Oopsie Daisy, Dixie

This week some of you may have seen the piece in The West's Inside Cover regarding the Mt Weld mine media release sent out by the Premier's office. (If not, here's a screen capture above. It may be a bit tricky to read, sorry!) It's a great example of a potentially damaging situation being fixed by a PR professional.

As the article says, the media release included quotes from the Premier, however it was later found one of these quotes regarding the 'rare earths' being mined in the area was actually a passage from the Lynas Corporation's website.

So firstly, a bit of context as to how state government releases work...

Sometimes as an electorate office we will recieve media statements drafted by the PR and media people at DPC (Department of Premier and Cabinet) for use in our electorate. Obviously if the issue is relevent to other electorates they will receive a copy as well, so the same release (or perhaps slightly changed) release will be sent out to more than one office for use. That means it's my job as the John's research officer in Kalamunda to make sure everything in that release is a) relevent and suitable for the area, and b) the quotes are cleared with John and if necessary new quotes are made by him. Whilst it's okay for the same information to be sent to multiple publications in multiple electorates, (you can't, and wouldn't, change information that is correct) we don't want the same quotes to be attributed to more than one politician. The releases of this nature are always labelled as drafts and are to be edited by us, but provide us with a great framework filled with first-hand information from reliable sources. While the release for the Mt Weld mine was not a release of this nature- it originate from the Premier's office for the sole use of the Premier, it's still good to understand how these things sometimes work. A lot of research goes in to everything sent out from State Government offices, and a lot of liaising with different offices and departments goes on behind the scenes to make sure information sent out to the public and the media is correct.

Dixie took the blame (very skillfully in my opinion) for the quote mix-up, and I think she did a great job of explaining the situation. The information in the release wasn't wrong, (in fact it was spot on) the mistake came when the quotation marks were put around the paragraph as a quote from the Premier. At least it goes to show she's gathering information for the release from the appropriate source!

As is often the mantra in our office- "We don't want John ending up in Inside Cover!" Thankfully we have a good record! Except for the City of Melville John Day/Malcolm Day mix up a few weeks ago where John was captioned as Malcolm Day - the Adultshop guy- in one of their press releases. A rather obvious mistake that Inside Cover (and we here in the office) had a bit of a laugh at!

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