Writing for Malaysian editors.

After the first two weeks of doing media calls and participating in events with GO Communications, it was time to do some writing. My leader gave me the task of writing an invitation to the minister for an event called LumiAir for our client Sunway Lagoon. I was able to use a template of previous invitations so this task wasn’t too challenging. However, I was then given the opportunity to draft a media release for another client, Sunway Lagoon.  As I have written many media releases for university, I felt comfortable with this task so I used the information available and put together a media release highlighting the key points of the new promotion Sunway Lagoon had to offer. I kept the information factual and to the point as we are taught in university and only put emotion and descriptions in the quotes. However, once I had looked at the template of how media releases were written in Malaysia I noticed a significant difference. The template had a lot more "fluff" and describing words. Therefore, I edited my draft and put some additional describing words into the media release.

My leader told me “the Malaysian editors are lazy, they want you to write the article for them, with all the descriptive ‘fluff’". I was taught to use extra adjectives and emotion in my writing to make it sound more like “PR”.   

I took this as a learning experience as I had to change the way I would normally write media releases to how it is expected in Malaysia. This could be applied for any consultancy I may work for in the future as they may have a specific in-house way of writing too.

 

Until next time,

Jessie