It is the 40th anniversary of the film Cathy Come Home

Also this year, following on from on their Britain on the Move campaign, ITV are looking to commission programmes all about "young people engaged in community action". Jane Luca, Controller of Regional Affairs at ITV is running the season :

Ian Russell, Chair of the Russell Commission said : “The association of the ITV brand and their ability to reach out to millions of people is key to this initiative. The ITV Regional News service reaches an average of 23.7 million viewers which is 46% of the UK population. We are delighted that ITV wish to support the aims of Russell Commission using regional news and bespoke programming to highlight, inspire and motivate young people to consider volunteering as a means to developing their potential. “

I work in development of social action campaigns for the BBC, including the homelessness one. We try to consult and disseminate information as widely as possible among the charity sector. Who have you spoken to, as your request hasn't come through to us?

No -- I don't think you should censor requests. An insensitive request isn't the same as an abuse of the service. I think if you get a request that you think is insensitive you have two choices:
1) Ignore it.
2) Contact the journalist and explain your point of view.
It's just the nature of some publications that those are the sort of stories that they're after. If anything, it's better that charities do see the requests, so they can choose to have some (perhaps less sensationalist) input into the stories if they want to.

A s someone who works both as a freelance journalist and as a charity press officer, I think charities would be shooting themselves in the foot to ignore requests from journalists who don't have a commission. While obviously you will have to weigh up the time and effort involved in helping against how useful/likley the coverage would be, very many articles are not 100% commissioned untill the case studies are in place. The journalist is unlikely to spend a lot of time chasing case studies unless he or she thinks he or she has a pretty good chance of placing the article, so you might be missing out by not helping. Although I do agree that journalists should be upfront in their messages about whether an article has been commissioned or not.

Sorry for this

Just a reminder that the charity MediaWise - http://www.mediawise.org.uk or 0117 93 99 333 - has done sterling work in the area of media coverage of suicide, both in the UK and overseas, and can often be helpful to fellow charities with advice, training, codes of conduct etc for other sensitive or difficult issues.

Maybe he has a point. There have been several occassions recently where charities have jumped on the "pr bandwagon".

Hello, having previously worked for an organisation which assisted many people facing debt problems, I think the main source of reluctance is the sense among people in financial difficulty that they will be seen as having been responsible for their circumstances, and that they therefore risk an unsympathetic response if they speak about them. Those who feel more comfortable speaking about health problems (though depends what these are) are perhaps more confident of their story being received with sensitivity and sympathy because they are often less likely to be blamed in any way for their situation. I suspect it's a similar case for those dealing with clients who have problems with gambling, alcohol or drug addiction. Audiences can be very judgemental, and shame and fear of stigma are understandably powerful disincentives to talking about one's difficulties. Of course, were more people to talk about these sorts of difficulties, we might expect that stigma to lessen, but it's a lot to ask of someone who has no experience of nor desire for public attention.

It's not just the elderly... Vulnerable adults generally - including those with learning disabilities or mental health problems - don't generate the kind of press coverage that children do - they're simply not "heart-breaking" enough.

Recent examples are the damning reports published by the Healthcare Commission into the long-stay hospitals in Cornwall, and Sutton and Merton Primary Care Trusts. While the reports themselves received a reasonable level of coverage in the press, there was nothing like the type of follow up that the country saw with the Climbie enquiry.

It is still acceptable to shut these people away. This is true whether they are people living in a long-stay institution, long deemed unacceptable but for which the closure dates continue to move every year, meaning that people continue to be subjected to physical or sexual abuse; or whether it's the elderly.

That's interesting about no Word docs or PDFs. When journalists sign up to our press release email service, the vast majority opt for having them sent as Word doc attachments rather than the text in the body of the email.

I guess a lot of charities work with part-time staff who just aren't there after five. In our case, emails are answered pretty promptly as we check on them from home, but phone calls... well...

I read that post on freelancewritingtips.com and it was an eye-opener. I didn't realise that the women who regularly feature in the glossy magazines as 'case studies' have been actually screened for being photogenic. How hypocritical is that?!

Hello there, I wanted to drop by to point you to a piece I've just put on my blog about advice for charities about what can make a feature - not for the TV but for national publications, I wrote this in light of the recent furore around journalists' requests which showed no respect for the people they were hoping to speak to:

http://www.freelancewritingtips.com/2007/07/advice-for-char.html

Thanks for reading! All the best to you,
Linda

It is fair to say that the Guardian and Telegraph don't just "want to create their own social networks" -

They're already operational:

- Particularly handy for people working in international NGOs:
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/ has 'My Guardian Weekly' which includes reader map search to find other Guardian Weekly readers and website users. Also, "If you know of an experience related to news events that you think is of interest, you can submit an article to our site editor for consideration."

This is in addition to the thriving debate on the Guardian's Comment is Free site which has throves of regulars engaging in long 'letter to the editor' debates: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/i

The Telegraph has http://my.telegraph.co.uk/ where you can "start a blog, join debates, bookmark articles and form a community".

I know it's probably not a very popular opinion round these parts, but I thought his speech was great.

Whether we like it or not, he knows what he's talking about. Us charity PR types need to stop moaning about the way the media world works and start using it to our advantage.