The Art of Making News Relevant

The Art of Making News Relevant 

The main projects I have been working on at the Department of Sport and Recreation have been news stories, eNewsletters and Media releases. These have been about new programs and events which are on. Whilst this work sounds very routine, I have learnt something new from it. At uni we are taught about all communications material needs a message, which was easy enough as I could make up my own message. Out in the workforce, you have to capture someone else's message and aim for their program they made. Again this may not sound as hard as you may think, but because not everyone works in communications, not everyone knows how to write a message. 

This is where my learning begun. I had to learn how to read in between the lines. I get given the information, and from that I need to try to understand what it is they are really trying to say. I really learnt the importance of making something exciting to your audience. One of the stories I was working on was development programs for volunteers. This was very exciting news at the Department of Sport and Recreation, as it was another great way to support community sport. The issue was how I convince a volunteer, who already has a job, has kids and needs to do the food shopping, to give up a night to come to a development program to benefit their sports club they volunteer for on the weekends. I suddenly realised just because it is free and benefit the volunteer, I still need to convey the development programs worth. 

At first I struggled a little with wrapping my head around all the different programs, and who I should be targeting. I had to do a lot of research and really learn what the programs were about and what they were trying to achieve. Once I did this, I spoke to my boss to clarify that the aims and messaging I had come up with, matched what the intended benefits of the programs were. In the end we worked together on it for a little bit and came up with a clear message for each target group. This is a link to the general news story promoting the online page promoting the new events.

Community Volunteers Project
This has been a very valuable lesson as it is important to be able to communicate to your target market the value in your news.  

New Season

New season's resemble new beginnings, a fresh start, or even sometimes, can present a new goal to achieve... In my last post I mentioned that Northway Christian Centre was in a period of change. New branding, new internal communications, new employee branding and a new website are all what form the New Season which we are currently working on.  

This New Season all started out in April 2011 when Northway's previous senior pastor, Pastor John Warwick resigned from his position of almost 10 years and our Associate Pastor, Pastor Dean Evensen rose to the call. Since then, he has brought many new ideas to the table! One very important call he has made, is to re-invent Northway through firstly updating its vision and mission statements to portray the new 'personality' that the church is taking. 

The task was given to me and this is one of the challenges I was working on in my second segment of my placement at Northway... You see, creating a vision and mission statement might not sound to difficult. Heck, we've written up hundreds at uni... but creating them for an organisation in real life proved quite daunting to me to be honest. I couldn't believe that I had been given the tasks of creating such statements in which all change and future direction was going to be measured upon! To cut a long story short... I developed both statements in accordance to the key phrase in which Pastor Dean had given me: he wanted the church focus to be on 'children, family and community'. This task was truly intimidating, but extremely fulfilling as I now have the pleasure of knowing that such important statements were created, and entrusted to me. 

A further update on the website happenings:

At this stage of my placement, I had contacted and arranged a meeting with the photographer which we had chosen. I briefed him in regards to what key messages we wanted projected from the images on the website. It was also key that the 'style' and 'feel' of the images were also on par with the branding of the design of the website. This too was a highlight for me at this stage as it would seem that my new role at Northway had been taken seriously and I was loving every minute of it!

Stay tuned for my next instalment!

Thor Williams

13971186

Curtin Bentley