Hope you are doing good. I have reached half way of my journey and I was waiting for this event to be done so I could talk about it. One thing I have to agree that this internship is teaching me a lot of things and things which I had actually learnt from books and now I am actually experiencing it all.
Very often we used to come to the golden question of whether PR person needs journalists and vice-versa. While at university we have had several debates and learnt that both need each other specially nowadays since no other thing can replace the role of a journalist and Public Relations; it is only now that I have been able to witness it.
I had been to my very first press conference at Apollo Bramwell ( who is one of our clients) a few days ago. It was an awesome experience :) The press conference had been organised by our company and it was about the new ottoblock system at Apollo Bramwell. Our organisation has to finalize the venue which was at the Apollo Bramwell Conference Centre and cater for the logistics during the whole event. My role was to assist the supervisor with taking pictures and taking notes during the seminar so we could draft our Press Release. I also had to sort of confirm the names of the 'interviewees'. Needless to say many took to me to be one of the journalists.
Now coming to the main issue,some journalists had informed us that they would be late, therefore we had to wait for them. I asked myself the question, granted they are important persons but some do we need to wait for all the journalists to be present so we could proceed? ( bearing in mind some were already present) It was really intriguing. I then asked my supervisor why...
She simply asked me 2 questions : 1) who will write articles (different angles) on us if we do not wait for all of them? 2) Who will they contact if they need additional background information such as interviews or Press Release? This got me thinking! Actually it is true, we need different articles about us. As PR persons, the more media coverage about our event, the better for us. Similarly, the more relationship building, the better will it be to both parties. And finally where will the journalists go if they need information. So this gets back to our question of who needs whom? I guess we all have the answer for that.
That having said, we can see how at times we tend to neglect things. Like me for example I thought some journalists were present, so it was still good for us. At the end of the day we come to see that journalists are those who can either take us up or down the ladder according to our behaviour towards them. They are indeed important person and they are well aware of that. We need to please them to maintain this mutually beneficial relationship.
Lesson learnt is that we both need to understand the need of each other to be able to reach mutual satisfaction!
And to be honest, all the waiting paid off because we were almost on every newspapers during that whole week :D ( * Find some print screens below )
Thant`s all for today. Hope to hear about your experiences so far and comments are most welcomed ^_^
Karishma Rughoonundun
15636461
