Stuart Dredge

This poor blog. It’s been woefully neglected. The last quarter of 2011 was a bit wurgh with deadlines, travel and child-related sleep deprivation. Hopefully 2012 will be better.

What’s going on? I currently have three main things I do: The Guardian’s Apps Blog, music industry publication Music Ally, and its spin-off site/newsletter The Appside. But I also write about apps for Stuff magazine, and do a weekly mobile games column for the Sunday Times – the latter two are both in print rather than online. And I talk about apps on the radio – Lauren Laverne’s 6Music show – every Tuesday morning.

I’m currently getting set for the Mobile Games Forum and Midem conferences, mulling whether to go to Mobile World Congress or SXSW, and trying to keep the balance between writing, thinking and actually responding to calls and emails rather than watching them slide by unreplied to while feeling slightly panicky (See: 2011).

Anyway, this week so far: the 6Music show with Huey Morgan sitting in was fun, talking about the Brit Awards, Cupidtino, Burns Night and Numberlys among others (it’s about 1hr 10mins in). There are Apps Blog interviews with Toca Boca, The Economist and Appillionaires author Chris Stevens.

Music Ally is busy, although most of my work is behind its paywall – stories on HMV’s Listening Post app and Yamaha’s NoteStar app are free-to-access though. And The Appside is going well: it’s a site but also a free daily bulletin about what music, film/TV, books and games companies are up to in mobile, as well as startups, social services and brands.

The problem with personal blogs is they feel like pure self-promotion – all of this post for example. I’ll try to think of things to write about more from now on.

Oh, one last bit of self-promotion: SAY Media interviewed me, about mobile and music in 2012. Thankfully they went with the big Bjork picture rather than my mug.

It’s only fair, and might make ‘Taggart’ less annoyed…

1. Say something sounds interesting and then not write about it. Usually because it does sound interesting and I intend to write about it, but then things come up. Sometimes that’s justified – a big story breaks that knocks something else off the end of my news list. Other times it’s not – a story that I meant to write up falls through the cracks. Somewhere, a client is probably shouting at their PR either way. I think I need to be better about saying ‘That does sound interesting, I’ll try to cover it, but…’ to be upfront.

2. RSVP to events and not turn up. Very seldom: actually, I’d usually send a shamefaced email on the day saying ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t make it…’ – but am guessing it’s just as annoying. Sometimes this is work-related – deadlines falling around me – and sometimes family-related, but I can imagine if someone has said ‘Oh yes, he’s coming’ to their client, and then he doesn’t, they would curse me.

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Earlier this week, I went with a couple of other journalists to Skywrite to be grilled by a room of PR graduates on what journalists do and don’t like about PR. And to have some more rounded stuff to say, I asked other tech journalists on Twitter for their key annoyances. The floodgates / can of worms opened wide, and I thought it would be worth publishing the responses in one place.

Before that, though – there was a specific brief here to focus on what annoys journalists, because that’s what would be most useful for the graduates. Please don’t take this as a ‘PRs are REALLY annoying’ post from me, for that reason… There is plenty to say about what makes tech hacks really happy when talking to / dealing with people in PR (and yes, an equally long list of ‘things that annoy PRs about journalists). I’d love to read the latter if anyone’s up for compiling it.

Update: Also, sorry, something that didn’t come through because I worded it badly above:  the session at Skywrite was about lots of stuff – how journalists work, what makes a story, what they find helpful. It was mainly positive stuff rather than moaning – the moaning part was what I solicited from Twitter though. But the reason I went along is I get on well with Skywrite and Hotwire, and it seemed like a good thing to take part in. In other words, NO AXE TO GRIND HERE! ;o)

Anyway, I’ve just copied and pasted these all in – Deadlines are looming today, so apologies for not attributing each quote. But thankyou to everyone who contributed. The tweets are grouped into a few key themes, with any extra thoughts from me in italics.

Also, this blog post and this blog post also have some really good information on this subject. And here is my follow-up on the things I do that really annoy technology PRs.

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