Getting Ink

Read into this what you will...

I've had a bit of a tiresome weekend.

Top of the list: the letter from my mortgage company saying they've accidentally been under-charging me for the entire period of my loan thus far. Oops. Then, the central heating died. And to top it off, I got to spend yesterday with a relative who, to all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from Satan in a dress. But I spent this afternoon reading a really good book, and forgetting all about the real world.

So I was interested to see Wordsmith's post here on the Big Read meme. She hasn't tagged me (clearly, my tag got lost in the post)  but I'm going to join in anyway.

Here's what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE. (can't be faffed, so they're in red. I also added blue for those I read so you don't have to waste hours of your own life discovering they're a bit crap.)
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 MISSING
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My score: 91/100. This suggests I read a lot. I'm not sure what else it says. I don't care much for sci-fi.

But since I love a good row about whether or not Jane Eyre is a complete whinging waste of space (clearly, she is), I'll tag Kim, Linda and Sherrie.

Things PRs Hate #1: Disappearing Journalists

My post from pre-hols about the invisible PR phenomenon struck a nerve with a couple of PR readers - most notably David in the original post's comments and Susannah over at Lighthouse PR.

Both responded by criticising hacks for missing scheduled phone calls with clients. I get their point, I really do (I still think David's wrong, but let's agree to differ) but I've been giving it some thought and here's an idea: don't set up interview times.

Interview times - for the most part - don't work. If your client isn't essential to my feature and something more interesting comes up at the appointed hour, I'll ditch the interview. That sounds harsh, I know, but it's a reality. If I am due to speak to your client at 11am but someone I'm desperate to speak to calls at 10.55am, I will take that call over yours, every time - because my job is to produce the best copy I can before my deadline.

Now, of course, when this happens journalists should email the PR, explain and apologise. Not doing so is both rude and unprofessional. But it's going to happen. And I'll admit I do it myself more often than I like to think about.

Perhaps I'm rude (ahem) but I think the problem is the nature of the job we do. That 10.55am call might last 30 minutes. When I put the phone down, it might ring again with the call I'd scheduled for 11.30am. At 12pm, I finish the call and see three or four urgent emails regarding interviews I've requested for another story. I reply to those and then see another email from an editor about some work - obviously I call them right away (since I know from experience, if I don't, they might commission someone else). At 12.15pm I get off the phone with my editor, send out a couple of emails about the new commission and notice a PR has sent me a story idea, which I want to try and sell in immediately, so I'm back on the phone. At 2pm, I need to start writing copy for my 5pm deadline, so I'm concentrating on that.  

Before I know it, it's 5pm and I've forgotten all about the 11am interview. You're (rightly) pissed off, the client's (even more rightly) pissed off, and I'm oblivious to the whole thing until two days later when I remember I wanted to speak to your client and send you a witless email saying something like: "Oh, sorry about that, is he around in the next couple of hours?"

Personally, I think there are two ways to get around this issue when you're dealing with a reporter who is really busy and who doesn't necessarily NEED to speak to your client to get the story:

Option A: give your client the reporter's direct line. Ask her to set aside an hour. She should call the reporter at 11am, then every 10 minutes until she reaches him. If your client is super-important, have an account exec do this for them. If you get voicemail, leave a message with a DIRECT line for the reporter to call to reach the client (seriously, I've lost count of the number of times I've been waiting for a call, missed it because I was on the phone, and got a message saying they'd call back "in a few minutes" but I've missed them again because another call came in)

Option B:give the reporter the client's direct line. Give them a 2 hour (ideally, could be less) window when the client will be in the office and available to take a call. 10 minutes before the start of that window, drop the reporter an email to remind them that Bob's going to be available this morning for that interview. 10 minutes before the end, you can drop another email asking if they got what they needed, or do they need some questions answered over email if they're too busy to make the call. This means the reporter can take an urgent call if it comes in without blowing the interview, and they're a lot more likely to make the call if they can choose a good time for them on a specific morning.

Worth a try?

Talking head or living dead?

I don't have exact figures to hand but I would estimate that most journalists spend approximately 100 percent* of their waking hours searching for decent experts to interview for various features and news stories.

Today I spotted a request on a media forum from a journalist looking for an expert commentator on primary school education. A fellow journalist offered the name of an author in the space, only for another colleague to chip in with: "Don't bother. She's useless. Try XXX instead, super friendly and really on the ball."

The lesson? If you have a spokesperson who hasn't been trained in how to speak to the press, it's not just the interviews they're doing that are wasted opportunities - it's also all the features they'll never be asked to help with, because journalists actually do tell each other about good and bad interview prospects.

Of course, the best solution is to invest in some media training for anyone involved in talking to the press. However, if you don't have budget available for that sort of thing, what are some of the fastest ways to be a "useless" interviewee?

1. Talk fast. Most journalists rely on shorthand or written notes, and it's always fun trying to quote someone later when you only managed to write down every third word they uttered.
2. Don't worry about using jargons and clever bits of terminology. They make you sound clever.
3. If you're not sure about precise figures, percentages, ages or names, just give it your best guess. So long as it's almost right, that should be fine.
4. If a journalist doesn't ask about your new product or initiative, mention it in every answer you give just to be sure you're getting the "message" across.

* Not true. Just feels true.

What did we miss?

So we're back from our hols and we had a lovely time, in case you're wondering. The child in the picture wore a sun hat and therefore didn't get sunburn. Her mother, on the other hand...

There are 471 emails to be read, 1,000+ blog posts in Google Reader , five Facebook messages, three Linked In invitations, and goodness only knows how many Tweets I missed (although since 90% of those seem to be variations of "Wow, I just watched Doctor Who" I won't rush to read them all).

What  else did we miss?

Summer Break

Getting Ink and Getting Ink Requests are taking a bit of a holiday by the seaside, with a sparkly pink bucket and spade. They will be checking on email when they pass a friendly hotspot, but we don't expect to hear much from them as they've been working very hard and deserve a bit of a break.

See you in 10 days.

Charles Arthur launches one man mission to stop copyright theft

Every so often, I check through the Google Analytics, Technorati, Feedburner and other stats on this blog - it tells me who's visiting, what they're reading and where they're from. It's fun.

One of the things I notice consistently is how much traffic comes through Google Images - people search for an image of, say, a "sleeping kitten", and then copy/paste it to their own site. It's sort of annoying and also illegal - the images are copyrighted and actually owned by a stock image company - I pay an annual fee to license those images for use on the website, blog and in various 101 materials. Every so often I roll my eyes at the idiots who think that because something is on "Google Images" it's somehow free. Jeez.

So I'm really heartened to see that Charles Arthur is getting good and stroppy with idiots who copy/paste images and text from the Guardian Tech website without seeking the proper permission. As Charles correctly points out:

1. No it's not magically legal if you provide a link back to the originating website
2. No, it's not magically legal if you're running the content on your own non-profit blog or website
3. No, I'm not really grateful for you ripping off my content because it provides me with, er, "publicity"
4. No, I don't agree that the Internet has somehow magically made copyright theft legal. It's just made it easier.

Things Journalists Hate #1: The Invisible PR

I've decided to start an occasional series about things that tend to put journalists in a bad mood (I know, it's gonna be a looooooong list, right?)

Top of my list for today? Invisible PRs. Those PR execs who refuse to be found, or who pop up only to turn tail and hide for no apparent reason.

Today, I have been writing a piece for Personnel Today. It's quite a big magazine if you're in the business of selling things to HR managers. A week ago I emailed the press officers at three of the biggest consulting firms in this sector.

At Company A, my press contact has left the company and there's no other press contact listed on the site. No phone number, no nothing. I emailed my old contact's address, hoping for an auto-reply with his replacement's name - it didn't bounce. Argh. So I mail a PR agency I know represents another part of the business, they forward the request to the agency that handles the HR stuff. This is an agency I've never had particularly great experiences with, and unsurprisingly they replied yesterday to tell me my deadline (next Monday) is too short and they can't help. No interview, no information about their client, no white papers, bylined articles. Nothing.

At Company B, the website doesn't list a press contact or phone number at all. There's a US head office, which can't help, and there's a list of press releases -- but the last one to name a press contact was issued in 2004, and is unsurprisingly now out of date. Switchboard won't put me through to anyone without a name. I fill in the "contact us" form on the website which presumably goes to some underpaid work experience kid because a week later I still haven't heard a sniff.

Company C, meanwhile, replied to me within 24 hours. They arranged a phone interview, sent over some research they'd done on the topic and lined up a customer of theirs that I could speak to. Tomorrow, they've arranged for me to speak to someone at the Health and Safety Executive who they collaborated with on a big survey. Guess which company is going to be all over the feature while the competition won't even rate a mention?

I would understand if this was a magazine where Company A and B weren't relevant, but they are HR consulting firms and this is the biggest HR trade magazine in the country. What's the invisible act in aid of?

Here's my 5 top tips on how to not be invisible:

1. Google your client's name plus UK PR agency - does your company pop up? If not, why not?
2. Check your client's website. Is there a named press contact from the agency? Is there a dedicated email that directs enquiries straight to a press officer or the PR agency?
3. Do you put contact details at the bottom of press releases? It helps a lot if you do this, really.
4. We know sometimes you don't want to publish client lists on your agency website so how about setting up an online press centre? You can then vet journalists before giving them access to the site, which should list clients, most recent releases and relevant contact details.
5. If you're representing a global company and (as in the tech sector) they're headquartered in Palo Alto, please don't let the client only have a West Coast contact number. If we're looking for comment we don't want to wait until 5pm to reach the US press office, to get a number for a UK contact who we've now missed for the day.