PR Studies

The Landmark Trust has been receiving some spectacular press coverage over recent days, based on its 40th anniversary celebrations. It’s a select and specialist conservation charity, which makes this major media coverage all the more impressive (examples from The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times; The Daily Telegraph article is not yet online).

The party political campaigns have hardly begun, but already message familiarity is creeping in.

The Conservatives are keeping tightly on-message. Here’s a Google search result for Michael Howard’s much used phrase ‘hard working Britons’ showing how his party is sticking to the script. Yet this phrase is only a variant of Gordon Brown’s ‘hard working families’, a favourite of his for much longer. Yet talk of ‘hard working families’ is not limited to the Labour party.

Less than four weeks to go to May 5. Is it long enough for target audiences to hear the messages politicians are keen to communicate?

As if to prove Kirsty Milne’s thesis (see below), a celebrity chef with a determination to change the food on offer to UK schoolchildren and the means of expression (a TV series) appears to have changed public opinion – and tipped the government into activity (BBC reports).

Is nuclear energy becoming an environmentally friendly option? Yes, says a former bishop who as a result has been forced off the board of the Friends of the Earth. No, says Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth, when the radioactive waste management and potential for terrorism are considered. The Independent reports.

It’s a problem environmentalists have been grappling with for decades, but it’s coming to the front of the agenda because of Kyoto and because Britain’s current nuclear reactors are nearing the end of their lives (but still generating over 20% of our power).

Here are two articles about Bono’s involvement in the debt relief campaign for the benefit of Master’s students who will be researching into and writing on a similar topic.

Pro Bono: in the Observer newspaper.
Get real on Africa: BBC.