Police forces are spending some £40m a year nationally on press officers, a Freedom of Information request has found. They are used for a range of roles, including marketing the crime prevention message and providing accurate information to the public but some media outlets fear they also manipulate the news agenda by withholding crime details.
Police forces stepped up spending on marketing when the Home Office began measuring performance against perceptions of crime. The figures were revealed through an FoI request submitted to all forces in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Former Nottingham Evening Post editor Barrie Williams returns to Nottinghamshire to explore the highs and lows of being a newspaper boss when he recounts tales from his autobiography Ink In The Blood, at the Lowdham Book Festival next month.
His time in charge covered the introduction of new technology and the miners’ strike. Barrie will be in conversation with Evening Post features editor Jeremy Lewis at the festival on June 28.

Senior figures from both sides of the media law world will be speaking and leading sessions at the three-day summer school being organised by IBC Legal Conferences.
Speakers at the event, to be held at Cambridge University from August 11 to 13, will include Sun legal manager Justin Walford, head of litigation at law firm Swan Turton Jonathan Coad and Carolyn Pepper, a partner at Reed Smith Richards Butler LLP.
Developments in privacy, FoI issues, defamation and the rights of the press are among the topics.

Scooped!, the mock newspaper front-page business, has teamed up with The Scottish Sun to run a Father’s Day competition. Readers in Scotland must tell the paper why their dad is the best in the world.
Ten winners will each star on the front page of a special spoof edition of the paper. Scooped! was launched by former local press reporter and Sun sub-editor James McIvor after he was asked to design countless mock front pages for departing colleagues.

A Brighton journalism training school is running two two-day courses next month. ‘Be a Successful Music Journalist’ runs on June 10 and 11 while ‘Advanced Feature Writing’ takes place June 17 and 18. For more details visit brightpicture.co.uk.