Doing the news

A task carried out by one of the CJS Team members every day, to bring you the edited highlights of the news across the sector. It can be anything from a stack of scientific papers to a big breaking story and all the reactions from the various organisations.  We receive hundreds of press releases every day as well as reading the countryside and wildlife related publications and relevant sections in the main daily newspapers. However, to find out what's happening more locally we use many specific watches and alerts set up to let us know of the latest stories, these are triggered by specific keywords.  One of our sources is of course google news where we have our personalised CJS settings.
snippet from our CJS news searches

And it's here that the fun begins, google is very good at finding specific words but not so much at looking at the context.  You'd be surprised how many seeming innocuous words are actually linked to other things, for example we know far more than we ever wanted to about Jodie or Kym Marsh, apparently there are several US sporting teams called badger and recently there has been a lot about the DJ Neil Fox!
Sometimes the shear idiocy of people leaves us speechless (although frequently results in a quick email around the rest of the team!).  Which is why we occasionally need the feel to double check that a news story really is what it says it is, hence the title of an article in the most recent CJS Focus "Glad to find it wasn't an April Fool" all about the Greater London Notional National Park. Read it here.
And then there's twitter to read....

Apparently we've sent over 25K tweets on our CountrysideNews stream, that's a huge amount of information and if you think that we tweet maybe one in 40 or more items read that means that since we started tweeting the news we've read approximately 1million stories - no wonder we're all cross eyed!

It all adds up to some large publications, this week alone we've produced over 60 pages of newsletters, and today has been a bit trying, one key member of staff off sick, one advertiser at the end of their tether with 'those upstairs' resulting in a very late advert for CJS Weekly and one problematic advert being handled by an intermediary (this one has been rumbling for a couple of weeks). But, as ever we all pitched in and the print edition is almost ready for dispatch, the electronic ones have just gone, phew.
And there's only one more left this year - heavens.