THE big day is almost upon us. I've had lots of phone calls about it from people just as keen to see it as I am, wondering what our coverage is going to be. The time, finally, has come.

Nope, it's not the Royal Wedding, which despite having already been exhausted from every angle imaginable by the nationals is still more than a week away. The real big day is tomorrow, when a press release sent to us by a PR company gets followed up in The Champion. Trust me, it's a momentous occasion, because it means I'll finally stop getting the phone calls.

It's a sorry story that began about two weeks ago, when a publicity firm - let's call them Dog and Bone PR, because almost all these big agencies have silly, fatuous names - rang to ask whether we'd be interested in a story connected to West Lancashire. Naturally, I was, so I asked them to send over whatever they had, and said I'd have a look at it. This, a mate in PR has since told me, was my first mistake. Show them even the remotest sign of being interested and you're on their list as a target publication.

Sure enough, the release came over but (predictably) it wasn't a story in the hard-hitting, newsy sense, but the usual sort of flim-flam which has a hint of information and an awful lot of promotion for a business which convenientally happens to be one of Dog and Bone's clients. For that reason, it got turned around into something closer to a news story, put in our Champion newsbasket and then missed at the final cut when it got beaten onto the pages by the bigger, meatier bits of breaking news. This happens at every newspaper up and down the country on a daily basis but it didn't make Dog and Bone very happy, because they've got targets to meet. So they rang us. Repeatedly.

They rang to see if we'd got it into The Champion. They rang us again to ask us why we hadn't got it into The Champion. They rang us two days later to ask if it'd be going into the following week's edition. They rang us on deadline day to ask us how we were getting on with it. Then they rang us again to make sure we hadn't forgotten about it. This, I'm told, is what they call "closing" in the world of sales and marketing, but given that I never make any promises, I wasn't about to lose any sleep over it. Well, until it got held back from the paper by bigger, more immediately important stories. Again.

So the pattern continued, with the Dog and Bone PR lady ringing us roughly every two days about it, sounding slightly more aggressive and forceful about it with every call. Believe it or not, despite all the media doom mongers suggesting that all regional news reporters do these days is rewrite press releases, we do actually do proper stories with actual news which say newsworthy things about local people and places, and they'll always come before a tenuously-connected company trying to get a plug in the papers for free. That's why proper journalism came first and the barking PR woman came second.

Anyway, the story is on a page in tomorrow's edition, which I'm sure Dog and Bone will take as an eventual victory because they got the release into the paper for their client and ticked off another box on their target list. However, they also succeeded in annoying a room full of reporters with a string of aggressively targeted phone calls in the process. It does, however, mean I can breathe a sigh of relief and focus on the thing most important to us media types.

The Royal Wedding.

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