Walter Finch
GIBRALTAR’S mercurial new government media director would quite like to be playing the guitar or indulging his passion for cinema and documentaries.
But instead, Anton Calderon, 43, will be leading the drive to bring the government press office out of the ‘analog world’ and into the brave new one unfolding before us.
Already a garlanded documentary-filmmaker with his own production company, Calderon has been tasked with ‘crafting a voice for the government of Gibraltar to tell the stories we want to tell.’
“Some of the issues which we would consider to have quite a solid consensus about liberal democracy and the way our society should function are coming under fire a little bit and being questioned,” Calderon told the Olive Press.
“So one of the first things we have to do is reaffirm the role of government, of public services, and the civil servants; the value and the importance of these being robust and strong and trusted by the public.”
Calderon is planning a new form of communication that will extend beyond the old realm of the hallowed government press release.
It means utilising social media channels, crafting videos – even TikToks – that showcase Gibraltar’s institutions at work to ‘inform people of what we are doing.’
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“Gibraltar’s institutions are extremely valuable things that we have created, and they provide super high levels of quality of life and care and support to citizens.
“We want to help people to engage with the public services and help them understand their value.”
Social media will play a key role.
“Social media has been used for quite some time as the provider of feedback to government of the way people feel about policies and changes – but I don’t think it does that job anymore.
“It often becomes a bit of a boxing match where the most forceful and extreme views fight it out.”
One fresh idea is to rely further on polling – both quantitative opinion polls and qualitative focus groups, which take inspiration from previous award-winning work he has done.
“The Needle, the documentary I did for GBC, was basically a poll.
“We asked people about how they felt about a series of issues, and then we had debates about the data and interviews.
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“You have a lot of perceptions and a lot of subjects in that program. The poll ran only for like a week, but it had more than 3,000 or 4000 entries.”
Ultimately, the citizens and residents are going to see more streamlined government communications, incorporating not just the various government departments, but the unsung heroes of public infrastructure and the civil service.
“Soon, we’ll move on from the government press office to the government communications department.”
