Campus PR

Our skill in spotting the story and our journalist contacts helped a research institute gain coverage in UK media

Bangor University

Founded in 1884, and located in the beautiful setting of North Wales, Bangor University’s teaching and research is organised across nine schools, with over fifty specialist research centres covering a wide range of disciplines.

The brief

Bangor University is regularly featured in the Welsh media, but felt that the University’s research was not reaching a wider UK audience. Bangor’s media team wanted us to help them identify research that was strong enough to make a UK national story, and draw on our journalist contacts to achieve that coverage. We were asked to start with particular areas of research, one of which was the University’s Nuclear Futures Institute.

Our response

Journal papers in nuclear engineering rarely offer opportunities for big stories, so we needed to look beyond standard press releases to other angles for the research. We interviewed the Institute’s Director and Deputy Director to gain an overview of the research and see where media opportunities might lie. A chance comment by the Director allowed us to spot the opportunity for an opinion article. We also saw that the opening of new laboratories – the Bangor University Fuel Fabrications Facility (BUFFF) – might offer the chance of a feature opportunity or exclusive for a science journalist.

The results

We helped the Director, Professor Bill Lee, write and publish the opinion article in the Conversation which has had over 9000 reads and over 300 shares on social media.

At our invitation, Tom Whipple, Science Editor at The Times, travelled up from London to visit BUFFF, leading to an article both in print and online.

We also press-released the launch of two new projects, which resulted in coverage in specialist media including Energy Central, The Engineer, Electronic Specifier, American Ceramic Society Bulletin and Design Products and Applications.