Went to first meeting of Creative Stirling Industries Forum. The structure has now been put in place. It was acknowledged we suffer from being a small town wedged between Glasgow and Edinburgh – major international creative hubs.
With arts organisations, particularly artist-led ones, facing a tricky financial future we are delighted to be given a £5,000 Awards for All Lottery funding to help raise cultural awareness and promote the arts in central Scotland.
This afternoon sees the inaugural meeting of Creative Industries Stirling, getting together of art, design and craft organisations in the area in order to work together for the future benefit of us all.
I will be there representing Forth Valley Open Studios.
Web-site:annshaw.co.uk
Plans are well under way for this years Forth Valley Open Studios and publicity is beginning to kick in.
Our local newspaper, The Stirling Observer, is featuring an artist a week in the run up to the event in June.
I am very aware of the need to tailor press coverage to different platforms. Gone are the days when you could have a scatter- gun approach and send out information to newspapers and hope that some paper with a sympathetic reporter interested in the arts would give your event the oxygen of publicity.
Now it’s the full works using social networks like Facebook and Twitter along with local freesheets.
Once we would have turned our noses up at publicity in these papers but they now have an important role in the community especially as the big morning papers in Scotland – the Herald and Scotsman- rarely give coverage to events such as ours even though we are becoming a major tourist attraction with people booking their holidays around it and it generates over £40,000 per annum to the local economy.
We are now embedded as part of the cultural scene in the central belt of Scotland, and like other events, have to work hard to generate publicity for it.
Because of the shortage of staff on local newspapers it is becoming relatively easy to get arts coverage providing you give them the copy and photos ready to go.
What they don’t like is having to dig the stories out for themselves because they are up against such tight deadlines and very limited, not to mention inexperienced staff, most of whom will never have heard of the concept of Open Studios so it is a steep learning curve and educational exercise for them.
The easier we make their job the more likely we are to get publicity.
Ann Shaw is an artist/writer based in Scotland working in new media. As a journalist she campaigned and wrote about many social and medical issues. She is a feminist and founder member of Falkirk Womens Aid, active in the trades union movement and former member of National Union of Journalists Equality Working Party, and founder member of Forth Valley Open Studios.
