Bulletin International

Anthony Hayward 'began his career as a photojournalist. In 1989 he set up Bulletin International, a broadcast PR consultancy based in London. He founded The NewsMarket in 2000.'

Bulletin staff are banned from using ’VNR’ to describe what they do, and refer to ’broadcast’ projects instead. Apparently news editors will never admit to using VNRs, but are quite happy to say that they use ’company hand-out material’.

Producers and distributors of VNRs, naturally, cannot see what the fuss is all about. Despite predictions at the start of the decade that the VNR market would be worth tens of millions of pounds in Europe by the mid-1990s, the British market, though growing rapidly, is still estimated to be worth only about Pounds 5 mil-lion a year. Anthony Hayward, managing director of Bulletin, Britain's biggest VNR producer, says that there is no difference between putting out a package of pictures on film and issuing a press pack. 'In the multi-media future,' he says, 'where images and words are all distributed online, there won't be any difference between the two.' Richard Sambrook, the BBC head of newsgathering operations, disagrees. 'It's more like getting a whole page sent to you already made-up, rather than receiving a press release,' he says. But Sambrook concedes that a more plausible explanation for the current concern may be that 'television has not really grown up enough' to know how to handle VNRs.

Hayward says that the vast majority of the pictures he supplies to broadcasters are wallpaper shots, used to illustrate business stories. Many are shot in locations which, for reasons of physical safety or commercial confidentiality, are not easily accessible to broadcasters. A VNR produced for the company Digital, showing the inside of a computer chip clean-room at a facility in Scotland, has been used more than 100 times on British television in the past five years. Hayward's VNRs contain no voice commentary, just a shot list. He ensures that all films include some footage containing no brand names.