My first days at the City of Joondalup

Hi everyone, I’m Katie and I’m six days into my PR 393 placement at the City of Joondalup. I’ve been working predominantly with the media advisor of the City so far and it has been a real learning experience. I’ve had the opportunity to write media releases, and see the end product of those as actual articles in the newspaper. I’ve also written speeches for councillors and have learnt a lot about the processes of dealing with the media.

The first thing everyone said as I was introduced around the office on my starting day at the City was “so you’re going to be helping Mark create some spin hey?” (Mark is my supervisor) If anything, these words from the rest of the marketing and governance department really showed how PR is viewed within the organisation.

This view of PR, however, is not what I’m going to blog about on this occasion. I want to talk about the media and using them for reaching the City of Joondalup’s key stakeholders, City of Joondalup residents. Being a local government, the City of Joondalup receives a lot of negative publicity for things that are often out of their control or just by people who have had a bad experience with the council. A lot of this negative publicity gets reported in the Joondalup Times and the Joondalup Weekender, the local Community newspapers which are delivered to all the residents of the City of Joondalup, so it’s important to get positive stories about what the City does in there as often as possible.

Mark was once a journalist and manager for the Community Newspaper group and he has highlighted for me the importance of keeping a good relationship between yourself and the journalists of your most used media outlets. (Just as a sidenote, Mark also said he had to rebuild a lot of his friendships with journalists when he moved from journalism to PR because, for the journalists, he lost his credibility. This really emphasizes what we’ve been told during our PR degrees that journalists and PR professionals don’t get along!). By having a good relationship with important media outlets it makes it a lot easier for you when there is a big issue that is happening and your organisation needs to comment or get your side of the story in the media, it doesn’t mean, however, that the story will have the desired end result.

To illustrate this I’m going to use an example of something that occurred in my first days at the City. The local government reporter for The West Australian contacted Mark about local government spending on graffiti. The beauty of having a good relationship with journalists, or close friends in the industry in Mark’s case, is that they allow you to comment or get in on certain issues that are being reported on. The questions that were asked included things like how much was spent on the cleaning up of graffiti (a number that has been very high in previous years for the City of Joondalup), and how prominent it was in the area. Different departments needed to be contacted for the figures and out own positive take on the matter needed to be included, that the City’s spending has decreased by hundreds of thousands because of all the positive programs to prevent it.

The next day, as the number one morning duty came about- media monitoring- we opened the West to see how the story ran. It was gut-wrenching to see that the term “City of Joondalup” was not included once in the whole article. Our figures were used, though, along with our preventative measures.

There is only one thing to do when you are not happy with how a story has run, according to my supervisor, and that is to get in touch with the journalist and to ask why this has happened. So we got in touch and politely enquired as to why the story had run this way. The answer was that the editor wanted to story to reflect councils who were spending more money on removal rather than decreasing numbers. Which made a lot of sense when it was explained and plus it made us feel better that there wasn’t a negative story on us in the state paper. The CEO was pleased about this for much the same reason.

I guess what the lesson was, is that no matter how good your relationship is with the journalist, you’re not always going to get your way because the media is an uncontrolled form of communication. All you can be thankful for is that you’re not included in any negative issues.

I am looking forward to last three-quarters of my internship at the City of Joondalup and reading all about everyone else’s experiences.

Katie Richards.