David Robertson wrote:Never seen a chess story here before. Just shows what a large PR budget can do.
http://bit.ly/QQT9Bz
Good spot. Thanks for the link.
I wonder quite how large the PR Budget was/needed to be, though. From the text of the story I doubt this story is anything more than a rehash of the piece that appeared in
The Times (the reference to the quote given to the other paper in the middle of
The Daily Mail's report is a bit of a clue) and perhaps a story sourced from one of the news agencies. There's not an awful lot more here than there was in
The Today Programme this morning
Once a story appears in one paper it tends to appear in all the others too. It's how the media works. They seem to assume that the publiciation of a report somewhere by definition makes the event newsworthy. The real sucess, then, is getting the story in the press in the first palce.
The original location was
The Times and I'm sure the fact that they published their report owes an awful lot to their chess correspondent. So credit to RDK for getting another chess story in the news. It is, to be fair, something he's pretty good at.
That said, looking at the reports more closely, I do find them a little odd. The opening quote, for example,
World-class tournament chess will return to the sport's so-called 'home' in central London for the first time in more than a century.
and one from the end
The game briefly returned in 2003 for a small tournament to mark the 175th anniversary of chess on the site.
seems very strange given the claims being made for the Staunton Memorial at the time. The last version of Stauton announced at the start of every round that it was the strongest tournament held in Britain since the 1930s. This was of course cobblers - the 1st London Chess Classic held a few months later was clearly stronger and only claimed to be the strongest tournament in London for 25 years (an underselling if anything) - but, nevertheless, it was the claim the Staunton folk were making.
The second mail quote is simply factually incorrect and both describing the Staunton Memorial as "a small tournament" and the claim of no world class chess at Simpsons for 100 years is at least questionable and certainly in conflict with what was being said by the organisers of Simpsons events at the time. This is all particularly interesting given the likely orginal source of the story.
This is a question for publicising chess I suppose. How far are we prepared to go in being flexible with the actualitee?
PS: Talking of the Daily Mail, I'll check when I get home, but I'm pretty sure they covered both the Black Queen Murder Mystery and the Korchnoi-Spassky Candidates' Final of 1977/1978. Guess who was smack bang in the middle of those!