Shaping a reputation
Hello and welcome to a personal blog on journalism, media relations and PR.
I'm Scott Sinclair and I’ve been working as an account director at a media relations consultancy since May 2008. I love my job and I’ve wanted for a long time to set down in a kind of diary mode some random musings about what I do and the feelings I have about the way the media is changing.
My boss and colleagues at Deep South Media are happy for me to blog about all this but I want to say upfront that I’m talking from my own experience and nothing is being vetted by anyone else – though you’re welcome to contribute like anyone else, guys!
I’ve no idea how this will go! Maybe you’re a journalist, a press officer who was a journalist, someone in-house moving to an agency, going from public to private sector – I’ve done all of the above. Maybe you’ve done none of them – that’s fine too. Please feel free to leave comments (no spam please) and maybe we can get into some discussions.
Certainly, we’re all seeing strange times right now with the credit crunch affecting people’s livelihoods and causing serious loss of confidence in financial markets. How this will pan out for businesses and other organisations seeking PR services over the longer term is unclear but I guess there is always a need to communicate. Maybe we just ought to hunker down, focus on what we’re good at and continue to come up with those brilliant ideas.
By way of a first thought I confess to being bemused by this week’s Tory plans to cut down on “town hall promotion”. No surprise that local authority press officers are less than pleased. If you stop telling people what their council stands for, they will be less likely to know what services there are locally and what their council tax is being spent on. Ignorance is hardly bliss. When the LGA commissioned MORI to look at this, they found that while services have seen steady improvement, very few people attribute that to councils themselves.
There is some excellent LGA advice on building local government reputation as we move towards comprehensive area assessments and “place shaping”. It is no time to stop talking – community consultation and involvement will be ever more important.
I'm Scott Sinclair and I’ve been working as an account director at a media relations consultancy since May 2008. I love my job and I’ve wanted for a long time to set down in a kind of diary mode some random musings about what I do and the feelings I have about the way the media is changing.
My boss and colleagues at Deep South Media are happy for me to blog about all this but I want to say upfront that I’m talking from my own experience and nothing is being vetted by anyone else – though you’re welcome to contribute like anyone else, guys!
I’ve no idea how this will go! Maybe you’re a journalist, a press officer who was a journalist, someone in-house moving to an agency, going from public to private sector – I’ve done all of the above. Maybe you’ve done none of them – that’s fine too. Please feel free to leave comments (no spam please) and maybe we can get into some discussions.
Certainly, we’re all seeing strange times right now with the credit crunch affecting people’s livelihoods and causing serious loss of confidence in financial markets. How this will pan out for businesses and other organisations seeking PR services over the longer term is unclear but I guess there is always a need to communicate. Maybe we just ought to hunker down, focus on what we’re good at and continue to come up with those brilliant ideas.
By way of a first thought I confess to being bemused by this week’s Tory plans to cut down on “town hall promotion”. No surprise that local authority press officers are less than pleased. If you stop telling people what their council stands for, they will be less likely to know what services there are locally and what their council tax is being spent on. Ignorance is hardly bliss. When the LGA commissioned MORI to look at this, they found that while services have seen steady improvement, very few people attribute that to councils themselves.
There is some excellent LGA advice on building local government reputation as we move towards comprehensive area assessments and “place shaping”. It is no time to stop talking – community consultation and involvement will be ever more important.
posted by Scott Sinclair @ 7:10 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
If press offices don't report what is going on inside councils nobody else will.
Local newspapers that once reported every cough and splutter seem to have given up on council coverage.
Is it because of boredom, a mistaken idea of what is important to people, or staff cuts in the newsroom? A combination of all three, perhaps.
Whatever the reason, if we don't have proactive press officers pushing out informative press releases the only coverage we are likely to see will be when residents have something to complain about.
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