One of London’s biggest heists was committed on the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, with 9 thieves taking millions of pounds worth of diamonds from the Hatton Garden diamond district, where locals and tourists have flocked to find decent priced diamonds for over a century.

At Clareville we rotate our newspapers and this week my morning paper has been the Daily Express. As soon as I opened the paper, I saw the feature of the heist and a picture of a man the police had arrested for the theft. He is a licensed pilot and owner of his plumbing company. He is known at the local pub as a ‘nice man’ and neighbours are ‘shocked’ in finding out he was part of the Hatton heist. As I read more and more, I started to feel bad for him, even though he is probably a criminal. They mentioned a father and son that were also part of the heist and it somehow made me think of Bonnie and Clyde (the romanticized Hollywood version).

I decided I wanted to see a completely different type of newspaper and took Jordan’s advice on reading The Sun. While I flipped through the pages full of breasts and footballers, I finally saw the feature of the heist, a mere mention in which they described the thief as a plumbing boss with an aviation license. The feature was sandwiched between a half page advert for the Sky Bundle and the picture of Prince Charles.

From a PR perspective, I thought of the demographic and what reaction each paper was aiming to achieve. As specialists in PR we must never forget the simple rule of who our intended audience is and how we can connect with them.

The targeted demographic of the Daily Express is very different to those that read The Sun. While the Daily Express is aimed at the middle class, a most-likely somewhat educated demographic, it’s safe to say that people reading this newspaper want all the details on current events. The Sun on the other hand is aimed at covering all the gossip in UK’s pop culture. Their reader does not care as much about current events as they do about who’s wearing what. While we can’t cast a net over all the publication’s readers, which would be generalising, we can use ethnography to learn about how we can better communicate with our audience. From the wording we use for a pitch to the way we lay out a press release or write a tweet, we should always have in the back of our mind who we want to reach.