The Crucial Blog

DROP the dead dongle, hold the front page.... Sorry, got carried away, but do start the presses again. Whilst local newspapers rein in, regroup and relocate to counter the effects of readers and advertisers rushing online, businesses are embracing the new old world. Majoring, as we do, on helping companies to spread their news to their staff as well as the outside whirl, we can report that there is a steady stomp back to printed...

Submitted photographs . . . . we often have to ask people to supply photographs for our clients' own in-house publications or to be forwarded on to newspapers and magazines for their use, but it's always a little bit of a trip into the great unknown.

Even the simplest of digital cameras can provide perfectly useable images but, at a time when more and more publishers are relying on contributed photos as illustrations, it's only the minority that understand the few basic requirements of that image's format.

REPEATED phone calls from PR folk are just about the biggest bugbears for journalists, I read this week on HoldTheFrontPage.  Along with Americanisms and corporate jargon.

2012 - where did it go? In the blink of an eye. For the UK, Washed away in a deluge of rain - many, many times.

Yes the summer was rubbish, yes the autumn brought even more flooding and yes, the economic gloom shows scant sign of brightening. But there were many things to celebrate.  Here's our round-up of just some of the happier news stories of 2012.

Crikey it's easy to waste time with the internet at your disposal. We've all done it.  We start with the best of intentions - to sit down and do some serious research.