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Summer 2009
From the Chair
New members
Sci Comm news
Eurochat
Feature: The day CERN was more popular than NASA
Feature: Biding time
Feature: The importance
of good design
Feature: From around the world
Event Report: The
numbers game
Event Report: When lives are on the line
Event Report: The new media officers
Event Report: Achieving global coverage
Interview: Ian Sample,
The Guardian
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Stempra newsletter
Upcoming events
My worst day in the office
Have you ever crawled under you desk and refused to come out? Or fantasised about it? From comic to embarrassing, awkward to tragic, we've all had stories go wrong or days turn into disasters. Reliving those horror moments may help to put them behind you, which is why we're hosting a ‘confessional’ to share and learn from all our experiences.
A cosy pub setting and wine-induced loss of inhibition should loosen tongues sufficiently to make the evening entertaining and educational. Jenny Gimpel, UCL press officer, will kick off the discussion by explaining how the UCL team managed – and learned from – their media response to the London bomb attacks.
The event will be hosted in The Perseverance pub on Lamb’s Conduit St in Holborn, London on Wednesday 23 September 2009 from 6.30 pm. For more information, please visit the events pages.
Regular desk-hiders are especially welcome, and can confess under the safety of a pub table.
PR can be bad for your health
What has been your most nightmarish day in the office? You can come to our September event to find out – but in the meantime 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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Upcoming Stempra events – dates for your diary
Our swine flu event on 27 August at the Wellcome Trust will be twinned with a sister session in Scotland planned for early September.
23 September will host our ‘confessional’ in a pub on Lamb’s Conduit St, Holborn, and October will bring a more sobering event on climate, ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
November sees the return of statistics, following our hugely successful event in March and requests from several members for another session – and early December should bring an explosive start to the festive session, with our Xmas do on ‘the rise of the TV experiment’.
Next spring we hope to kick off with ‘the darker side of PR’, to test your new year resolutions to their ethical limits, followed by a February event on the prospect of University press officers being swamped with demands for press releases due to the planned ‘public engagement’ criteria of the new Research Excellence Framework.
Keep an eye on the e-group and events pages on our website for dates and venues of upcoming events, and do email me at jenny@stempra.org.uk if you have any suggestions or comments on Stempra events.
Jenny Gimpel
Stempra Events Coordinator
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