Creative Packages

There’s something eerie going on… my email inbox has fallen silent. Well, not completely, but it is definitely less frantic than it has been in recent weeks. Post-Jubilee, post Mothers and Fathers Days, post-start-of-the-festival-season, there are not any mega-pegs out there right now to attach to a press release.

And I’m delighted! It means a bit more creativity is possible, both from the journalist’s side and the PR’s side. This time of year is when we are craving ideas, both immediate and longer-term, to get us through the summer months when new films, openings, events and high days are far fewer. This week we’re spinning the chlorine shortage, DIY health checks and the joy of a summer novel into features.

I write this from an office with fewer than half of the usual staff numbers. It’s the tube and train strike, of course, but where once the idea of bringing out a newspaper (and vast amounts of content on other platforms too) in such circumstances would have struck fear into my heart, today it’s a different story.

We can have morning conference with colleagues dialling in, catch up on Gchat about division of work tasks and follow up via email on all sorts of other matters. More importantly for a line manager, I can feel pretty much fully connected to a team. This is, of course, all thanks to the pandemic (never thought I’d write those words!)

HMU, as the youngsters say, or certainly have a think about creative packages that you can talk to your contacts with that we can whizz onto our pages and websites while there’s a commuting and calendar lull…