In This Economy, and her name is Kyla Scanlan. And by the way, she's my social media feed of the week too. She does a great series of explainers on Instagram. Last thing I'm going to say. And there's a jobs board that a woman named Sonya Collington here in the uk, just out of the goodness of her heart curates. And it's the second, actually, it might even be bigger than the AI chat where she posts jobs that come across her feed and now many other people are posting jobs that are available. It's a great almost like library of resources. So I ask her to pick the job of the week and the job of the week she picked is a search for an AI strategist for an organization here in the UK called Women in Data. And I just thought that was a thoughtful pick. We had a lot of conversations about how underrepresented women are in data stem anyway, but also specifically in ai. And this was a job. Last thing, you mentioned something about this last week, and I failed to get what you were saying, but you started, you've got a weekly column now, right?

Farzana Baduel (34:04):

Yeah,

David Gallagher (34:05):

Pr. Yeah. Sorry to surprise you with that. But

Farzana Baduel (34:07):

Yeah, so my parents are from Kashmere, and so I obviously have a cultural sort of familiarity with South Asia, and I've been to Sri Lanka many, many times. I've got lots of friends there, and I absolutely love Sri Lanka. It used to be called sep, which I think is so apt because you just feel this incredible serenity when you're there. I was offered a column by their national newspaper called The Daily Mirror, nothing to do with our daily mirror in the uk. And I just thought, I'm a yes person. So I'm like, yes, why not? I've never done a column before. And so I did the first column, and now I have this sort of, every week I have to deliver 1200 words at the end of Sunday. And I'm now thinking, oh my God, what did I say yes to? So A, I need to master that discipline, but I thought it would help me have more empathy with journalists and columnists because of course we're always pitching to them, but it would help me understand actually what they go through, how they find stories, who they consider a credible source.

(35:11):

So I'm really enjoying this little empathy exercise I'm going to have in sort of trying the hat of a columnists. And I've got this great friend called William Sitwell, who's a columnist for the Telegraphs. I'm meeting him on Tuesday to give me tips on how to be a good columnist. And one of the things that we did talk about in the past is journalists, they hold PR power to account and prs, we hold invoices to power. And so we're to have a chat on Tuesday. He's going to give you some advice. I'll share it in our next week's session about how to be a good columnist because I am literally blind to what it takes to

David Gallagher (35:47):

Do well. I read your piece on soft power and I thought it was great. In fact, now I put it all together last week you were talking about soft power. It's like, how the hell does she know so much about this? I didn't realize you've done all this research for your, so now it's my

Farzana Baduel (36:01):

Thing.

Doug Downs (36:01):

So now that you're newspapers, can we call you Scoop?

Farzana Baduel (36:05):

Yeah, you can. And if there's any stories you want to pitch to me, I just may just ignore you.

Doug Downs (36:12):

That's right. That's right. Ghost

David Gallagher (36:17):

Guys. We're five minutes over and I know we didn't get to a lot of the things we want to, so we will

Farzana Baduel (36:21):

Continue. Can I show one comment, David? Just one comment? Yeah. Just from lovely, Kevin. It was just a comment about the early conversation about the independence that have been unbundled. So Kevin says that it's also client driven. They don't want junior support. They want senior support. That big agency cannot afford to provide dedicated support. Independence are cost efficient, and absolutely when you're coming to resource planning and you can't foresee sort of 12 months of resource in a particular expertise, then it makes sense to bring in the independence. And yes, they are cost vision. So thank you Kevin for that.

David Gallagher (37:00):

Thank you, Kevin. I'm sorry I can't see the comments the way my, I need to lay out my screen better, so I'm relying on you. So thanks for that. But I am going to take us out and respect for everybody's time. Thank you as always, to our producers. Oh, Doug, do you want to say something?

Doug Downs (37:15):

Yeah, I have one final thought that I wanted to share. Final thought, sorry. In light of our top stories is the Charlie Kirk issue. I'm encouraging you watching, listening is to find someone in your life that you disagree with, fundamentally disagree with. Have a conversation with them and just listen. Don't do anything to try to change their mind. Just listen and seek to understand. That's my challenge to anyone watching or listening, and I'll do that too.

David Gallagher (37:43):

That's going to be so hard for me. I just can't shut up sometimes. But I think it's a worthy endeavor. So I want to thank, I know you'll join me in thanking our producers, Emily Page and David Ty. So much work goes into just pulling up random things that we think about and they find the images that they bring the whole show together. The week on Fun is a production of Zen PR stories and strategies and Full Gate advisors. We'll try to figure out a way to share some of the links to the things we went through quickly. I know we can do it in LinkedIn, but we'll find another way to do that. If you want to join the Mega Advisory Club, mega Chat, just get in touch with me. Please follow stories and strategies, subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and I hope you have a safe, peaceful weekend. Thanks everybody. Thanks Doug. Thanks Rosana.

Doug Downs (38:30):

And cheers, Stuart.