My press release was featured in the West Australian!

Hi everyone,

Very exciting news, my press release for the Tickle Me Pink Launch was featured on the inside cover of the Western Australian! I put a lot of hard work and effort into the press release and my hard work paid off.

Over the weeks I have realised how hard it is to get a journalist to publish a press release. My plan for developing the press release was to grab their attention within the first few sentences so they would continue to read it. When emailing it to them I made the subject line catchy. Instead of writing something like 'press release for your consideration' I wrote 'who tickles you pink?'.....very good tip I received from a journalist I met. I sent the press release to channel 7, channel 10, channel 9, Community News, ABC, Sunday Times and the Western Australian.

Here is the first sentence I wrote to grab the journalists attention:

"Council House was literally ‘Tickled Pink’ on Thursday September 4^th celebrating the launch of the ‘Tickle-Me-Pink’ Movement and corporate friendship between WA’s Harris River Estate Winery and the McGrath Foundation. Perth Mayor Lisa Scaffidi (who co-hosted the event)  flipped the symbolic switch to light up the iconic building in pink for the evening." 

After emailing the press release my supervisor told me to do a media follow to see who got the press release and who didn't. This is always the scary part because you have to be confident and straight to the point, journalists receive heaps of calls every day regarding different press releases so it is important to stand out. I had to ask if they needed any extra information or images and if they didn't receive it I had to resend it. 

It has come to my attention that Journalists and PR are both very important in distributing information to the public, however there is a lot of conflict and tension between the two. The role of PR is to pitch a newsworthy story to a journalist, so it can reach the target audience. However the journalist can easily ignore the information that was sent and never read it or can change the story into a negative news angle. PR has no power once the journalist receives the story.

The day of the launch my press release was in the Western Australian! The client and my supervisor were both very impressed and this will be very useful to include in my resume and portfolio. I noticed that they did change a few words here and they and didn't include everything. 

My supervisor and I were responsible for the media of the event and had no part in the coordination of the Tickle Me Pink Launch, which was unfortunate. We attended the event and were very surprised with how it was organised. It started raining and there was not back up plan, so we couldn't see the Council House lit up pink. Inside, it was very disjointed there were all the ideas thrown into one event including hair dressers, belly dancers, motivational talks and body art,  know one knew what was going on. An alarm also went off which was very disruptive.

It was a good experience attending the event as I got to see 'what not to do'. It taught me to look at the big picture and taught me that planning is crucial when it come to organising and coordinating an event. 

Good luck with the rest of your intern days!

Until next time,

Meika