It's now my fourth blogpost and I have arrived at the end of my internship (only 2 days left). I feel quite sad to leave as I have came to met awesome colleagues who are now very good friends and also leaving with a lot of useful experiences which will certainly help me in the future. In the other hand I'm happy to leave as waking up so early every morning was such a pain.
One of the main task I was responsible for my internship was to read newspapers! Every morning as I arrive at work, the office clerk hands me on the daily morning newspapers and ask me to read. I thought it was a very easy task and that it would not take me much time, but it wasn't!
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| Newspapers collected for the month of August |
Firstly let me explain the purpose of this task. Immedia being mainly an event and Public Relations agency, for each event that Immedia organises or participates we are asked to collect each newspaper articles that appears in the press so as to follow up the public awareness of the event. Secondly, as a PR agency, our main client (a telecommunication company) asks us to collect articles which are in relations to them, their competitors, and other things related to telecommunications such as the government and other stakeholders.
The easiest part is to search for the newspapers articles and then take down the page numbers on where they are located. Then my colleague scans the desired articles and sends them back to me where I then store them in a document. After each week then, I am to fill the press review document and put up remarks about the article. In a week I can have about 20-30 newspaper articles to read and analyse.
I then remember one of our PR assignments which was to collect media clippings in newspapers and magazines about a particular subject and summarize it and this is where I found that it was very useful where I first said that it would not serves me later.
Below is an example of a newspaper article that is collected for the client -
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| Weekly Magazine - Emtel article |
For only one month, it is about 100 newspapers read, scan, and commented. Despite that, it is an interesting task as it has direct relation to public relations and it is interesting to know what is happening in the country. In my opinion I see this as using a PR agency as an "intelligence" agency, not in terms of spying, but in terms of knowing what competitors are doing so as to do better than them and this is how a PR agency or department is important for companies like this.
It was a pleasure to share my internship experiences within the blogposts. Thank you for reading and do not forget to comment and share your views and opinions.
Regards,
Mehdi Bundhun
4 comments:
Hi Mehdi,
It is good to hear that you are coming to the end of your internship.
I too, remember completing a similar assignment for one of my PR units. I think it was Media Relations. We had to pick a specific topic and collect five different media clipping, and summarise each one. Monitoring the media is a very important aspect of working in Pubic Relations. How else is an agency or organisation supposed to know if what they have put out has in fact been publish or seen by the public.
You do not realise how much you have actually learned during your study years until you put it all into practice in the real world.
Good luck in the future.
Hi Mehdi,
I remember that media clippings assignment well too.
It seemed like a bit of a dull and pointless task at the time but just as I've found with a lot of the other Public Relations tools we've studied over the last few years, you can't fully appreciate the importance of the activity until you try it out in a real life setting.
Doing this internship has given me the opportunity to see the real consequences of my actions - to see how my organisation directly benefits from my hard work, which feels a lot more rewarding than getting a distinction on an assignment.
Glad to hear you enjoyed your placement, good luck for the rest of the semester.
Kelsey
Hi Mehdi, Kelsey and Maria,
The media clippings assignment has definitely come in use during my internship as well. Lucky for me my placement does not target newspapers so i get to scroll through blogs and read through magazines.
Another assignment which has come in handy for my placement was the Fact Sheet and Backgrounder task for PR Techniques. At the time I was very confused between the difference but I am glad i could write these with no problems for a media kit I am preparing at the moment.
Good Luck for the rest of semester
Regards,
Kelvin
Hi All!
Congrats on making it to the end of your internship!
I was really excited as I got to do a fact sheet and backgrounder in my first couple of days, but then it wasn't released to the media for 3 or 4 weeks. So I had forgotten about it when I saw the information in print.
Can I just say that I have been doing the exact same thing with the newspapers. I used to read the paper every day anyway, but this has been hard. All the newspaper clippings relevant to our organisation are on the PR office walls. There are literally 2 walls covered floor to ceiling in articles. It has been especially difficult since I have had to do media monitors and work out the AVE of everything. Thank god the website isentia gives you most of the information, including ASR!
I hope you enjoyed your last couple of days!
Ashlyn xo
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