The Sheffield company started with publishing, wandered into design, built web infrastructure, acquired a media habit and has now arrived at digital PR because apparently specialising is for cowards.
There is a sensible way to build a company.
You choose a thing. You become good at the thing. You sell the thing. Eventually somebody from LinkedIn starts calling you a “sector leader” and everyone goes home.
Astronomica Ltd has elected not to do this.
The Sheffield-based company, led by unwavering lightspeed director Q. G. Wingfield, is expanding its public operations across publishing, design, websites, digital communications, media and public relations, formalising a collection of activities that have gradually accumulated around it since its incorporation in 2023.
This sounds less like diversification and more like somebody accidentally discovering vertical integration.
Astronomica began primarily around publishing and cultural projects. It now operates or develops work involving book publishing, branding, websites, online publications, hosting infrastructure and communications.
The company says it is now bringing those areas together into a wider commercial operation rather than pretending that designing something, publishing it, putting it online and getting people to notice it are completely unrelated professions.
Annoyingly, it has a point.
The publishing company kept developing additional organs
One of Astronomica’s earliest substantial projects was Camelot House Publishing.
Its publishing activity has included Spiritual Science Zero, an introductory book dealing with Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, along with a wider collection of cultural and publishing projects.
That apparently failed to satisfy the corporate urge to produce things.
Design work followed.
Astronomica’s creative operation has since developed services involving branding, websites, publications and communications for businesses, charities, nonprofits and community organisations.
Its main website now describes publishing, design and platform-building as parts of the same broader project.
Then came websites.
Then came media.
Then came infrastructure for the websites.
At some point somebody probably should have intervened.
They did not.
SALAMANDER entered the building
In August, Astronomica announced SALAMANDER, its web platform for studio clients.
The platform was developed to provide websites and associated infrastructure for projects created through Astronomica’s design operation.
This completed a mildly ridiculous circle.
Astronomica could publish the thing, design the thing, build the website containing the thing and increasingly operate the infrastructure underneath the website containing the thing.
The only obvious missing step was shouting about the thing.
Which brings us to public relations.
The company is now expanding into digital PR
Astronomica is developing a wider communications operation involving press-release preparation, publication and distribution.
The company says the service is intended partly for smaller organisations that occasionally have legitimate news to announce but do not need someone wearing a headset saying “brand narrative” on a monthly retainer.
There is quite a large gap between doing absolutely nothing and employing a conventional PR agency.
A small company might launch a product twice a year.
A charity might publish a report.
A researcher might have a new study.
An organisation might appoint a new chief executive.
A community group might launch something sufficiently interesting that somebody outside the group ought to know it happened.
None of these organisations necessarily needs a permanent communications department with twelve people, a beanbag and an £8,000 monthly invoice.
Astronomica’s proposed answer is considerably more transactional: when something actually happens, turn it into a decent story and distribute it.
“What they need at that point is a good story, presented properly, and a serious attempt to get it seen,” company director Q. G. Wingfield said in the company’s announcement.
Revolutionary.
The press release has been discovered.
Press releases are not journalism, except when they become journalism
This expansion also puts Astronomica into one of the stranger parts of the modern information economy.
An enormous quantity of news begins with somebody who desperately wants there to be news.
Businesses send announcements.
Universities send research.
Councils send statements.
Charities send reports.
PR firms send approximately seventeen emails before breakfast explaining that somebody is available for comment on National Sandwich Awareness Fortnight.
Journalists then decide what, if anything, survives contact with an editor.
Astronomica says its model will distinguish between supplied promotional material and subsequent editorial reporting.
A customer may pay for a release to be prepared, distributed or initially published.
That does not necessarily mean that every later article about the same underlying event is an advertisement.
Once another publication takes the fact itself, rewrites the story, chooses its own headline, adds context and remains free to describe the whole thing as stupid, the advertiser has lost the thing advertisers traditionally enjoy most: control.
Astronomica says downstream editorial decisions will remain outside customer control.
That distinction will matter if its media operation grows.
Operating on both sides of the press-release/journalism membrane is perfectly possible.
Doing so while pretending the membrane does not exist is how everyone eventually ends up reading an ASA ruling.
Astronomica has been heading here for a while
The expansion is less abrupt than it initially sounds.
Astronomica’s own public reporting has previously described plans to expand its publishing network, design operations and online platforms.
Its website currently presents Camelot House Publishing alongside its creative operations and describes the company as actively developing publications, websites and platforms.
Companies House records Astronomica Ltd as an active company incorporated in February 2023, with registered activities including online retail, publishing and advertising.
The Epoch, meanwhile, operates as Astronomica’s existing online publication and has been used for company announcements as well as longer material relating to Anthroposophy, culture and society.
Astronomica therefore did not wake up on Thursday and decide to become a media company because somebody found a WordPress coupon.
The pieces have been accumulating for some time.
The current expansion is principally an attempt to make the pile coherent.
Everything is apparently communications now
There is a reasonable underlying argument to Astronomica’s model.
Consider publishing a book.
Someone has to write it.
Someone has to edit it.
Someone has to typeset it.
Someone designs the cover.
Someone makes the website.
Someone prepares promotional material.
Someone sends review copies.
Someone tells journalists that the book exists.
Someone maintains the digital infrastructure beneath all of this.
Traditional business organisation has solved this problem by creating seven companies and twelve invoices.
Astronomica appears to have looked at the same situation and concluded that it would simply keep collecting departments until the problem went away.
Whether combining this many functions produces an unusually efficient communications company or merely an exceptionally elaborate way of giving one director too many browser tabs remains to be established.
But the expansion itself is real.
Astronomica now has publishing projects, design services, web infrastructure, online media and an emerging digital PR operation sitting under or around the same company.
In traditional corporate language, this is an expansion of integrated communications capability.
In normal language, Astronomica kept starting things and has now decided they are a business model.
Disclosure
This article is based in part on a press release and other public information supplied or published by Astronomica Ltd.