Publicity Officer’s Report

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 10

APL has not been renowned over the years for attracting a great deal of publicity - and the small amount it does get is seldom good.

Publicity of the BAPLA comes in two forms - publicity of what the committee is doing to its members and publicity to the outside world.

The first is what you as a member (assuming you are one??) see as the fruits of your membership fee. Vector is the most obvious and goes out to all members. The notice of meetings, however, is just as important (for those people who live in Britain) as they have a great bearing on the numbers who turn up on a Friday afternoon in London. If we don’t give people enough notice, they may already have something booked; if we don’t ‘sell’ the meeting well enough, they may decide they can’t afford the time; if we do get these and other things right, the turnout is good and everybody is happy.

The second is much harder though. Publicity to the outside world is mainly through the computer press and here we are not starting from a good base. They have to sell papers and are generally only interested if we have some up-to-the-minute news. Are we CUA-compliant for instance? Do we run under OS/2 or Windows-3? Can we do a bit of co-operative processing here and there? How do we do Object Orientation in APL (APL++?). Generally the answer to all these questions is either we don’t or we can’t.

Consequently we have to rely on more major events like the Outstanding Achievement Award and the sponsoring of the APL Statistics Library, events that aren’t run of the mill and may attract the attention of even the most hardened press hack.

So I don’t think you are going to see APL emblazoned on the front pages of the weekly magazines in the immediate future, but with some effort and a bit of luck you may come across the odd snatch here and there.