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Behind the Spin: call for contributions

22 Oct

BehindthespinIssue 18 of the UK’s ‘public relations magazine for students and young practitioners’, to be published in March 2008, will have two main themes:

  • Public Affairs (eg lobbying, political PR, issues management)
  • PR for transport (bicycles, cars, planes, trains, space rockets etc)

Proposals to write articles on these themes are welcome now. We also welcome articles on perennial themes such as careers in PR and the value of a PR degree. As well as writers, I’m looking for photographers and editorial assistants.

You can contact me (the editor) via the comment box or by email r[dot]s[dot]bailey[at]leedsmet[dot]ac[dot]uk or through the email link on the right.

The food issue

16 May

Btsjan07 Food is nutritional, fashionable, cultural and political. It’s also big business.

Now that issue 16 of Behind the Spin (the environmental issue) has been published, we’re looking for ideas for issue 17 of the public relations magazine for students and young practitioners. You could write about:

That’s without mentioning drink. But what are your ideas? Brief proposals are welcome now (copy deadline will be in August). Please send your ideas to John Hitchins or to me.

Remember, remember fifteenth of December

1 Dec

Contributions are arriving for the next issue of the UK PR student magazine, Behind the Spin (copy deadline 15 December).

This is a public reminder for those who’ve promised articles but have yet to submit them. And a reminder that there’s still time to come forward with new ideas, particularly if they relate to our two main themes:

  • PR for fashion and beauty
  • The public relations consultancy business

Articles are welcome from students, practitioners and academics. The editorial contact for this issue is me: r[dot]s[dot]bailey@leedsmet[dot]ac[dot]uk

Whoops

13 Oct

Pr_writers_handbook_1Spot the error? (If you can’t, it’s to do with a missing apostrophe.) In defence of the publishers, Wiley, this book doesn’t come out until April 2007 so there’s time to fix the cover. Presumably their authors do know how to write; perhaps it’s their designer who doesn’t. (That’s an ugly sentence, but I’m showing off two apostrophes.)

Or maybe they think there’s no need to bother with apostrophes in the digital age…

MySpace music myth

25 May

So teenage chatter on MySpace created the Arctic Monkeys? Yes, according to the standard media interpretation. Not so, according to Adam Webb writing in Technology Guardian. For one thing, the Arctic Monkeys phenomenon preceded MySpace.

But he doesn’t discount the importance of the internet. He quotes the band’s manager at Domino saying:

[The Arctic Monkeys] handed out 50 CD-Rs at the early shows to a small group of fans. As the fans started file sharing them, that’s how it spread over the internet. It was word of mouth.

Trades in decline?

30 Mar

And I had thought this was an industry in decline. We learn from Drew B that PR Week now has a UK rival, PR Business. The website’s unimpressively incomplete with one day left to go in March, but you can already read the copy on technology and PR direct from the contributor, Antony Mayfield.

It appears that PR Business will be sent to CIPR members. I look forward to reading it.

The right mix

16 Sep

Paper is portable, it’s tangible and it feels permanent (though it’s not). And my students are thrilled to see their bylines in a full colour magazine. Blogs are instant, they’re interactive and they have a wider reach; articles are also more readily archived and searchable.

The balance of paper and digital media is a challenging one for all publishers to manage. The CIPR’s member magazine, Profile, now has a complementary online presence which brings some old articles out of the shadows (I’ve contributed a few book reviews). The PR student magazine, Behind the Spin, is just going to print. We will be publishing many of these articles on the Behind the Spin blog in the coming weeks.

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