As you can imagine for a daily news service such as Bizcommunity.com which covers 27 sectors within the broader media, marketing and advertising industry, we get invited to a lot of events, most of an extremely professional nature. Where there remains much improvement for the organisers of media events and the event venues themselves, is in catering to media news provision requirements. Almost without exception - from breakfast presentations to three-day expo's with seminars and workshops - venues do not make it easy for the media to report from their events. In this age of instant news - where even monthly publications now load daily news on their websites, it is vital that media facilities include - at the most basic level: a simple table and chair with a plug point at the back of the room, near an exit. Journalists need to come and go - we don't want to disturb paying guests; we need to file instantaneously from events, connected as we are wirelessly to our email or internet sites, so we need plug points and a table and chair to sit at for our laptops. From breakfast presentations at the local five-star hotel to state-of-the-art convention centres - few make provision for the multi-media news team of our current reality which includes reporting directly on laptops, blogging straight from events online, to the next step: fully-fledged production crews with camera's and sound engineers for podcasting events live or for webinars. Old-style cinema seating with a table no bigger than an A3 notebook with nary a plug point in sight are completely inadequate. The fact that we have to ask organisers of events to set up a table and chair at 99% of the events we cover is utterly ridiculous. This should be at the top of event checklists when media are invited. And I'm not just talking about the older venues built before multi-media interactivity was a possibility - the Cape Town Convention Centre, one of the newest, most beautifully designed venues, makes no provision for the media in its auditoriums. After trying to report from there for a three day international event recently, laptop on the knees wedged on top of a magazine to prevent first degree burns from the heat - one needs intensive physiotherapy to stand upright again! Happy holidays! Louise Marsland, editor, editor@bizcommunity.co