Posts from — February 2009

Damien let the cat out of the beautifully-embroidered bag that my company, A Stitch In Time, will be providing the goodie bags for the Irish Blog Awards. Each canvas tote will be embroidered with the Blog Awards logo, and you have your choice of pink, green and canvas to choose from when you pick up your goodies.

For any sponsors, nominees or participants out there, I’ll be driving down to Cork for the awards, so if you’ve been thinking about getting your logo/url/own name (vainglorious bastards) on anything you can think of, drop me a line at markham[at]astitchintime[dot]ie to place an order and I’ll hand it to you personally on Saturday in Cork. Deadline for orders is Wednesday.

Our catalogue is online here so have a squizz and see what takes your fancy. Damien will have info on available merchandise with the Blog Awards logo (and your logo if required) for sponsors from Monday onwards.

Originally uploaded by evissa

There’s been a good bit of talk on Twitter regarding the misuse of embargos by PR firms and corporate bulldogs. Journalists HATE embargos, or rather, hate their overuse by PR types. Yes, an embargo is a useful tool when an important or highly interesting announcement straddles a publication deadline. It means that info a publicist wants to be seen in the morning papers, but which won’t be announced until after the 11pm news deadline, gets into print. Used correctly, it’s a handy covenant between journalist and publicist. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

In the wrong hands, however, it does nuthin’ for nobody.

When someone slaps an embargo on something ridiculously trivial, it screams incompetence. Part of the marketeers function is knowing where their product or announcement ranks in the grand scheme of importance. Marketeers need to be strong with their clients, know the media to which they are pitching the product, and tailor their means of presentation accordingly. Obviously, to a client, the ‘announcement’ of a new flavour of cat chow is the dawn of a new era in feline cuisine. To any journalist bar those writing for ‘Your Cat Magazine‘ (who have a monthly deadline anyway, so run a lower risk of falling foul of deadlines) it’s kitty litter. In the bin it goes, and if you can avoid touching it directly, so much the better.

Our generic newsdesk email address in Metro used to get upward of 350 emails a day, all vying for attention, many of them with hilariously ambitious embargos. If you’re fighting off 349 other releases to get into a paper, an embargo certainly won’t help your cause, and neither will being guarded and coy on the other end fo the phone. You may think it makes your product more exclusive, or even mysterious. But journalists don’t want to be sleuthing (read: wasting time) for the sake of a paltry product release – that’s not really the nub of investigative journalism.  Publicists, before using the word in an email header again, do yourself a favour, grab a copy of the Oxford dictionary of Etymology, and look at the roots of the word embargo:

embargo: prohibitory order on the passage of ships; suspension of commerce, etc Sp., f. embargar, arrest, impede

It shares a linguistic root with the word barrier, and sits tellingly between emasculate and embarrass, a few words either side of it in the dictionary. Embargos are a hindrance, to be used sparingly, if at all, unless you’re a journalist on Twitter and you’re being sarcastic. Ahem.

Just a quick snow shot before I go and make a thick hot chocolate with cinnamon and chilli in. It’s best not to wonder how this picture was taken. Be safe in the knowledge that I was doing about 15mph at the time.

And in a 4X4.

Spring in Ireland, eh? Meanwhile….THIS. Jeez, can’t think why people are emigrating….

One more pic below the fold. [Read more →]

Kenny Egan, silver medallist, coulda been a contender. But he gave up the hollow glory of golden gloves for the infinite riches of contentment.

One Wednesday in the autumn of 2008, two kids squared up against each other on a patch of grass in Condalkin, fists raised in a pugilistic pose. The day before, a neighbourhood hero had returned from Beijing wearing a silver medal, and so they had forsaken soccer for the newest old game in town. As Kenny Egan drove past, he looked out the car window with a sense of pride.

“I came back on the Tuesday,” said Egan, “and the next day there were two kids sparring on the green with a pair of gloves on them. That’s the first time I’d ever seen that in my housing estate,  so I think the Olympics did great for boxing in this country”. Boxing clubs are full to the point of turning people away. Egan’s own club, Neilstown, has finally received a grant that will allow it move out of a school hall and into the ranks of proper boxing clubs, and boxing can look to a securely funded future, behind its figurehead, that other sports can only dream of.

Ireland universally welcomed Kenny Egan home with open arms and open doors. He practically has a car parking space of his own in RTE. He is ubiquitous in the Irish media, gracing the front of the papers as often as the back, and spent months being courted by the international big time. Vegas was calling Kenny Egan to come bask in its neon glow. He would have begun fighting in the same weight class as his hero, Joe Calzaghe, a man with 46 professional fights fought and zero lost, with 32 knockouts to boot. During our interview in the high performance gym of the National Stadium, Egan is cooling down from a workout on an exercise bike. He is wearing a Calzaghe v Roy Jones Jr t-shirt, picked up when he went to New York to watch Calzaghe fight Jones, win, and walk away with $10million for one night’s work. It must have been very tempting indeed. [Read more →]

Feare no more the heate o’th’Sun,

Nor the furious Winters rages,
Thou thy worldly task has don,
Home art gon, and tane thy wages.
Golden Lads, and Girles all must,
As chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

Feare no more the frowne o’th’Great,
Thou art past the Tirants streake,
Care no more to cloath and eate,
To thee the Reede is as the Oake:
The Scepter, Learning, Physicke must,
All follow this and come to dust.

Feare no more the Lightning flash,
Nor th’all-dreaded Thunderstone.
Feare not Slander, Censure rash,
Thou hast finish’d Joy and mone.
All Lovers young, all Lovers must,
Consigne to thee and come to dust.

No Exorciser harme thee,
Nor no witch-craft charme thee.
Ghost unlaid forbeare thee.
Nothing ill come neere thee.
Quiet consumation have,
And renowned be thy grave.

Wherever you are, Dad, we miss you.* [Read more →]

I interviewed Kenny Egan last week, heading in to the National Stadium’s high performance gym for a chat and to watch him do a pads session. We chatted for 15 minutes as he warmed down after his session on an exercise bike.

The interview appeared in the Sunday Business Post as a First Person interview, which is a nice format, but doesn’t allow for much elaboration. The interview as it appears is here, but the wealth of quotes that I got from Kenny deserved a second working, so I’ve written the feature as it could have appeared in a post that will auto-post later on.

Kenny chats away so naturally that really, I could have gone down several interesting streets with it.

One interesting avenue was that the interview was organised using Twitter, which was a first for me. Kenny tweets away here and uses Facebook, Bebo and YouTube to keep his fans in the loop.

“We’ve Twitter there,” says Kenny.  “We’ve Facebook, my Bebo page has over 10,000 hits since we got back from Beijing. Steven, a very good friend of mine, he has been in here recording clips of me working bags, pads, circuits, putting them onto Youtube and Bebo to let the kids see what it’s all about. They only see me fighting in Beijing, they don’t see the stuff that goes in before it and after it.”

The article is timed to go off at around 10.30 this morning, check back in here if you fancy a read.