Conference News April 2020 | Page 5

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL efore I joined Conference News four years ago I worked on the web desk for a broadsheet newspaper. Part of my job was to cover breaking stories over the newswires, and in the space of about three weeks I found myself leading rolling coverage of two plane crashes and the death of Muhammad Ali. What I learned from those intense experiences – especially the air disasters – was that coverage moves in natural stages. It starts with the bang, moves to scrabbling for facts, then sets into a rhythm of analysis before the true scale of the consequences come to light some time later. You must, at all costs, avoid overloading your readers with too many opinions from too many sources. The Covid19 pandemic has swung an axe through the events industry like nothing before it. There is no business in the land – Hell, maybe the world – which hasn’t been impacted. As you can imagine, this magazine looks very different to how it was supposed to only two weeks ago. As the dawning realisation of the gravity of the situation became clear, I’ve had to make some changes. Some content went in before it really kicked off, so you may take comfort to learn that there is still plenty of content in here for ‘normal times’. I have been inundated with calls and offers from people who want to share their views on this crisis, but I have 5 Editor’s Letter resisted all of them. Over the last couple of decades, we have been saturated with ‘experts’, and now when we actually need proper ones, a lot of people don’t want to trust them. For this issue’s Covid19 coverage we have stuck to facts, speaking only to the trade associations who are working on your behalf. Here, we have been working incredibly hard to help you as best we can. Since the last issue I have been on BBC News and LBC twice, as well as fielding calls from newspapers. We even wrote an open letter to prime minister Boris Johnson, asking for more funding and the deferment of new IR35 rules – the latter of which I’m pleased to say was considered. Make no mistake, this is a dark time for the events industry, but there may be signs the clouds could be beginning to lift in Asia. China, South Korea and Singapore may be the first countries coming out of the other side, and while that offers little consolation to those with an empty business diary today, there is, at least, light at the end of the tunnel. We are here, in part, because we have been unable to raise sufficient awareness of the value of the business visits and events industry. This must change, now. Tell everyone you meet that it is worth £70bn to our country and – to date at least – employs 700,000 eventprofs. The government has a duty to look after us all. We are all in this together. Martin Fullard Editor Conference News www.conference-news.co.uk