As a Labour Party member it pains me to say it, the Conservative Party web site is far better than Labour's site. The most immediate benefit is that it provides news syndication for its news releases. This is such an easy technology to implement that I'm at a loss as to why Labour has went to the trouble of redesigning its site and then missed out something so basic. 

Don't just take my word for it but take a look at what permission marketing guru Seth Godin says about RSS feeds. It is doubly ironic that Labour is failing to do this when a lot of its latest election techniques are based on permission campaigning.

Another change for the worse is that the Labour site no longer offers an option to sync with AvantGo, so you can view it on the move. The Conservative site still offers this option.

Sunderland University PR academic, Philip Young, has an excellent account of the recent Chartered Institute of Public Relations academic conference in Lincoln. Philip presented a paper entitled As Clear As Your Conscience about ethics in public relations.

Chris Rushton, also from Sunderland, presented the paper, Changing Modes of Editorial/PR Production, that most intrigued me. Chris has researched the volume of press releases going into news rooms and what happens to them, looking at factors such as how they are delivered (email, post, fax etc). Not sure if he looked at RSS. I'd love to be able to read this paper/research but as Philip comments in his post that is not the way academia works and it could be months or even years before it is available to PR practitioners in the field.

Technology journalist (and various other things to make a living!) David Tebbutt has an interesting post on the 'rules' for interviews. They are a useful pointer, although they are only applicable for technology PRs (with my public sector or political PR hat on I would have a different list).

The only one that I would query is one of his "Examples of information which cannot be shared with a journalist". I don't understand why "Personnel information, PRACTICES or POLICIES" (my emphasis) is included in the list. As a PR I would counsel clients that these would seem like reasonable areas for a journalist to explore. As a customer I want the media to tell me about the employment practices of companies I might buy something from. It is relevant and interesting to know what policies they have on issues such as equality, redundancy, trade unions, outsourcing etc.

Hopefully David will respond and explain why this one is on the list.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the heads up on this new PR company that really looks like it's going places! Perhaps it's the US sister company of Prentiss McCabe?

Correction: A domain check reveals that it is actually based in Australia.