Looking back at my original email marketing plan made several years ago, I see for July I noted the end of the school summer term, BBQs and festivals. As I write in 2022, the school term is coming to an end and the school holidays beckon. I have yet to have a BBQ this year. And my younger daughter is at a festival this weekend, as part of a week in Madrid. I’m going to a festival at the end of summer, over the first weekend of September.
Last July I was celebrating my first retainer client and that contract with Activate Performing Arts is coming to an end this month. It’s been a fantastic year working with them, helping deliver free outdoor performances and creating all the marketing and communications materials for them in the process.
I now have two other retainer clients – ITN and the countryside charity CPRE, the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
ITN is keeping me particularly busy as I fill in as on-call press officer for the Channel 4 newsroom one day a week. I was there yesterday, the day that Boris Johnson announced his resignation as leader of the Tory party, and what a day to be in a newsroom. Of course, it was all highly professional and smooth; it’s very impressive the way a heavyweight editorial team rallies around these big, national moments and I’m not writing about just the correspondents and presenters, impressive as they are. Experienced editors and producers make it all run smoothly behind the scenes.
I was also delighted to get my first news lines for C4 News into the national press today, featured on the front page of The Times, no less, as we pushed out an exclusive interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg and his withering assessment of Rishi Sunak’s time as Chancellor, plus views on Boris Johnson’s interim cabinet.
I have capacity for other comms retainers from October onwards when my arrangement with ITN comes to an end and I’m particularly interested in media clients, where I can use my experience and expertise in comms, gained over 30 years. Yes, this September it will be 30 years since I started working as an editorial assistant for Government Group publications, having graduated earlier that summer and done a nine-week post-graduate certificate in magazine journalism.
In other news
This is amusing about male MPs seeing what it’s like to have a hot flush – “We’d be complaining a lot,” said former Tory party leader IDS.
Apparently as taxpayers we now all have a stake in a sex party business – yay!
This is kind of terrifying, about a BBC journalist being chased by a mob of anti-vaxxers last year, especially coming at the same time as we’re hearing testimony about the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 at a Congressional committee in the US.
This is just appalling about two girls trying some blackout challenge they saw on TikTok and dying as a result. We can’t entirely blame social media, but I do think there should be some regulation about what social media platforms are allowed to ‘push’ to users. It can’t all be down to parents to police what their children are seeing online. We don’t understand algorithms, very few people do. And I’m mindful of articles I’ve read in the past about ex-social media execs not allowing their children to have smartphones, no doubt for this very reason.
That’s it for July. See you in August.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 