Provision of DDC News Press Management System

The Directorate of Defence Communications (DDC) is the central communications directorate of the Ministry of Defence which provides policy and guidance on defence-wide media and communications.

The DDC News manages all media contact and currently has a requirement for an on-line database to log and manage media enquiries, collate interview requests for ministers and to forecast upcoming issues.

The News Team within DDC operates a 24 hour a day service to domestic and international media 345 days a year. Each and every day the majority of the news team will interact with national, regional and trade journalists and are required to provide a timely and accurate service in order to fulfil the department's strategic communications objectives.

As one of the busiest communications teams in Whitehall, DDC News will issue numerous statements, provide guidance on a wide variety of subjects and will process interview bids for Ministers and senior members of the military every day. In order to do this it is imperative that there is a system in place that logs journalist interaction and provides a database for all statements that have been issued. This allows consistency in messaging and allows individual members of the News team who may not specialise in one subject area to access information and respond to enquiries quickly.

The News Team currently uses a single word document to save all media statements and attempts to save core scripts on the shared MOSS site. This comes with limitations as a shared word document does not allow the news team to log individual contacts with journalists and, as lines evolve and change, it often causes confusion when trying to find statements devoid of background and context in a single word file.

Using a single word file has led to individual members of the News team trying to find statements that have been issued in previous media coverage rather than through our own systems. This is because the single word file for 2016 consisted of 600 pages making it very difficult for lines to be found. It is currently not uncommon for one member of the News team to have to phone the Communications Officer who dealt with original request for information to get clarity on the latest line to take and to get the background on an incoming media enquiry. This can often happen out of hours and during the night which is clearly not acceptable.

Given the lack of certainly with previously issued statements, there is concern that an individual communications officer could unknowingly issue an out of date line or provide a journalist with incorrect information due to a lack of a central resource to log and store statements DDC is therefore seeking a new platform in which all media interaction can be logged.