By Jo Kelly No matter what stage of your career you’re at, we all need a bit of support every now and again, which is why we set up the informal Stempra Buddy scheme. What's the buddy scheme? Rolled out in October 2018, the scheme is designed to match people with Stempra colleagues from different …More
By Alice Kay Journal communications can sometimes seem like a bit of a different beast to other aspects of press work. At a recent event at the SMC, four experienced and brilliant journal press officers de-mystified their workplaces and walked Stempra members through the ins and outs of working with journals. We heard insights from …More
By Amy Drummond, AprilSix Proof The term ‘techlash’ – the backlash against the technology industry – was shortlisted recently for the Oxford Word of the Year, which is awarded to a word or expression “judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year.” The techlash has certainly surged in its intensity this year. …More
By Beck Lockwood Our Stempra tour of northern cities arrived in Leeds this month where we got to work tackling more of PR’s most pressing challenges along with around 40 colleagues from higher education, NHS and charity organisations. Petroc Sumner, Head of the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, joined us to share early results …More
By Alice Kay A recent Stempra event, organised by our excellent Events Coordinator Emily Head, focused on a topic of high interest to a lot of our members: freelancing. A lot of Stempra members are freelancers and many more dabble in freelancing, but making the transition from permanent position to freelancer can seem daunting. We …More
A post by Dr Claire Hastings, Chair of Stempra At Stempra, it’s our goal to ensure everyone who works in science media and public relations has the requisite skills, knowledge, professional recognition and ethical guidance to successfully negotiate the balance between attracting public interest in research and retaining accuracy and balance. This is especially important …More
A blog post by Dr Claire Hastings I first wanted to re-ignite the embargo debate a couple of years ago after I, like many press officers, received an email from Eureka Alert saying the journal PNAS would no longer embargo a paper if any of the data was previously published on a preprint server. Since …More
By Daisy Barton Evaluation is one of the trickier and - dare we say it - neglected aspects of our work. We all have an instinctive feeling for what great impact looks like, but how do we actually evaluate the success of our work and convince the people we work with that what we’re doing …More
by Alice Kay You may remember that Stempra ran an event at the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) last November outlining the recommendations for press officers from the Academy’s extensive report on enhancing the use of scientific evidence to judge the potential benefits and harms of medicine. One of the recommendations had been for the …More
By Kate Mcallister We are really pleased to report that our first big Stempra Scotland event in recent memory – held at the University of Edinburgh in May – was a success! As well as a brilliant line-up of speakers, we hosted around 45 press officers and science communication professionals from all over the UK, …More