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Non‐attendance for first appointments in primary care mental health services represents a major service delivery challenge. Previous research identified how invitation type can influence attendance rates and a localised study was therefore carried out to examine the most effective invitation method and to inform local service guidelines. This exploratory study aims to consider the rate of non‐attendance to assessment for clients referred for psychological therapy in relation to invitation type.

In total, 521 invitations to initial assessment were sent over a three month period with clients being drawn from a rolling waiting list of referrals and invited to attend initial assessment by letter, telephone, or telephone with a telephone reminder. Non‐attendance rates were examined and findings compared across invitation type.

The study concluded that telephone invitations followed by a telephone prompting reminder significantly reduced non‐attendance to initial assessment appointments.

The findings highlight how using phone based invitation to assessment with a phone reminder can increase attendance rates and improve service efficiencies locally and more widely. There were several limitations to the research project including key variables not included or controlled for which it is felt may have biased the findings and the small effect size.

The findings of the present study extend and build on previous research in the area of attendance, particularly in relation to the provision of localised evidence from which to develop and improve local, national and international service delivery.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of media attention in the context of early-stage startups. While many studies have examined the implications of media attention on firm outcomes, few have investigated the antecedents especially in the context of early-stage startups who significantly lack organizational legitimacy. This study attempts to answer an important and yet unanswered question: What type of startups are more likely to be covered by the media?

Using Poisson regression, the authors analyze all media articles written about 315 early-stage ventures in the USA.

The authors found that startups with a prestigious investor or a patent have more media attention and startups with a female founder or prior entrepreneurial experience have less. The results suggest that entrepreneurial signals do play a role in media attention, but that the signal–signaler relationship may be more complicated than that in the investment literature.

Entrepreneurs may benefit from signaling less noisy and unambiguous signals that the media pays more attention to, such as getting an endorsement from reputable third parties early on, which might activate noisy signals.

The contribution of this paper is to extend the current literature on media attention and entrepreneurship by shedding light on attributes of startups that may help or hurt the volume of media attention in an uncertain and noisy environment.