Labour Bloggers Beer & Sandwiches at TUC

I am just back from a very good evening out. First stop tonight was a seminar on trade unions and blogging, organised by the TUC. I had been beforehand at an interesting meeting in the UNISON Headquarters on Pensions and Capital Markets (which I hope to post upon). I had got the TUC event timings wrong so I arrived late for the seminar and missed most of the speakers.

It was aimed at TUC affiliated union's communication and policy officers. It was very well attended (about 25 people). I had missed the presentations by Tom P (Labour and Capital) and Paul Evans (Never Trust a Hippy). I came in during the middle of Richard Murphy's (Tax Research UK) talk about his blog. Some useful points he made was that you should always make posts very short. You need to recognise that there is a different writing style with blogs compared to traditional journalism or report writing. He also recommended that that you make links and post comments on sites that you find things interesting to support them, since with blogging you can feel isolated at times.

The excellent informal TUC blog Touchstone was discussed and explained. There was a general recognition that blogging helped you keep your edge, it made you think about your views and what are your politics. “I don’t know how I think until I write it down”. Labourstart blogger Eric Lee was there as well and he made a fair point that there was a lot of rubbish blog's out there and we must not get forget other media mediums (and that not enough time to ask questions at this workshop!).

Afterward we went off to the TUC Christmas Communications and Media party. I met up with Paul Smith again, the deputy Labour leader of Islington Council Labour group who does IT work for unions. The event was a busy and buzzing with media people. We did note that many newspapers and media groups did not have any “industrial correspondents” anymore. News regarding trade union issues is often presented along with “business news” and usually portrayed unions in a poor and negative light.

Picture is of Tom, Paul, me and John W (Johninnit). We couldn’t find Richard.

Afterwards some of us had a beer or three at a local hostelry and put the world finally to rights.