I’ve rebranded Lucecannon PR as lucyrouse PR not because I have a massive ego (friends may disagree), but because what was funny in 2020 is not so funny in 2026.
I was always aware of a rapper who goes by the name LuceCannon; I sometimes got his tweets, back when I used Twitter. A colleague from the invaluable Landon Marketing & Design let me know that this person has been involved in some misdemeanours. Which started me thinking about what at least one friend said when I launched Lucecannon PR – do people really want to employ a loose cannon?
Other friends were more frank. “It’s a terrible name.” “It was good for your writing career, but not great for PR.” So, I’ve repurposed the logo, the website and my email address which is now lucy@lucyrousepr.co.uk. It’s a brand of sorts and my dad would be proud I’m using the family name, possibly.
So, this is a soft launch of Lucyrouse PR. I hope you approve.
Huge thanks to Steve Landon at Landon Marketing for pointing me in the right direction, and to Lyndsey Harvey at Landon for doing the work on the logo and website.
With thanks also to The Silver Cloud Business for support with the domain and email account.
The end of the financial year is always an exciting time and a fresh start for Apr 2026 to Apr 2027. I’m making plans for my sixth year of continuous professional development with the Chartered Institute of PR.
Speaking of which, I recently read the CIPR report Humans Needed More Than Ever about the impact of AI on PR. What will I do differently as a result?
- Continue to increase my understanding of AI and its implications
- continue to explore tools that are simple to use (been recommended Claude as opposed to ChatGPT)
- get better at putting in proper prompts, on the rare occasions I might use AI
- be wary of free AI tools where my data is the product
- be wary of sharing proprietary information, as I always am
- personally, I won’t use AI/technical tools for writing but will continue to use them for transcription and (some) note taking
I was also delighted to read something in the report that I’ve heard before: that AI is not intelligent – it’s predictive technology based on datasets which can have in-built bias, and the results of AI-generated work, of course, need to be thoroughly checked and used carefully. Too often, people say something is AI and imply it’s intelligent when actually it’s simply computer-generated. How clever we make those computers and to what extent computers replace humans is completely up to us people, at the moment.
I’ve enjoyed two networking events in the past month, the CIPR Independent Practitioners’ Network drop-in online and an in-person PR & a Pint with the fantastic Miranda Rocksmith.
At the Warm Welcome Campaign, we’re busy planning our first ever Warm Welcome Awards, an impact report on the campaign over the past year, and a special Evensong service of celebration for the thousands of people who run warm spaces at St Paul’s Cathedral on 22 April. And I visited Sky Central, our very gracious and generous hosts for the awards which will be held in sunny Osterley in June.
Plans are underway with a couple of good friends and colleagues for press around the next Creative Cities Convention, which is the leading convention for people working in (and wanting to work in) TV and film outside of London.
I’ll share a little insight I first had more than 22 years ago. In 2004 I permanently moved out of London to the countryside and I noticed something I’d felt for a while. That people outside of the Westminster/central London media bubble care deeply about what actually matters to them. People in Westminster and in the London media scene care about what happens to them and that includes global politics.
People outside of London – and this is a massive generalisation, of course – care about more prosaic matters such as potholes and bin collections. But it also means we care about the people nearest and dearest to us, the cost of petrol and energy, the price of the BBC licence fee (sometimes), the cost of the subscriptions we’re prepared to pay for, the price of food and how we get to the shops.
In other words, most people in the world already care about the things that mindfulness experts and people in the media are telling us we should focus on to counter the global storm of bad news that has come our way forever, and in the UK particularly since Brexit and Covid and Trump 2.0.
We should focus on the things over which we have a modicum of control. Although I note Prof Brian Cox’s point from several years ago on TV – the earth and the cosmos is driven by entropy, and everything is heading to chaos eventually. What matters to me and to some others is how comfortably we and those we share the planet with are as we travel towards that chaos.
In other news
The Politico London Playbook was good again on Tuesday 10 March, some 11 days into the US/Israel/Iran conflict, when it noted of Trump: “He also went on a stream of consciousness about people who died in roadside bombs and are “right now walking around with no legs.” Glad that’s clear.”
Reminds me of a friend’s mother’s saying: “Don’t come running to me with your two broken legs.”
I’ve been exploring Winchester and relishing its literary connections, with Jane Austen buried in Winchester Cathedral, having died at a house just outside the cathedral close. And I was delighted to discover from this piece that the poet John Keats spent about eight weeks in Winchester before his untimely death from TB. I’ve walked some of the walk Keats is thought to have walked, and love the idea that his ‘Ode to Autumn’ with its “mists of mellow fruitfulness” may have been composed after just such a walk.
This is really salutary, about staff at ABC the public service broadcaster in Australia going on strike for 24 hours in protest at pay rates that haven’t changed in a decade and which mean staff can’t live in Sydney but have to live in cheaper places.
We must must must fund the BBC and allow it to have modern working practices which will allow it to keep good presenters and staff on the payroll. Obviously the bad apples can go (I wrote this before Scott Mills was sacked earlier this week and before I watched Martin Clunes in the most excellent Channel 5 drama Power). There will always be some exchange of people between the public and the private sector, but we will be culturally and socially poorer if we lose the many services and choices the BBC offers us – in return for not very much money per household, compared to our spend on Sky, Spotify, The Guardian/Times/Telegraph/FT, iTunes, Netflix, Disney+, do I have to go on?
That’s it for this month. Thanks, if you’ve made it to the end. Happy Easter to one and all, however and whether you’re celebrating.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 