Hi guys,
So this is a topic that's been building up for a while, and I figured it's best to ask everyone about how to best handle this.
As we've recently become more and more popular on social media, we started receiving a fair amount of interview/comments requests from mainstream media outlets. Many of them express initial interest only to go completely quiet afterwards, but a fair few came through, and I think we've benefited from the exposure (even if they do try to slant it negatively a lot of the time).
Now, up until now, when these requests came in, I'd normally either take them myself or speak to a few people that I thought might be interested. If you are one of those people I should keep in mind and I haven't spoken to you yet, please make yourself known - we can surely work something out. In principle, I would be in favour of setting up some internal communications channel for FES "veterans" to contribute towards interviews, share opportunities, etc. Personally, I would prefer for this to be a closed/hidden space - I think that would be a good middle ground between accepting contributions and outright publishing everyone's communications with the media. I'd be interested to hear how others feel, or if there is even interest in many others speaking to the press. If not, it's easy enough to keep it down to PMs/IMs.
The other issue is closing the loop. The media are writing about us - how do we tell our visitors that this is happening? One thing I've had in mind was described by Thork in another thread today:
Just make a 'media' tab in the menu and list them there with details of how media can contact us?
Another alternative could be to simply make Announcements posts about each individual publication - it would keep the homepage a bit fresher, at least for now. Or we could have a "recent media publications" sidebar section, similar to the "recent forum topics". Or any combination of these, or something else entirely. The possibilities are endless!
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions about how best to approach this.