The last week at my placement has been dedicated towards generating publicity for the ongoing event that I have been working on whilst at Arthritis & Osteoporosis WA. In order to generate this publicity I have had to contact many different newspapers as well as news and TV networks to try and get them to come down to the fun run and write a story or get footage of the event.
In reality i imagined this to be a simple task, as I had never really considered in full how you would go about contacting a journalist. The PR department did not have an up to date media contact list which also posed another obstacle as I had to begin at square one.
After finding contact numbers for outlets such as The West Australian, The Sunday Times, 7 News, Ten News and the local newspaper for the area The Canning Times, I then began calling each media outlet. This resulted in The Sunday Times journalist showing interest in the story and agreeing to run a story in this weekend’s edition and the Canning Times agreeing to run a story after the event took place(if only they all were as receptive!).
The TV programs both required that I send off all the information on the event to their newsrooms and it would be entered into the diary for the day. Now I guess all we can hope for is that there isn’t anything more ‘newsworthy’ taking place this Sunday when the event is taking place!
This task that I was asked to carry out has not only taught me not to underestimate the ease of communicating with journalists, but I have also learnt how to construct emails in order to grab their attention and ensure we get the story.
Kendall
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