Monday 29 October 2007

Update on West Midlands Economic Strategy

See previous post for digest of the consultation draft of the West Midlands' Regional Economic Strategy (RES) but there is now a news update....

The final RES will be published on 10th December along with the Regional Spatial Strategy but there is another draft of it published online now (see bottom of this page).

So, just to update you on those all-important word counts:

  • 'Creative Industries'
    Down from 6 mentions in original draft to 3 mentions in the current draft.
  • 'Manufacturing'
    Up from 24 mentions to 34 mentions.
  • 'Carbon'
    Up from 53 mentions to 105 mentions.
  • 'Birmingham'
    Up from 59 mentions to 109 mentions.

One I didn't mention last time was:

  • 'Digital'
    Up from 4 mentions to a mighty 9.

What does all this tell us? That the region's Creative Industries didn't shout loud enough during the consultation period? Maybe; or that this stuff matters less than we think (the North West's RES, for example, pays equally scant attention to the Creative Industries).

It's all in the delivery of course - the strategy comes into effect from April 2008.

4 comments:

Charlotte Carey said...

did you check how many times innovation was mentioned?

Dave Harte said...

'Innovation'
Up from 40 mentions in the first draft to 98 mentions in the current one.

Dave

Charlotte Carey said...

I knew it! oh man I am getting good at policy prediction. Funny how just counting up use of words gives such an accurate flavour of the document. I might try this with some of my reports.

GARY BALDY said...

Did you check how many commas there were? Oh and were there any grammatical errors? I suspect there may be some. After you have digested this stuff, does it always come out like when food gets digested? Do you do proof reading? Can you digest Mills & Boon? Is there a correlation between the number of times creative is mentioned and the number of times funding isn't? What type of font would suit the word economy best? do you recommend the use of serif fonts when delivering a published document for dissemination within the creative industries? How many characters do they use on average per line? Is it 1.5 spaced or double?