Raidió Rí-Rá, Ireland’s only all-Irish chart-station for young people, has put out a call for people with fluent Irish and a few hours to spare one morning a week in March 2010 to help get the word out about the station

Raidió Rí-Rá, which can be heard all year around online on www.rrr.ie, on all Nokia phones, and on iPhones with the latest application, will go onto the airwaves for the second year in a row as part of Seachtain na Gaeilge. Seachtain na Gaeilge is a non-profit organisation, which promotes the use of Irish language and culture both at home and abroad within a two-week festival held in March every year.

The chart-station will be broadcasting live in Dublin (100.3 FM), Cork (106.7 FM), Galway (99.1 FM), and Limerick (105.5 FM) during March 2010 and the station is organising volunteer teams to visit schools in these cities. Volunteers are required for a few hours one morning a week in March to help Raidió Rí-Rá by visiting at most five schools in their area.

The Raidió Rí-Rá street-teams will visit classes to chat with the pupils in Irish and to organise quizzes with small prizes with them, and some lucky students will even have the chance to talk live on air to Rí-Rá presenters in studio. Raidió Rí-Rá will supply all the prizes and the necessary material for the quizzes for the street-teams to get the fun going as Gaeilge in schools.

If you’d like to be part of this project with Raidió Rí-Rá and help to promote Irish in your local area, contact Clare Lanigan today at mailto: clare@rrr.ieor call +353 (0)1 6611999.

Whether working as a journalist is your dream job or you need to improve your business communications with the media, a new e-book from an Irish PR company has excellent tips.

Bvisible Communications, through its website bvisible.ie has issued a free e-book of a collection of interviews with media professionals giving a unique insight into how PR professionals and the media can work together.

The e-book, available as free download from www.bvisible.ie/ebook features contributions from a range of print, web and broadcast journalists.

Interviewees for the series are:
John Kennedy – Editor at Siliconrepublic.com
Adrian Weckler – Technology Editor at The Sunday Business Post
John Collins – Assistant Business Editor at The Irish Times
The team from Today FM’s The Last Word with Matt Cooper
Tim Desmond – Producer of RTE Radio 1’s The Business
Joe Walsh – Producer of TV3 News
Mark Little – Presenter of RTE’s Prime Time

Bvisible’s Managing Director, Bernice Burnside said: “There is no formal dialogue between PR and journalism and we have always found it odd that a profession built on bettering communications did not have this dialogue with its partners in journalism. We created this collection to breach that unspoken divide between the PR industry and professional journalism.”

The interviews had already been produced as part of the company’s ‘Ask a Journalist’ blog series.
Suited to those already working in the communications sphere or hoping to forge a career in the area, the e-book provides an insight into how a story might get picked up, major PR faux pas and examples of how to make your media pitch stand out.

It also highlights the use of Twitter as a news source. “Many interviewees have cited the service as highly useful for monitoring breaking news – a point that should be well heeded by those working in crisis communications,” added Burnside, a former media producer.

“Journalists are under increasing pressure with more work required to satisfy online and print, but fewer staff to meet it. This is an opportunity for the good PR practitioner and a major liability for a poor one. The messages that come across from the interviews will help ensure that PR approaches are more warmly received.”

The e-book is available as a PDF download online at www.bvisible.ie/ebook and will also be issued to third level institutions with PR courses

We all have to delve deep these days to find the strength and determination to push on through adversity. And no doubt, most people have what it takes. Having spent thousands of years trying to tease reluctant crops out of rain soaked bogs, the Irish are a resourceful and tenacious people - we are genetically programmed for adversity.

However, even the most determined of us falter when the spectre of George Lee looms into our living rooms, his sepulchral voice intoning doom, or when the newspapers shout from the news-stands about a 15% contraction in the economy. Any little green shoots that we might be carefully tending can only wilt under the barrage of the negative Irish media.

Unfortunately, the media is so addicted to bad news that they actually filter out the good news stories.

Example: that headline of the 15% contraction was based on an ESRI report. There were more positive elements in that report. The headline could have just as easily read: Job losses decrease from 1,000 per day to 500 per day. That might have made us feel that the recovery is dawning, albeit slowly, it might have made us feel a little more positive, it might have inspired us try a little harder.

Another Example: Brian Lenihan was going onto a televised political discussion show recently and he said that he wanted to point out the fact that 15,000 people had actually come off the live register in January. However, the producers forbade him from stating this as it didn’t fit in with the tone of the programme (that tone being brutally negative of course)

We are seeing the beginnings of the recovery at Prosperity. Our clients are starting to peep from the bunkers they had fled to post Lehmans; companies are hiring, things are slowly starting to get better. And of course, the Stock Market is steadily rising again. But then again, all the in house media economists say that this is a Bear Rally – something that happens before an even bigger stock market crash.

Who cares what these guys say. They never predicted the credit crash. We could have assembled a group of monkeys and they would have been more insightful than these economists have been. How can they pretend to be so prophetic now?

Morale is what wins battles. Any good commander knows that he has to watch out for the whiner, for that one negative soldier who can drain the fighting will of a whole platoon and inevitably lose the battle. The negative bias of the Irish media is undermining our will – it is hindering recovery.

Jim Murray - Prosperity

Back in the late nineties, the so called search engine pundits were as visionary as our economists have been of late. Just as we are now having our soft landing, those pundits predicted the imminent end of the search engine, claiming that it was becoming impossible to effectively filter and manage content, and deliver relevant results.

At the time, the major search engine was www.excite.com

One fine day two alumni from Stanford University approached this World leading search engine, and offered to sell them their innovative new algorhythms for just one million dollars.

The geniuses at excite laughed them out of the building. So Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to go ahead and set up their own search engine. The rest is history, and the irony is that excite.com not only quietly left the World stage, but they actually even host Google ads now on their “bar fly” home page. Looking at excite now, it is hard to believe that in 1998 there was a 6.7 billion dollar merger of Excite and @Home. Free falling from the dizzy heights is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to Irish banks and property developers.

We thought you might like a little nostalgia; this is actually the Google home page from back then -  baby google

And there was another kid on the block back then – baby yahoo

Jim – Prosperity.ie

For all of the people who love their jobs so much that they are depressed it is a bank holiday weekend, here is something to cheer them up . . .

Matt’s travels are very discretely sponsored by Stride Gum, but you wouldn’t know this unless you did some research.

Jim - Prosperity.ie