EHFA in the Press

The association's own announcements ran through its press releases, its newsletter and the news channel of this site. Coverage in the trade and national press was a different thing, and it depended on the association doing something that a publication's readers would act on. The archive holds one example of that in full, and it is a clear one.

In 2009 EHFA and IHRSA, the international fitness association, signed an agreement to cooperate. It was signed on 29 June 2009 by the EHFA president, Harm B. Tegelaars, and the IHRSA president, Joe Moore. A joint press release was circulated to the media and to interested parties, and the association was then invited to write an article for the World Sports Law Report, which published it in August 2009 under the title "EHFA and IHRSA: promoting health through fitness".

That the story travelled at all is worth noting. A cooperation agreement between two industry bodies is not obvious news. It reached a legal publication because the interesting part was structural: two associations, one European and one international, agreeing to work together on how the sector's workforce was trained and recognised. For a readership concerned with the governance of sport, that was evidence of an industry beginning to treat its own qualifications as a matter for formal arrangement.

Coverage of health and fitness was carried largely by the sector's own trade press, and the subjects that travelled were the concrete ones: standards decisions, recognition agreements with national registers, EU funding awards, appointments to the association's technical bodies, and the summits at which the sector met the European institutions. The association issued releases on exactly those subjects, which is why the press release channel reads as a list of the period's substantive decisions rather than as publicity.

Where a release concerned the register - the alliances in Catalonia and Ireland in 2011, or the memorandum with the Government of Catalunya - the audience extended past the fitness trade to the public bodies that employed or regulated exercise professionals, which was the point of the recognition work described under EREPS.

For most of the association's work the coverage itself is not in the archive; what survives is the release that prompted it. That is a property of how a secretariat keeps its records rather than a judgement on the coverage: press cuttings were not filed, and the two documents behind this page - the joint release of July 2009 and the published article of August 2009 - were kept because they belonged to a partnership the association was managing, not because they were coverage.

The agreements themselves are in the archive: the IHRSA cooperation agreement is among the news items, and the partners pages describe the organisations the association worked with.