Happy New Year to you. I hope you, like me, had a peaceful Christmas. I packed the Christmas decorations away on Thursday 4 January, the day before Twelfth Night.
It’s always a reflective time, the turn of an old year into a new one and I find myself wondering what life will be like in December 2024, when I unpack the Christmas decorations again. Who will I have worked with? Where will I and my girls be in our lives? I hope we’ll all still be on similar tracks to now, me self-employed and them continuing their university courses, but nothing is guaranteed.
Today, Friday 12th January is National Work Harder Day, according to the Days of the Year website. “Pushing beyond the ordinary for rewarding accomplishments,” according to the blurb on the website. All very well intentioned for January, and I’m happy to work harder after a fantastic two-week break over Christmas and New Year.
I’m keen to work with London media types or London or Bristol-based organisations that need support with communications from PR to email newsletters, updating websites, maintaining social media profiles, measuring and reporting and so on.
This week I’ve covered for the communications team at ITN while they held an away day and tried to help a friend and colleague with some business-to-business media pitches. It’s hard, getting through to journalists even when you have a phone number for them. We’re only in the second week of the year and already people are overwhelmed by work.
I spent a morning last week having new headshot images taken so I can update my website, with the lovely Barbara Leatham. She was a breath of fresh air, building narratives with different backdrops and giving me ideas for marketing my personal brand in the early part of this year. Watch this space for the images when they’re ready.
In other news
This seems worrying, about AI summarising articles from Politico, which I follow through their daily Playbook email about goings on in Westminster.
Still on the theme of AI, I’ve spoken to a couple of colleagues about the latest version of Photoshop with its many AI features and we’re equally in awe and slightly scared about the possibilities now available to doctor and generally “improve” images.
Those working in TV know this, but the sector is experiencing the worst downturn in ad spend for 15 years and now Channel 4 is saying it will have to cut jobs. The downturn is bad news for freelancers like me.
Bad PR for PR came from this story about the head of media and PR for the Post Office writing a release rebutting criticism of the flawed Horizon IT system, which then got used in witness statements in the prosecution of Post Office operators.
I aim to work for organisations that make a positive difference to the world, whether it’s ITN or The Halo Trust, and would like to think many of my colleagues in communications and PR wouldn’t try to spin their way out of a scandal of the sort that the Post Office has been involved in.
That’s all for this month. See you in February when the days will be just slightly longer.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 