Bad publicity

Stephen Cook ] writes
A friend of mine once complained to the Times newspaper that they
didn't cover gliding and their response was that they didn't have
anyone to cover it. She said "yes you do" and became the voluntary
Times gliding correspondent. They used some of the stuff she produced
but eventually got bored with it. Perhaps someone needs to volunteer
their services to the BBC.

That's usually the way with the media (admittedly, I'm drawing more from
my experience with music and theatre than gliding, but there might be an
analogy here). If you point them at a story or item of interest and hope
they'll cover it, odds are they'll ignore you. If, on the other hand,
you cut out their need to do any real work themselves and provide them
the story written up and ready to print, the hit-rate (and thus
exposure) climbs considerably.

Perhaps all clubs should have a "volunteer" in the form of a budding
freelance journalist for feeding the press and public relations monster?

And whilst 90 year old grannies taking to the sky might not be the sort
of cut and dash image we'd really want to portray, any publicity is good
publicity, and it was nice seeing a picutre of one of the club's K8s on
the BBC website :P

--
Bill Gribble

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