UK Quantum Technologies Communications Specialist

Quantum and science-based innovations
into the mainstream.

Sustained coverage in major mainstream media — for companies, investors and other interests commercialising quantum and other frontier technologies.

Discuss your brief How it works
Specialisms
Quantum Computing Quantum Sensing Quantum Timing Quantum Imaging Quantum Communications Deep Tech PR Mainstream Media Placement Investor Narratives Technology Storytelling Media Strategy Quantum Computing Quantum Sensing Quantum Timing Quantum Imaging Quantum Communications Deep Tech PR Mainstream Media Placement Investor Narratives Technology Storytelling Media Strategy
Coverage placed in
Financial Times ◆ The Times ◆ The Sunday Times ◆ The Daily Telegraph ◆ BBC News ◆ BBC Radio 4 ◆ ITV News

The communications gap

Media instincts, practical public relations and accessible storytelling are needed to take quantum to non-technical audiences, including investors, government and potential customers.

About Appleby Communications

Mainstream media impact
for visibility and credibility

Appleby Communications is built on reporting experience at senior levels in UK national media.

I work for and within the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. Clients include:

  • Innovate UK
  • ORCA Computing
  • Cerca Magnetics
  • UK Hub for Quantum Sensing and Timing
  • National Quantum Computing Centre
  • UK Government Quantum Technologies Showcase
  • Royal Observatory Greenwich
  • University of Nottingham quantum interests

Why Appleby Communications

Communicate to Lead

Toby Moore delivers practical public relations that gets results fast through proven top level media-grade storytelling.

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Journalist eye

The key to top level media coverage is knowing, from experience, what makes an editor say yes — and no.

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Quantum sector specialist

Appleby Communications explains quantum technologies and relates them to daily life, business and national resilience — from position, navigation and timing to advanced brain scanning, optimisation tasks and drug discovery.

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Mainstream media focus

The goal is media titles and programmes with audiences that move investment decisions, policy and enterprise adoption.

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Senior engagement

Every client brief is a personal one. Simple.

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Compelling stories

The dazzling, beguiling and counterintuitive physics behind quantum technologies is having real world impact. I specialise in helping to communicate scientific developments and technological advances through their commercial or societal impact.

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Major media

Coverage follows from many years spent as a reporter for national newspapers. This puts story-telling into my professional DNA and helps me to develop compelling pitches for coverage, shaping angles for particular media and individual journalists.

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Strategic planning

I plan with you a roadmap of deliverables: news and feature story angles and press release schedule to maximise return on your investment when you need it.

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The right question

What do reporters want? What does this particular reporter need to make their story 'work'? What does this audience need to make the coverage or broadcast worth their time? The right answers are what unlock earned coverage in media that matter.

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The key media question — and its answer

A busy reporter makes a rapid decision on whether to cover a story, and that is usually based on the widest impact or interest it will have to their readers or audience. A familiarity with the UK's national quantum programme — from government strategy, to academic research and industrial interests — and knowledge of the larger political and economic landscape is needed to answer. This applies to all frontier technologies or applied science breakthroughs. The wider context is what can transform a single announcement from a one-off event into a story with multiple angles and a long shelf life, one that can be revisited regularly and layered, opportunistically, into the ongoing news agenda. Good examples are position, navigation, secure communications and timing and quantum-enabled health technologies. I bring front-line media experience and instincts to client requirements.

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Navigating the news cycle

The reporting of transformative technologies can follow cycles, including troughs when there is little 'new' to report. I specialise in sustaining the momentum of coverage by finding and developing new angles, building on eight years spent generating media interest in the UK national quantum technologies programme.

Navigating it benefits from direct media experience — knowing when to push a story, when to hold back, and how to frame genuine progress without being hostage to expectations the technology cannot yet meet. The companies that emerge commanding visibility are those that communicated with discipline throughout. That discipline is hardest to maintain precisely when the temptation to over-claim is greatest.

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The authority that others give you — not the authority you claim

Thought leadership that companies post themselves on social media has its place, but also a ceiling, as a self-published partial assessment. The thought leadership that shifts perceptions at board level, with institutional investors, with enterprise procurement and with government, involves being quoted in the columns of leading business writers. It is being the trusted person called when a quantum or emerging technology story breaks.

Services

Practical communications

From building the media narrative around a funding round to preparing leadership for the most demanding broadcast interviews — strategic support across the full communications lifecycle.

01

Media Strategy & Narrative Development

Defining the story before approaching a single journalist. Developing the core narrative that makes your technology accessible, compelling and credible to a general audience — grounded in editorial thinking, not marketing language.

Foundation work
02

Mainstream Media Placement

Proactive, targeted outreach to the national and international titles, programmes and correspondents that will make the difference. Written to editorial standards from the outset — so editors see a story, not a pitch.

Core delivery
03

Funding & Commercialisation PR

Amplifying investment announcements, partnerships and commercial milestones in a way that resonates with the financial and enterprise press — reaching investors and potential customers who need to understand your trajectory.

Growth stage
04

Media Training & Interview Preparation

Preparing founders, scientists and executives to deliver confident, clear and quotable interviews with national media — including broadcast. Coaching rooted in decades of experience on the other side of the microphone and notebook.

Leadership readiness
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Thought Leadership — Earned, Not Self-Declared

Positioning company leadership as the expert voices that Times and Financial Times journalists reach for when they need authoritative comment on the quantum sector. When a respected correspondent quotes your CEO, they are lending their own editorial credibility to that expertise — reaching investors, enterprise customers and policymakers in the most persuasive register available. Bylined articles and op-eds are also written where appropriate.

Profile building
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Crisis & Issues Management

Rapid, clear-headed counsel when a story breaks in the wrong direction. Drawing on decades of newsroom experience to understand exactly how an unfolding situation will be covered — and how to shape the narrative before it shapes itself.

Protective counsel
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News Agenda Intelligence — Motivation, Not Manipulation

The news agenda is unpredictable. That is not a problem, it is an opportunity. When a story breaks that could connect with your technology, the window is short and the competition for a journalist's attention is fierce. What closes that window faster than anything else is a bland, self-serving pitch or treating a reporter on deadline as a distribution channel.

Decades in newsrooms produce an instinct that no media training can match: understanding in real time what a reporter actually needs — the quote that makes the story land, the angle that transforms a niche development into something an editor will run without hesitation. National media cannot be manipulated. They can, however, be motivated — by material that genuinely serves their story and their audience.

News agenda strategy

Also available

Additional Services

Quantum disciplines covered

Appleby Communications focuses exclusively on the commercialisation of quantum technologies across five core disciplines.

💻 Quantum Computing
📡 Quantum Sensing
⏱️ Quantum Timing & PNT
🔬 Quantum Imaging
🔐 Quantum Communications & QKD
💰 Quantum Investment & Funding Rounds
🏛️ Quantum Policy & National Strategy
🏭 Quantum Hardware & Enabling Technologies

Selected coverage

Stories placed. Outcomes delivered.

Every placement below was the result of strategic narrative thinking — identifying the angle that would work for the outlet, not simply the story the client wanted to tell.

Financial Times Print & Digital Feature

The discovery of altermagnetism — pitched as a business story, not a science one

When the University of Nottingham needed to communicate a major physics discovery, the instinct might have been to lead with the science. Instead the pitch to the FT was built around commercial potential: what this meant for materials, for industry, for investors. The FT ran it. The coverage triggered direct international engagement from organisations seeking to fund further research into commercial applications — a tangible return on a single, well-aimed placement.

Outcome International funding enquiries for commercial research at the University of Nottingham
Client: University of Nottingham
ITV News Two Broadcast Features

A wearable quantum brain scanner — from laboratory curiosity to government investment

Two separate ITV News broadcasts featuring Cerca Magnetics and its quantum-enabled wearable brain scanner built a cumulative public narrative around the technology. The second broadcast proved to be more than a media moment: it directly preceded a multi-million pound UK government project to develop a mobile version of the system — a clear demonstration of how sustained mainstream coverage can shape policy and procurement decisions.

Outcome Multi-million pound UK government project award for mobile system development
Client: Cerca Magnetics
BBC News & UK National Media Broadcast & Print Suite

The government-funded mobile brain scanner — a suite of national coverage at launch

When the UK government's investment in Cerca Magnetics' mobile quantum brain scanner was confirmed, the announcement was placed across a coordinated suite of national titles and broadcast outlets including BBC News. The result was simultaneous, consistent coverage that framed the story on Cerca Magnetics' terms — establishing the company's credibility at a critical inflection point in its commercial development.

Outcome Nationally coordinated launch coverage establishing Cerca Magnetics as a UK quantum flagship
Client: Cerca Magnetics
BBC Radio 4 · Inside Science 10-Minute Flagship Interview · March 2026

ORCA Computing's CEO on the UK's sovereign quantum computing investment — on Radio 4's flagship science programme

When the UK government announced a major investment to build sovereign capability in quantum computing, the window for high-value broadcast coverage was narrow and competitive. Appleby Communications secured a ten-minute interview for ORCA Computing's CEO on Inside Science — one of the BBC's most respected and demanding science programmes — recorded at the company's own offices. In a crowded news moment, ORCA Computing's voice was the one that led the national conversation.

Outcome ORCA Computing positioned as the defining voice on the UK government's quantum computing strategy
Client: ORCA Computing
The Times Science Feature · Print & Digital

A quantum radar under trial at Birmingham — and The Times science editor came to see it

Getting a national newspaper's science editor to leave the office and visit a university laboratory is not a routine outcome of a press release. It is the result of a pitch so precisely calibrated to what that journalist and their audience needs that declining becomes harder than saying yes. When the University of Birmingham needed to communicate its quantum-enabled radar system — a flagship trial within the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme — the story was framed not as an academic announcement but as a genuinely consequential technology, already installed and under live trial, with implications well beyond the laboratory.

The science editor of The Times visited the university. The feature that resulted placed the Birmingham radar — and the national quantum programme behind it — in front of one of the most discerning general audiences in British journalism. It showcased the university, its researchers, and the programme's ambition to readers whose understanding of, and confidence in, the UK's quantum future is precisely what the national effort requires.

Outcome A Times science editor site visit and feature placing quantum radar — and the UK national programme — before a national broadsheet readership
Client: University of Birmingham · UK National Quantum Technologies Programme

How Appleby Communications works

No credentials decks. No discovery workshops.
Three stages — from story to placement.

01

Finding the story beneath the science

For most quantum and emerging technologies companies, the communications challenge is not a shortage of interesting material — it is that the most interesting material has been obscured by the physics. The first conversation is about separating those two things: understanding the technology fully, then setting the science aside to find what the company actually does in the world — the use case, the disruption, the human or economic consequence that makes a non-specialist audience stop and pay attention.

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Building the argument the media cannot ignore

A story that works for the Financial Times companies desk is not the same story that works for BBC News or a Sunday broadsheet feature. This stage is about building the precise argument — the angle, the framing, the timing — that makes it straightforward for the right journalist to say yes. For quantum technologies clients, that almost always means placing the development within the context of the national programme and the broader commercial transformation it represents: giving a correspondent not just a story, but a reason their audience should care.

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Placement through relationship, not volume

Reaching the right journalists in national media is not a function of database size or pitch volume. It is a function of knowing which correspondent covers which beat, what they are working on, and — critically — of having the professional relationships in which a message arrives as a trusted signal, not filtered as agency mail. Those relationships, built over decades working alongside national journalists rather than at them, are the difference between a pitch that lands and one that simply disappears.

Get in touch

What is the best way to tell
your story to major mainstream media?

That is usually the right question to start with — and it deserves a direct answer, not a pitch for services.

The first conversation is an assessment: what the media landscape looks like for your technology right now, what a credible strategy would involve, and whether this is the right moment to pursue it. If there is a strong story to be placed, that will be clear quickly. If the conditions are not yet right, that will be said too — because the goal is coverage that changes commercial outcomes, not activity that justifies a retainer.

There is no discovery workshop, no credentials presentation, no proposal document arriving a fortnight later. A conversation, a direct view, and a deliverable plan.

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Email toby@applebyquantumcomms.com
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Based in United Kingdom
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Response time All enquiries responded to personally within one business day

All enquiries are read and responded to personally within one business day.