My worst day in the office
From comic to embarassing, awkward to tragic, we've all
had a bad day in the office. Come and share you experiences on stories
that went wrong or days that turned into disasters, and tips on how you
righted them or kept your head in a crisis.
This informal 'confessional' aims to give press officers
and communicators a chance to share and learn from all our experiences.
Date: Wednesday 23 September 2009
Time: 18.30 – 21.30
Venue: The Perseverance, Lamb's Conduit St, London WC1
Map: http://www.the-perseverance.moonfruit.com/
Cost: Free to members, £15 for non-members (includes annual membership to Stempra)
To register: please email events@stempra.org.uk
Here's a little taster for you, Jenny
Gimpel from the UCL press office gives us a bite-sized version of a
nail-biting battle with her bête-noire.
Online support
groups and medical websites may be bad for your health – but the press
release we issued on the subject was far worse for ours in the UCL
press office.
The author of the paper, who linked interactive
health sites with poorer clinical outcomes, said proudly: “This whole
finding confounds conventional wisdom.”
No sooner had we
published the release, the researchers discovered that they their
outcomes were the wrong way around in their meta-analysis.
Following
alert of the error, the journal withdrew the paper and we withdrew the
release from the UCL website. The journal decided to allow the
researchers to reanalyse and resubmit the study – but we were faced
with a complicated dilemma.
Should we issue a retraction to our
press list, though the paper wasn’t technically retracted? Or should we
wait for the revised paper to come out and send a clarification of the
results? Having many years experience in brow-beating and hair-pulling,
I did so with vigour – hair-pulling stimulates blood flow to the brain,
after all.
After much deliberation, we decided to re-post the
release with an embedded warning that the findings should not be
reported, as the paper was being revised. When the new paper was
published showing that interactive sites have a positive effect of
health, we reissued the release.
Did it cause a storm? None that
I could see outside my window or in any of the newspapers we anxiously
scanned, but the one in my stomach took many more days to subside.
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