News Ltd gets the green ink

I went to a cracking lecture last night put on by the Public Relations Institute of Australia, featuring the environment and climate change manager at News Ltd, Dr Tony Wilkins, and sustainability communications expert and Clean Up Australia co-founder, Ms Kim McKay.

The lecture was entitled ‘The Issue of our Times’ and looked at the how and why of developing communication strategies to bring about environmental behavioural change.

Both speakers were excellent but the News Ltd speech was particularly heartening, because, if the knowledge, enthusiasm and genuine do-goodedness of Dr Wilkins was a reflection of the rest of the company, News Ltd certainly has an intention to change the environmental practices of a broad community – inside and outside the company.

As Peter Chernin, News Ltd President and COO said in a video shown by Dr Wilkins: “As a media company we are in a unique position, which is that we not only have the ability to affect our own actions but we also have the ability to set an example and the ability to affect the actions of millions of people everyday.”

The catholic-proportioned News Ltd family of news publications and programmes reach more than a billion people everyday. Phew.

News Ltd's overall objectives include: to clean up its own act, to work with suppliers and partners to encourage them to do the same, and to inspire others to reduce their own carbon footprint. Dr Wilkins’ words were: “Knowledge has to be spread. Engagement needs to happen. That’s our (News Ltd’s) job.”

It’s the job of us marketers too. From the pen of WPP’s chairman, Sir Martin Sorrell in the most recent WPP Corporate Responsibility report: “If the marketing industry has been unwittingly complicit in causing the problem, it’s now confronted with an historic opportunity: to shape and encourage consumer demand for sustainable products and lifestyles; to restore the true value of durability; to reject the superfluous in products and packaging; to make much of what has passed for fashion deeply unfashionable.”

Here here, Sir Martin. Here here, News Ltd.

If you're quick you can catch Dr Wilkins tomorrow at the Climate Change Summit in Sydney, which I can’t go along to, bummer. But I encourage anyone who is interested in sustainability within business to investigate what News Ltd is doing and why. Plus there is some interesting news, tidbits and an apparently award winning carbon calculator available on the 1 Degree portal.

By the way, one News Ltd company has profited from these initiatives is BSkyB. It was recently ranked second in a survey of 1,500 Brits as to to green reputation of the FTSE 100 companies.

Communications executive extraordinaire Matthew Anderson is James Packer's right hand man at BSkyB. He used to be the head of Ogilvy PR in Asia Pacific, my old employer, incidentally.

So the next time I am faced with the question as to whether corporate responsibility is a fad, I'm going to cite News Ltd and Matthew Anderson and Sir Martin Sorrell as examples.