The master vault of news, events and resources.

Nothing fosters collaboration like a global emergency, and this is the effect we’re experiencing with the COVID-19 pandemic too. Ethics approvals procedures for research studies at various institutions have been accelerated (e.g. Health Research Authority)  with guidance also developed by the WHO, and thousands of volunteers have put themselves forward for vaccine trials to help […]

When an academic sends you through a paper on which she or he is main author, does your heart sink when you see a long list of collaborators from other institutions? If all institutions involved in the research want a namecheck, it can turn what is otherwise a fairly simple process – write release, secure […]

I work for the Meningitis Research Foundation and some of what we see now in terms of coronavirus communications mirrors what we see when this terrible disease strikes. When there are cases of meningitis, public health teams respond quickly and my team works hard to get accurate information out to worried communities. Monitoring news and […]

In an interview with Faisal Islam of Sky News on June 3, 2016, Michael Gove said that the British people have had enough of experts. I remember it well because I had not long left working as Head of News at one of the Research Councils and it felt like the end of an era, […]

I used to think dealing with the media was easy. In my first job which involved media relations, my press releases were widely picked up, letters to editors were usually printed, and I never had a shortage of TV and radio bids. Coverage was sympathetic and shaped the wider debate. But looking back, there were a […]

Since we started on the daunting task of analysing hundreds of press releases and news articles in 2012, there have been several studies, including our own, presenting evidence on the topic of caution vs hype in news and press releases. The main conclusions from this research are: Cautious press releases still get news. The main […]