The Crucial Blog

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.

As soon as the London protestors found themselves unable to erect their canvas city at the stock exchange and so moved across to St Paul’s, they unwittingly landed the Church of England in a very unusual place - right at the heart of national debate. From there the CofE has wriggled, fudged and squirmed its way into what can only be described as a PR disaster. Anyone - PR expert or no- would surely have advised...

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.

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.

I’ve done a lot of hanging round school gates at home time over the years. In a nice, perfectly legal, way.So I’m not in the least bit surprised by the BBC report of the Bristol University study that mums in deprived areas are put off taking their toddlers to playgroups because they don’t think they will fit in with the other parents and, more directly.I’ve been steaming about that story, and all I’ve observed of the sometime school...

When that old stirrer-in-chief John Humphreys hinted in a recent Today show that Ed Milliband might be too ugly to be Prime Minister millions of Radio Four listeners of all political persuasions understood immediately what he was getting at. After all, 21st century politics isn't so much about what you say as what you look like when you're saying it. But are we really only looking for leaders who are easiest on the eye? 

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.

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...

WATCHING BBC Breakfast this morning has left me choking on toast crumbs as I endured yet another delivery of a serious news story riddled with jokey puns in the voiceover to match a (staged?) visual image.

Does the act of naming a child in a newspaper picture caption expose the youngster to paedophiles?
A simple question but an answer that engenders a big debate.

IT may have slipped by largely unnoticed but last week MPs found time to debate a long-term trend that has been gathering momentum and deserves all of our attention - the death by a thousand cuts of the regional press.

Good morning dentist - that tooth extraction you did was absolute rubbish. It's not what I wanted at all. The procedure you followed was all disjointed, your whole approach was wrong. Oh never mind I'll do it myself.Rubbish! Good morning electrician - the rewiring work on my house was not what I was expecting at all - nothing flows properly, the connections are terrible. I've rewired it all myself and this is the system I want...