Christmas 2008

From the Chair

Feature: Stempra
members review the year

Interview: Roger Highfield, New Scientist

Stempra newsletter

From the Chair

Festive greetings for Christmas and the New Year! And what a year it's been for science PR.

Early on in the year, the debate over the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill returned to the front pages as it neared its climax. But crucially, this time the coverage remained broadly positive, thanks to the hard work of many scientists and press and policy officers. They certainly deserve an extra handful of Quality Street this Christmas for their role in helping keep this debate positive, accurate and balanced.

An extra portion of figgy pudding goes to the physicists at CERN, though. 2008 was the year the Higgs Boson became a household word (even if we're still not entirely sure what it is). When the Large Hadron Collider was switched on in September, there couldn't have been anyone left in the country who didn't know it was happening, though fortunately, they'd all gone back to watching Coronation Street when it faltered a fortnight later. The media loved it. Never before had particle physics looked so sexy (and not just Professor Brian Cox, ranked by People magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest People of 2008). Fortunately, the doom-mongers were wrong – the end of the world wasn't nigh (that came a few weeks later with the financial meltdown).

Stempra, too, has had a vintage year. Our record number of nearly 240 members learnt about blogging and podcasting, debated the rights and wrongs of embargoes, had a peek into the life of a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and learnt how to make the most of science festivals. We broke free of the M25, too, with a number of events north of the Watford Gap (and even north of the border).

Next year promises to be another great year for us, beginning with the launch in January of the Stempra Guide to Being a Press Officer, which we hope will become an essential part of every press officer's tool-kit.

We hope that you will continue to support Stempra in 2009 and take advantage of the busy programme of events that we have planned. Please complete a renewal form (available online here) and return it so that we can ensure our membership records are accurate.

As ever, we look forward to hearing any comments and feedback on the Stempra email network.

Katrina Nevin-Ridley
Chair of Stempra
chair@stempra.org.uk

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