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Offline Pete Svarrior

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Press/Media relations
« on: December 22, 2017, 01:25:14 PM »
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.
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Offline Dr David Thork

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Re: Press/Media relations
« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2017, 04:25:04 PM »
I think setting out the guidelines of what we will and won't do for the press is a good start.

Example ... no one was keen to pay for themselves to travel to the US on April fools day to give a talk to an astronomy group.

Podcasts are fine, written press responses are fine. Not sure how many of us would be keep to go on TV or end up in youtube live streams. We like our anonymity. It prevents extreme violence vigilante attacks from lunatics like Gary Green.

I like helping Students. Example. Myself and Pete did a day in Cambridge for a student final year dissertation a while back. She got a good mark in the end  :) I've helped with quite a few projects over the years.
I don't mind doing podcasts and radio stuff, but I don't really want to be doing 5am radio shows because it is the only time they'll have us on or the other side of the world.
I also think we could do educational packs for schools. Worksheets etc ... but this does take work. I propose this takes the form of gentle FET stances and the kids have to research what the round earth rebuttal to such a theory might be. So maybe we set out how eclipses work and they have to work out how they work on RET to say why our theory is wrong or just draw the 'correct' version. Just really simplified, we don't need Tom Bishop beating 8 year olds into submission. They benefit with education in a fun thing, and in the back of their mind they have heard of flat earth for later in life if they care.

Also having an agreed upon standard press release that can be sent out might save a lot of pain in future. A copy paste "this is who we are, these are our beliefs, this is what we want to acheive".

My 2 cents as usual.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2017, 04:28:59 PM by Baby Thork »
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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Press/Media relations
« Reply #2 on: December 26, 2017, 07:48:43 PM »
I am getting personal media inquiries in my PMs too. It would be nice if we could participate in these sort of things together as a group, rather than me giving my own personal view of things. I am interested in helping and joining in.

We do want these articles and videos linked somewhere on the website. Everyone is coming here to see what we have to say, and we should make that easily accessible. I would go as far as saying that we should make it the featured article on the main site and put a link to it in a "Press" tab. If an interview with the New York Times isn't worthy of a featured article, then what is?

The Press page should have some official way of contacting us, as well as a linked list of past interviews. Once the press contacts us, the group should be notified and we can discuss how we want to handle it and who will participate. Maybe a new private forum or repurpose the Zetetic Council forum? We need a discussion and workshop area.

Re: Press/Media relations
« Reply #3 on: December 26, 2017, 08:23:56 PM »
I posted about a request I got in Flat Earth General, linking here as well for visibility.

https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=8287.0
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