Within societies, media is like a window in which we perceive the world through. As for the PR industries, they are like the clinch or the glue that holds very single PR activity together without it the industry collapses. During my internship, I had the privilege of working with clients and doing media follow ups just two weeks before an event. During that time some journalists were a little bit harsh on me, some even went to an extent of asking “can you call and check if I’ll be able to make it just 15 minutes before the events starts?", honestly i thought that they were just being unreasonable at times. Despite all these my supervisor Carol, always told me this; even if they give you negative responses be nice to them in any possible way remember the kind of tone you use really counts. Secondly, find a PR angle that you can use to make the follow ups news worthy. With all this i had to rely on the following article when dealing with the media http://blog.journalistics.com/2009/how_do_journalists_view_follow_up_phone_calls/. Out of all these there are two lessons that can be learned;
· As a PR practitioner one has to always go an extra mile with the media. Extra mile here means talking to them nicely, calling many times to remind them not to forget to come to an event and even if possible send physical invitations with the hope of getting either a confirmation mail from them or something that they will make it.
· Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that after talking to them they will show up. If they don`t show up there is nothing that can be done. The least that you can do is start calling them to check if they would feature the post release.
Sometimes I tend to believe that the reason as to why they never take PR practitioners seriously or give them priority is due to free publicity that PR practices therefore the journalists often give priority to the advertisers who pay for their publicity or space. From all these I felt like pr industry needed the media more than the media needs them. When I joined the public relations industry I was hoping to see the relationship that is often expressed in public relations text books between the media and public relations (symmetrical communication). However, for all this to take the place there must be ethical communication which is something quite difficult to achieveas both as parties have to be ethical (Sriramesh 2009, 68). Therefore the relationship between the media a requires a lot of effort to be accomplished and involves a lot of things even if it exists its kind of rare to experience it.
Maybe you guys could share with me what you think about the relationship between the media and PR based on what you experienced during your attachment.
2 comments:
Media is an important tool to Public Relations, for pr to succeed we need media. During my placement in Pixarus consultancy,every event that occurred i was tasked with media invites, we wrote media invites and emailed them to every media house.the next morning we did follow ups as to know if they have received the invitation and to confirm if they will be attending, yes its not an easy job especially due to language. Pronouncing Chinese names was not an easy task.
Throughout the placement i learned that we need to be patient especially to media, and no matter how they may be rude to you always say "thank you, hope to see you there" because we are measured by the client through them. i have seen cases where the client was not happy as the product did not receive publicity hoped for an they terminated the contract.
For the very first time we stepped in the university grounds to do public relations, were always told the media is the very important public that a company cannot survive without and most importantly there is a two way symmetrical relationship as they media needs a story where as pr people need publicity. Even authors like (Sriramesh, 2004, p.20) says that “success in the media relations is always is often evaluated based on the ability of public relations to place a story in the media” .But during my internship period that was only what I see in books but in reality that was not the case. to me there was nothing like a two symmetrical that we were always taught about .even the theory that says the media are friends with public relations people was just a nightmare. I always thought that since the media and pr people work together they understand one another and it will make it easy for stories to be published without having to sweat a lot. During my internship, I realized that the pr people had to kneel before the media bore their event can be published. It goes beyond that because every time we had to give those gifts, bring them to lunch or have a cup of coffee with them just to strengthen the relationship. It’s like pr are forcing the media to have a relationship with them where as the media are not interested. If at all the media and pr are having a two way symmetrical it won’t be a hustle for pr to get their stories to be published as the media wants a story and pr wants publicity.
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