CorpComms Magazine

While normal, sane people may have been bemoaning the end of the holidays as they trudged back to the office today, some freelance journalists on this side of the pond (I won't mention any names) are pretty happy that the festive season is behind us.

The reason for this Scrooge-like sentiment? It's just that tracking down contacts and lining up interviews has been fiendishly tricky.

Not many people in the US take all the time between Christmas and New Year off work as they often do in the UK, but here the holiday season lasts a lot longer. This means that sources have been disappearing 'for the holidays' since just before Thanksgiving and it's only now that pretty much everyone is back at their desks.

That's more than six weeks of 'he/she's on vacation right now' or 'can we line something up for January?' And even when staff are physically checked in for work, psychologically a lot of people seem to switch off with their first whiff of turkey and pumpkin pie at the end of November and don't quite re-engage with any serious stuff until their New Year's Eve hangovers are well behind them.

No one can blame them, but the US recession seems to have made it all worse.  Companies have been waiting to line up that big interview in the new year - perhaps after the inauguration of Barack Obama  - when they hope that everything will start improving. Add to that the demise of the annual company press party because of the all-round credit crunchiness and it's been a quiet and worryingly sober few weeks for journalists, which is clearly a sorry state of affairs. 

Today may allegedly be the most depressing day to be at work, but I for one am glad to be here!

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