A good week to bury bad news?

As PR professionals, we are duty bound to make announcements that don’t cast the best light on the organisations we work for. Let’s face it, whether its profit warnings, factory closures or redundancies – bad news stinks. And you can bet, during these slightly slower summer months, any news is going to be jumped on and torn apart by news hungry editors and journalists.

But then something so momentous happens, even our worst nightmares pale into insignificance. You might well be personally devastated (or not) by Brexit or the news that the English national squad were ejected from Euro 2016 by Iceland – but professionally, this might just have been a golden opportunity to bury bad news.

How many front page worthy news stories have been hidden away at the back of the paper (or more likely – not featured on the home page) or completely ignored in favour of wall-to-wall coverage of European political and sporting news?

Of course – the same goes for good news (but perhaps not so newsworthy) stories. The dog days of summer have always been a good opportunity to get even the most cynical hack interested in your fluffy PR pieces (we’ve all done them). But this summer (or at least the next few weeks of summer) might be different.

If I had a great story to break, I would probably be sitting on it until the news agenda became less obsessed with Europe. Unless your client goes by the name of Cameron, Johnson, Farage or Corbyn – good luck getting a journalist on the nationals to even reply to your emails (let alone picking the phone up).

Yep – we’re all going to have to work a little harder this summer or perhaps take a longer vacation.

How will this summer’s European-focused news agenda impact on your strategies?