Why managing the media is no longer just a job for Alastair Campbell

The 20th anniversary of John Smith’s death this week is an opportunity to look back on how much and how little politics has changed in the last two decades. Smith became leader in the aftermath of the “it was the Sun wot won it” 1992 election where Labour faced a brutal personal assault by the right wing press. Tomorrow I’m going to be discussing what this teaches us about handling recent press attacks on Wednesday evening with Stella Creasy, Steve Richards, Tessa Jowell and Labour “digital guru” Matthew McGregor.

But we will also be discussing what has changed since then.

When Labour took office in 1997: Google was two blokes in a garage, Mark Zuckerberg was 12, and the first tweet was nine years away. Back then around 20% of Britons owned a mobile phone – compared to 92% today.

When Alastair Campbell first sat down at his desk in No10 the combined circulation of the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph was around 7.4m – nowadays it is closer to 4.5m. So on Wednesday we will be asking the columnist Steve Richards: are the newspapers as powerful as they were when their circulations are falling and we all have the power to be a publisher at the click of button?

Back in the 1970s Tony Benn said: “If I rescued a child from drowning the press would no doubt headline the story ‘Benn grabs child’ – but if he was in his pomp today Benn would be first on Twitter to ridicule the story direct to the voters. So we will be hearing from Stella Creasy about how you build political movements in the age of the Internet.

And we will be joined by Matthew McGregor – veteran (albeit a young one) of the Obama campaign and currently Labour’s top digital adviser.

In Britain today, half of those aged 18-44 say their main source of news is the Internet. Clearly a lot of that news will be from mainstream publishers – the Mail’s circulation might be falling but the mailonline topped 150m monthly browsers in October. But a lot will be from blogs, BuzzFeed, tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube videos and the like.

That means the work of Matthew McGregor and the brilliant digital team at Brewers Green will be increasingly important.

It’s amazing to think that when John Smith took on John Major at PMQs we all had to wait to the next day to see what the media verdict was. Now any Labour member with a Twitter account can tell you the Nick Robinson’s of the world verdict on Ed Miliband before he even sits down.

The job of managing Labour’s message in the media is no longer one we can all leave to Alastair Campbell while we get on with door knocking. Because nowadays we all have to think about how we use the modern media to talk to voters direct and help Labour get the result we want in 2015.

The event will take place tomorrow evening (14th May) at 7.30pm  at the The Radisson Blu in London – tickets are available by emailing HERE

John Woodcock is the Labour MP for Barrow and Furness