Current Insider News
Reporting on public relations and corporate communications practice
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Five desks, one standing set of notes
Current Insider News sets out how public relations and corporate communications work is actually organised: media relations, crisis communication, internal communication, public affairs, and measurement and reporting. Each desk holds standing notes that are written to be read before the work starts.
What this publication covers
Communications work is usually described as one job and practised as five. The person who maintains a media list is doing different work from the person who writes a holding statement at two in the morning, and both are doing something different again from the person asked at the end of a quarter what any of it achieved. Grouping the work by desk makes the differences visible and makes it obvious which decisions belong where.
The notes here are written for practitioners and for the people who work alongside them: the manager briefed the morning before an announcement, the official who receives a consultation response, the analyst asked whether a coverage figure means anything. They are explanatory rather than promotional, and they stop where honest general explanation stops.
Nothing on this site is a report of a particular incident or a comment on a named organisation. The standing notes describe practice: what a piece of work contains, what usually goes wrong with it, and what a competent version looks like.
The desks
Each desk collects the standing notes for one kind of communications work.
How organisations plan what they say to journalists, who says it, and what happens after a story runs.
What an incident communications plan contains, how a first statement is written, and what a review afterwards should look at.
The audiences inside an organisation, the channels that reach them, and why manager cascades succeed or fail.
How public affairs differs from press work, what a consultation response contains, and why transparency registers matter.
What a communications report is for, how objectives are framed so they can be tested, and how to report honestly when the result is mixed.
Where this work is practised
The same five desks appear in very different settings, and the setting changes what is difficult.
Consultancies and agencies
Teams working across several client organisations at once, where the same desks are run in parallel and the constraint is usually context rather than craft.
In-house communications teams
Practitioners employed by the organisation they represent, who carry the internal communication desk alongside external work and hold the relationships that make a crisis plan usable.
Membership and representative bodies
Organisations speaking for a group of members, where public affairs work dominates and every public position has to be defensible to the membership as well as to the outside.
Public sector communications
Communications governed by published standards, disclosure duties and a duty to be understood by people who did not choose to be an audience.
Organisations without a communications function
Small organisations where this work is done by whoever has time, and where a short written plan is worth more than any tool.
Recently written notes
- Crisis CommunicationWriting a first statement under pressure
- Internal CommunicationWhy manager briefings come first
- MeasurementReach, advertising value and what they do not measure
- Public AffairsAnswering the questions a consultation actually asked
- Media RelationsA story that cannot survive its second question
Resources
- Reference DeskEvery standing note grouped by topic
- GlossaryTwenty-four terms defined in plain words
- Editorial StandardsHow the writing here is prepared
- CoverageThe full index of desks
How this site is organised
The section tab bar runs in desk order: media relations, crisis communication, internal communication, public affairs, then measurement and reporting. The Coverage index lists the same five desks with their standing summaries, and the Glossary defines the vocabulary used across all of them.