With the world’s biggest cultural festival reaching its conclusion for another year, ThreeWeeks co-Editor and co-Publisher Chris Cooke, now back home, reflects on why, in the case of the Edinburgh Fringe, doing something to excess can be a good thing.

“Time at the Edinburgh Fringe seems to operate a little differently to everywhere else. While on one level it’s hard to believe that the world’s biggest festival is over for yet another year, at the same time – as I returned to London last night – it felt like I’d been living in Edinburgh for months when, in fact, I was only there for thirty days.

I find many members of the Fringe community feel the same way. Whether you are performing, or producing a show, or running a venue, or working in a box office, or handling publicity, or reviewing for a paper, or running the biggest review media at the Festival, while the Fringe month always speeds on by at a hell of a pace, looking back it feels like it all lasted a lot longer than just four weeks.

Presumably this is because, whatever your role, and even if you visit the Festival city primarily as an audience member, the experience is likely to be an epic one. You will squeeze into a few days or weeks what would normally take months to achieve, whether you are creating or consuming cultural output or, as in many cases, both.

For those of us running Fringe-specific projects, whether they be shows or venues or media or other initiatives, you find yourself going through the motions of launching, running, growing, honing, developing and closing down a business in the space of one month. It’s insane really. No wonder my brain is so frazzled by the end.

And even if there is a year round element to your Fringe venture, like ThreeWeeks, even if you started your preparation the previous September, so much can’t really begin until the start of August, when your project goes from concept to physical reality, that you are still basically building and collapsing an entire business in thirty days.

One member of the ThreeWeeks review team, too many years ago for me to remember which one, referred to their experience with us as “extreme reviewing”. It’s probably the best way to describe what our reviewers – some of whom saw and wrote about over 70 shows this year – are actually doing.

And I think that’s why, educationally speaking, the ThreeWeeks programme is so valuable to any young person wanting to pursue a career in journalism or the written word. My manta when giving my regular media careers lectures at universities around the country is always “if you want to be the best writer in the world, write every day”. The more you write the better you will become, and the “extreme reviewing” experience we offer participants on the ThreeWeeks programme is a fast-track way for aspiring writers to improve their art.

And the same is true for all the other people performing, creating and working at the Fringe – those taking part in ‘extreme acting’, ‘extreme producing’, ‘extreme publicising’, ‘extreme stage managing’, ‘extreme venue directing’ and, erm, ‘extreme standing-up’. Yeah, perhaps that should be ‘extreme being funny’.

Of course everyone knows that in life it’s good to do everything in moderation. But sometimes doing something to excess, for a short period, can be more rewarding and more fun. And the Edinburgh Fringe is all about excess.

At the end of last August I encouraged every one who had been to the Edinburgh Fringe that year, and enjoyed it, to persuade one person who has never experienced the Festival to come along this year. And I encourage the same right now. But this time I’m providing the sales pitch too. Tell your friends, everyone deserves some cultural excess, everyone needs some extreme cultural consumption, and the best place to get it is Edinburgh in August”.

Sections: Other Stuff | Tags: Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, ThreeWeeks

This week is the tenth anniversary of the death of my good friend and fellow CMU founder Alastair Walker.

It’s really hard to believe a whole decade has now passed since we sat in an Islington warehouse plotting the future of all things CMU. The music policy and editorial attitude that stays with the publication to this day came very much from Alastair, and to mark this anniversary of his death I wanted to do something musical. And compiling a special tribute edition of the CMU Powers Of 10 playlist seemed like a good way to do that. Here it is.

ALASTAIR WALKER’S TEN

Click here to listen to Chris’ Alastair Walker playlist in Spotify, and then read on to find out more about his selections.

INTRO: “Both Alastair and I shared a very eclectic taste in music, which I think has always been represented in CMU. Though Alastair’s passion for and commitment to discovering innovators in every genre of music on a daily basis surpassed mine and pretty much anyone else I’ve ever met. Representing those eclectic tastes in just ten tracks is no easy task, but it’s a rule we’ve enforced on everyone else who’s put together a Powers Of Ten playlist, and I’m sure Alastair wouldn’t want us to break the rules just for him. Well, actually, he probably would, but we’re not going to”.

01 William Shatner – You’ll Have Time
For reasons I never entirely fathomed, because this was before Shatner became cool again, Alastair was always a huge fan of the actor-come-singer-come-raconteur. In fact, a combined William Shatner/Leonard Nimoy album was always sitting next to the office stereo at CMU HQ. However, I’ve picked a track from Shatner’s more recent album, ‘Has Been’, rather than from that CD. Partly because it means I can include a nod to Ben Folds, another favourite of both mine and Alastair’s, who produced this album and track.

It might seem unusual to open a playlist marking the anniversary of someone’s death with a track that takes such a flippant attitude towards people dying, but as well as sharing eclectic tastes in music, we also had in common a rather dark sense of humour, and I am certain that Alastair would love the fact that his playlist opens this way.

02 Queen and David Bowie – Under Pressure
If there was one artist above all other that Alastair truly admired it would be Bowie. Actually, he’d hate me for choosing this track as the token Bowie appearance. He’d have probably chosen something from one of the BBC Radio Sessions. But this enables me to get Queen onto the playlist too, which I want to do because I remember Alastair’s mum telling me, not long after he died, how Queen were one of the few bands on which she and he could agree. Freddie Mercury et al were not a band Alastair raved about in public very much, but the way they frequently experimented with their sound would certainly have appealed to him. And all the more on the day Bowie was involved.

03 Stereophonics – Have A Nice Day
A band Alastair was behind from day one, initially as a student radio head of music in Edinburgh, and later as Co-Editor of CMU. Kelly et al returned the favour by writing us a column for a year in the early days of the magazine. We played this track at the end of Alastair’s funeral, knowing he would have wanted something upbeat despite the sadness of the occasion. Though as a result every time I hear this track, even though it’s probably the Stereophonics most cheerful song, it makes me a little bit sad.

04 Garbage – I Think I’m Paranoid
I have a theory that every Scottish male has a soft spot for Shirley Manson. Certainly I know a lot of Scots with very diverse music tastes who would still put Garbage on the list of their top ten favourite bands. I’m not Scottish, but I did live there for four years, which is possibly why, like Alastair, I do like a bit of Garbage.

05 UNKLE feat Richard Ashcroft – Lonely Souls
I remember the first time Mo’Wax Records bought an advert in CMU. Alastair was very excited. And not because it meant we were some way closer to breaking even on that issue but because he was such a big fan of everything James Lavelle had ever been involved in. I’m not sure Alastair could have picked just one track off ‘Psyence Fiction’ to feature here, but personally this is my favourite.

06 Public Enemy – Don’t Believe The Hype
Talking about Alastair being excited, if I told you just how big a fan he was of the late 80s American hip hop scene, and Public Enemy in particular, can you imagine how happy he was the day Chuck D agreed to supply a regular column for CMU? If I’m being honest, as the person who had to sub-edit that column, I frequently didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. But somehow his almost poetic use of words was still awe-inspiring. Frankly, you could put any Public Enemy track into this playlist and Alastair would be happy, but I’ve chosen the crowd pleaser.

07 MIA – 10 Dollar
Right, given Alastair’s constant passion for new music, we ought to get some newer acts into this playlist. That is to say, artists who have emerged since his death. All I’ll say about Ms Arulpragasam is that if Alastair had ever prepared a checklist of what he wanted from a new artist, she would have ticked every box.

08 Sleigh Bells – Tell Em
Bringing us even more up to date, another band I’m sure Alastair would have been raving about is Sleigh Bells, who are coincidentally signed to MIA’s label. Like our columnist Eddy Temple-Morris, who first hooked up with CMU when Alastair interviewed him, he loved it when people made electronic music with a rock, or almost a metal, mentality. Of course that means there’s been a lot of music in the last ten years that Alastair would have highly rated – basically anything Eddy’s ever played on ‘The Remix’ – but there’s something so in your face about how this Sleigh Bells track opens, I think it deserves its slot in this playlist.

09 Faith No More – Smaller And Smaller
Alongside Bowie and Chuck D, the other musical innovator Alastair had particular time for was Mike Patton. So much so, we are possibly the only magazine basically aimed at a mainstream music audience to have featured Fantomas on our cover (back when we had a cover). But here I’m going to go with Patton’s most famous band, because you can’t beat a bit of classic Faith No More.

10 Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name
As someone who had been active on the world wide web from almost the first day it existed, it’s a shame Alastair never got to really experience the social media revolution, which he used to predict so frequently in the late 1990s. If he had been alive to see the day Rage Against The Machine beat the ‘X-Factor’ franchise to the Christmas number one slot via a carefully orchestrated Facebook campaign, I suspect he would have laughed for a week. The fact that it was one of his favourite bands who were chosen to defeat the pop machine would have made him happier still.

Sections: Music Stuff - Other Stuff | Tags: Alastair Walker, CMU

Well, if you’re a media junkie like me, wow, what a week.

It was the perfect storm really. Shady reporters, bent coppers, an implicated spindoctor, a tarnished prime minister, and a media-mogul on the brink of a controversial multi-billion dollar deal. Add the tragically bereaved, angry mothers, indignant tweeters and nervous ad men, plus a Hollywood star to front it all, and boy you have the ultimate news story. Though it took a murdered schoolgirl to make most news organisations want to tell it.

There’s been a lot of blogs written about the role of Twitter, or other user-generated platforms, in toppling over the world’s biggest media giant this week. I thought about writing one myself. Opinion seems divided how important Twitter et al really were. Clearly no one social media, nor social media at large, single handedly dealt the deadly (for the News Of The World at least) blow. As I say, there was an element of perfect storm here. However, I do think it’s interesting how the internet is giving influence to more groups of people, which threatens powerful institutions whose power relies on controlling, to an extent, the influential.

I thought about writing about that too. But then somehow ended up writing an ode to News International’s beleaguered Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade) instead. It’s twenty years since I last wrote a poem (so please excuse any dodgy metre), but I’ve had a few poetic urges of late, and those seem to have combined with my wish to write something about the Hackgate scandal. Enjoy

An Ode To Rebekah (or “Resign You Bitch”)
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?
They’re calling you a witch
A selfish lying bitch
Oh Rebekah
Is that really you?

Oh Rebekah
You say you never knew
Your colleagues had no morals
It’s causing quite some quarrels
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?

Oh Rebekah
Is it true you never knew?
We’re mainly of the mind
You’d never really be that blind
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?

Oh Rebekah
What if you never knew?
That’s really no excuse
They should still cut you loose
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?

Oh Rebekah
What are you gonna do?
The world, it changed this week
Not controlled now by your clique
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?

Oh Rebekah
I think I know what’s true
You think you’re the victim here
Targeted by the twitosphere
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?

Oh Rebekah
You know what’s really true
You ran an immoral place
And now it’s blown up in your face
Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?

Oh Rebekah
I’ll say what’s really true
Your career is in the bins
Time to repent for all your sins
Oh Rebekah
That’s what you should do

Oh Rebekah
I’ll tell you what to do
Tell Rupert it’s time to go
Let’s James fuck up the show
Oh Rebekah
That’s what you should do

Oh Rebekah
What we gonna do?
I don’t think you’re a witch
So prove you’re not a bitch
Oh Rebekah
You know what to do

Sections: Other Stuff | Tags: James Murdoch, News International, News Of The World, Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch

Today the interns on the latest Taylor Bennett Foundation internship programme got my ‘how to write a press release’ session. Lucky them.

This combines some basics that you’ll probably find in any text book on media relations with some top tips I’ve put together based on [a] a survey of 100 music journalists we did through CMU about 18 months ago and [b] the frustrations I feel on a daily basis when I work my way through the 150 press releases which land in my inbox every day, many of which commit some basic sins which can cost the sender any chance of coverage, from me or anyone else.

This is something I wrote a piece about on an earlier version of this blog. It was quite a ranty piece if I remember rightly, and named and shamed a couple of particularly useless press releases I’d been sent. That article is no longer in the archive since the revamp here, so I thought I’d run a refreshed and slightly less judgemental version of those tips right now. So, here goes.

1. Get to the point, fast.
This is probably my biggest gripe. Before you write your press release, ask yourself “what is the news story here?” Why is what you are press releasing newsworthy today, and not yesterday or tomorrow? And make sure this is bleedin obvious in the subject line of the email, and the strapline and first paragraph of the actual release.

This is especially important if you are looking for news coverage, obviously. But even if your release is seeking review or feature coverage, be clear about what is new about your product, person or company at the outset.

You can give your release a snappy slightly ambiguous headline if you like, but the strapline and first paragraph should be factual and to the point. And use an edited version of your strapline, not the ambiguous headline, or generic titles like ‘Press Release’, as your email subject line. Most journalists will only open a fraction of the press release emails they receive – many more releases will go unread than read – and whether yours is opened depends on your email subject line.

Pretty much the entire news story you are telling should be covered in the first paragraph of the release, with perhaps a second paragraph of directly relevant background information. Be a tabloid journalist, and try and make sure you cover the six questions words – what, when, where, who, why, how? – in that first paragraph (well, the ones that are relevant anyway).

2. Adopt a neutral style.
This particularly bugged many of the music journalists we surveyed. I think music PRs are particularly prone to hyperbole – “best thing since the Beatles” – that kind of thing. Keep the OTT adjectives to the minimum and make any descriptions of your product or service or event or company as factual as possible.

Verified stats and records are acceptable for championing achievements, so “fastest selling”, “award winning” and so on, albeit in moderation. But big-up descriptions that are less tangible – “best ever” or “most exciting” or “most innovative” – should be avoided or, if they are required by a client, put in the named quote where they are clearly one person’s opinion. Which brings me to…

3. Include a named quote.
Never send out a press release without a quote credited to someone involved in your organisation. You can’t believe how much more likely your press release is to be used if only you provide a quote. It makes it look like I, the resource strapped journalist, got on the phone or attended some kind of important press conference. I like that. Though please make sure quotes are grammatically correct, I’m bored fixing them.

Even if your release is really angling for a review – as many entertainment PR releases will be – it is still worth including a quote, because increasingly these days news stories are as important as reviews, and will reach a wider online audience, and a simple quote can turn a product release angling for a review into a news story. For music releases, the quote could come from the artist, or from an A&R at the label releasing the record, saying how excited they are to bring this new song or album to the world.

4. Present lists as a list (not a table, and avoid tabs if possible).
First up, don’t provide a paragraph of prose running through your list of facts with description and comment. The journalist will write the prose, and they need quick, easy access to the full list of facts to make that possible. Some publications may also publish your list in full as you provided it, hence why tables and tabs are a no-go – think, how easy is it for the journalist to cut and paste my facts into their Word file?

5. Push anything but the core information into ‘notes for editors’.
Background information – biogs, product information, useful stats – are all good, and may be used by journalists to flesh out their article, but put this is a separate section at the bottom of the release, after the quote and contact information. Make notes to editors like a Wikipedia entry, all bullet points and short sentences. This is something I wrote about in esPRresso here.

6. Always include a photo (or maybe a link to one).
A photo of your product, or any people involved, or the person you’ve quoted, or your logo, or preferably all of these, should be available. Don’t send much more than a mega-byte worth of photos attached to an email, but you can provide links to a web page where lots of photos are available. I have ten tips just about photos, which I might blog about one day. In the meantime you’ll have to come to my music PR training course to find out what they are!

7. Keep layout simple and image-lite.
Journalists like words, and stories, that’s their trade. Nice pictures and layout never ever sold a news story to me, and pretty much every journalist I’ve ever spoken to has concurred on this. Spending hours (or even minutes) inserting logos and images and complicated layout is a total waste of your time, and can actually be counterproductive.

8. Think about what format you’ll provide it in – NOT PDF!
This links in with seven, keep it simple. I’d include the release as text in the body of an email, and attach it as a Word file, and let the journalists choose which they’d rather use. Never send it as a PDF. If I am going to write about your product I want to cut and paste your words into my file as source material for my article. Cutting and pasting from a PDF, especially one with lots of layout and pictures, is a nightmare. I routinely kick things off my always-longer-than-it-needs-to-be news story list because the source press release is a PDF.

9. Always include a date, and make any embargo very clear.
Best practice is that you always include the date the press release was issued at the top of the page, so I know exactly when the facts contained within are newsworthy.

The exception to this rule might be a product release which contains the all important date that the product first goes on sale, so that there is no confusion between the date the release is issued, and the date the product is released (it doesn’t help that we call both those things the ‘release date’!). Whatever, make dates very clear.

As for embargoes – requesting I don’t write about something until a prescribed time – preferably don’t use them. But if you have too, make sure the line that says embargo at the top is freaking huge. And then resend the release once the embargo has passed with the embargo line removed.

10. Make sure contact information is correct.
This is stating the bleeding obvious I know, but you’d be surprised. Also, the day you send out the release, don’t then have everybody who knows anything about the project out of the office for 48 hours. And don’t have an out of office reply that tells me to speak to someone else who is also out of the office. It’s happened.

So there you have it. A journalist’s view on what makes the perfect press release. I look forward to all the perfect press releases I will now be receiving. I’ll try my best to only write perfect news stories from this point onwards too. Honest.

Sections: Other Stuff | Tags: Press Releases