Who’d have thought it?
When Chancellor George Osborne – that’s Osborne without a ‘u’, as I have to correct myself every time I write it – promised money off fuel duty, he evidently meant everywhere except Worcestershire,
where fuel-related hyperinflation still seems to be the economic norm.
While I was blithely filling up my car after last week’s Budget (and before I choked on realising I had broken the £70-per-tank barrier for the first time) I was able to reflect on a highly satisfying day of agency PR.
Budget day is always a strange one, with Twitter going mad, dozens of expert bloggers and commentators to follow and newsrooms like ghost towns as reporters across the country watch the latest from Westminster. Generally it’s a tough time to try and have a good chat with a journalist about the latest news from your clients.
Which is why I’d like to take an opportunity to thank two business correspondents in particular – Graeme at The Birmingham Post and Louise at The Stoke Sentinel (I’m hardly protecting their anonymity but I won’t embarrass them by using full names!).
It can be pretty rare on a quiet news day for a business reporter to spend time chatting about ‘what exactly makes your client a social enterprise’ or ‘what precisely are your client’s business growth plans for the coming years’ but doubly so on Budget day.
That they bothered to take the time to put each story in their proper context despite the amount of other news flying in from the House of Commons is a real endorsement of the quality of the traditional regional media that’s out there – and it also made me rather nostalgic for my journalism days.
Well, that and this headline, from today’s Nottingham Post: ‘Family’s joy as Allah appears in Arabic on ‘miracle’ egg shell’. Check it out at http://tinyurl.com/69lohfw.
Brilliant.
