Public relations (PR) officers from insurer AXA gave the trade press and the national press different embargoes for the same story on Friday.
Embargoed is a small town in Wales, my old ex-national newspaper editor used to say, emphasising the “ed” sound at the end of the word. It looks like AXA’s PR people give the embargo about as much respect.
The BBC carried a story on a tax hoax phishing email this morning, timed at 01.49. I phoned the out of hours HMRC PR at 9am and he did not have the press release, said he would get it to me about 11am and, so far, still hasn’t.
Why are PRs so completely useless?
Update: After second chase up call, when release was still not ready, it arrived by email at 12.34, saying exactly the same as the BBC was given 11 hours earlier.
Should journalists mention facts that will play up racism, even though the source seems impeccable?
I did a story yesterday about insurance fraud on Daily Finance. In the course of interviewing the lawyer, she made the statement that the defendants refused to testify in court because they would have had to swear on the Qur’an. Continue reading
Accountants Ernst & Young issued a press release today (Sunday) but the named PR, Vicky Conybeer, did not have access to a photo of those quoted in the release because she was not in the office.
Why bother releasing it on Sunday or being the named PR if you can’t help working hacks? Continue reading
I finally got the figures I needed – though I had to find some via a link on Local Government Chronicle’s website to the Communities department’s site (new window) that the PR had not found.
Interesting that the chief PR seems to think the response “but will be Monday before I can come back to you” would be OK for a website that runs seven days a week.
When he gets back in on Monday he’ll find several more emails from me and that I have found the missing figure on his own website.
Throw some light on it
An email to my MP asking whether I should complain about the Communities PR team to the minister or head of the Civil Service elicited a response, at last.
I called Matthew Gorman there on 15 December. I asked for the amount of council tax collected and the cost of collecting it, plus the amount of council tax benefit paid and the cost of paying it. I was given this information ten years earlier by the predecessor department for an article in the Guardian.
Tweets from #governmentnews are so wrong the person tweeting should be taken out and shot. Journalists should avoid this site because of its inaccurate and misleading information.
Yesterday, 17 January, it tweeted that new donation and funding figures for political parties had been published. This was just baloney. Continue reading
Writing for the web means complying making your website accessible to blind or partially-sighted web users who may be using screen readers.
It is not just that your site may fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act – if you are providing services to the public – but because there are ethical and logical reasons to do so. Why would you not want as wide an audience to be able to read your website, after all? Continue reading
In the past few days I have worked from my Macbook using mobile internet connections from:
I have used a mix of my Vodafone dongle and my BT Openworld account. And that is in addition to several other people’s home wireless broadband networks. Continue reading
True to the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robot assassin in the Terminator, I am back and I’m blogging again. (I had complaints that I had stopped blogging – thanks for those.)
I have been busy. Most recently I have been paid to blog. I am now lead blogger on a new AOL-owned website called Daily Finance (my RSS feed right). Before that I was (unpaid) running a blog at the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) annual delegate meeting (ADM). It has been hectic.
So much has happened. News Now has ceased using national newspapers on its new aggregator service because of demands for payment from the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA). A company called Meltwater is now challenging the basis of that in the courts.
I have not had time to get to the basis of the NUJ’s argument that aggregators should pay. But my gut reaction is to back the Meltwater. If you provide links to the source articles and don’t copy the articles themselves then that should be free.
News Now was a much more sophisticated search engine than the newspapers’ own websites. It found stories related to insurance that never appeared when searching each paper individually. And whoever designed the Telegraph’s search engine, for example, should be taken out and shot.
A Right to Link campaign has started. I am minded to back it.
Elinor and Kat
NUJ ADM
Covering the NUJ’s ADM was a great, if knackering experience. The next issue of the journalist will include a fair chunk of the students’ work but the website itself is worth a look.
My full report on it says all I need to say, but I’d repeat here how great both Kat and Elinor are. I know Kat has spoken to a few editors I have recommended and I hope she gets a job out of teaching NCTJ law and into a newsroom where she belongs.
Elinor would be a good poach if anyone is interested in a reporter with a nose for news.
I was Jon Slattery’s third journalist to review the year and make predictions for 2009. This does not suggest I am the third most important. I think I was the third to reply.
In fact, quite possibly, I was the first to reply but he managed to convince two more interesting and important people to answer his questions before he had to use my answers.
