Media opportunities at the ECNP Congress

Every year the ECNP press team promotes selected research presented at the ECNP Annual Congress. This tends to get good international press coverage. We aim at a general audience, and in the last few years our work has been featured by the likes of The Observer, Huffington Post, The Sun, The Telegraph, CBS, NBC News, Agence France Press, Bild, Times of India, La Stampa, the BBC, New York Times, etc.

The work needs to be newsworthy and based on good science or be clinically important or have some general interest. We only promote around 7-8 items each year from a much larger initial selection. This is a service to scientists who present at the ECNP.

If you would be interested in having us consider your abstract as part of our media programme, please send us an email. Please include a copy of your accepted abstract in the email.

What are we looking for?
There are no firm laws in selecting work for the press, but here are some considerations:

• Is the work new, or do you say something new or controversial? A great review, even from a Nobel Prize Winner, is generally not news.
• Has the work received previous publicity?
• Has it already been published? If some work was published several months ago it may be difficult to present it as new
• Is it relevant to lots of people, or is it the sort of science which will make people sit up?

What happens then?
Our press team will look at the abstract to see if it is likely to make the news. If so, we’ll write to you and ask you some more questions. If it looks like we can go ahead we will begin to develop a press release to send to journalists at the time of the congress. There will probably be several iterations before we arrive at material which we are all happy with. Nothing will go to the press until you are happy with it. You can withdraw at any point. The ECNP can also pull out at any point; sometimes we need to take a ‘Conference overview’ for example we don’t want 6 press releases from the same country.

I’m planning to publish, is that a problem?
In fact, most journals don’t worry about conference work appearing in the press. A minority do have this restriction, so the best thing to do is to talk about it (we have a list of journals which are open to conference press activity). The important thing is to ask us; we can talk about this, then you will make the final decision.

What will a press release look like?
You can see previous press releases here.
If you are interested, drop us an e-mail.