Gavin Gibbons

Aquaculture Canada^OM 2011, Keynote Speaker

Gavin Gibbons

Director of media relations, National Fisheries Institute (US)

As NFI’s spokesman, he has been featured in everything from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to USA Today and has been the voice of fisheries issues on CNN, NPR and the Fox Business Network. Gibbons joined NFI in 2007 after more than a decade as an award-winning television news producer that saw him work for a variety of local television affiliates, as well as MSNBC and the Fox News Channel.

Abstract

The Message, The Media and The Market: changing how we communicate about seafood

In 2007 the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) made a decision to fundamentally change how we communicate with the media about seafood issues. We decided the long-held strategy of agreeing to disagree with reporters and activists on certain hot button issues no longer served as an approach that was tenable. Sound science and independent peer-reviewed publications were increasingly and publicly bolstering our arguments and backing up the assertions on nutrition and sustainability that we had been promoting for years. Insisting that ours wasn’t simply another view but rather the right, fact-based, view became a tactic that targeted journalists. Promoting ourselves as an authority on seafood and not just a last call before publication to get “the industry’s” take became an important job. Benefiting NFI’s membership by changing the way the media approaches reporting on seafood was our mission. But to promote the message, influence the media and benefit the market we were going to have to challenge reporters, producers and editors and hold them accountable. It was a strategy that made some uncomfortable, not the least of whom were journalists.

Four years later we still butt heads with misguided activists and take rogue journalists to task for misreporting. We are by no means out of the proverbial woods when it comes to defending the seafood community in the media. But we have turned some important corners and won significant rhetorical battles that have laid the groundwork for some essential changes in how the media reports on seafood. The climate, created in part by that groundwork, allowed a single, positive, heavily-promoted seafood nutrition storyline to make news in 378 U.S. media outlets in front of 41.5 million sets of eyes over a 10 day period in February. In 2007, in the midst of beginning an aggressive and much needed new media strategy, such an impact was almost unthinkable.