Busy one week, dead the next.
When I first arrived at the Department of Sport and Recreation, communications were swamped with media monitoring and getting out the priority news releases. At this time I had quite a bit of work to do. After two weeks, the work has dies down and my duties have died down with it.
Recently I have learnt how to upload news items on the website which is great. Once I was shown twice, the process was super easy I didn’t need any assistance after what so ever. My supervisor was impressed at how quick my uploading skills are. But it really is a sintch!
Other duties have been writing the odd media release for sporting club events, following up on loose ends of a story and making further phone calls and emails. Today I re worked a very wordy media release about the Edmund Rice Centre Lions football match held for Harmony Day. The news item had some great quotes and information and I found it quiet easy to pick out the irrelevant information and re typed it so the article flowed and caught the reader’s attention.
From working here I have found my writing skills have improved immensely and I am able to reconstruct a media release with more confidence. For one, it doesn’t take me as long to re work and I am able to see more easily where paragraphs are most likely to fit in place.
I have learnt how to send out mass emails to regional admin’s in the WA area. This has enabled me to send out emails to monitor what news items I have written that have been published in the regional news papers. So far I have had one media release that has been published about a Country Athlete Scholarship. It’s on page 62 of the Mandurah Coastal Times. The other news item I released was for the NAIDOC Carnival. Unfortunately the photo attached to the article was of one girl who did not have permission to be photographed; therefore the story was not published.
Aside from this, I am pleased that my media release was even considered and published by a newspaper. I am truly starting to understand the ins and outs of researching, writing, sending and publishing a story. It’s quiet fulfilling to see your work out in the real world.
Emma Harris
Department of Sport and Recreaation
2 comments:
Congradulation Emma, you got published!
That's great that you picked up the website stuff fast and that your supervisor was impressed (event if it was super easy). It makes you feel more confident when your noticed for things so you probably uploaded some interesting stuff!
I find too that sometimes your really busy and then other weeks it's a lot slower, i guess in a perfect world we would have steady work flow but realistically it's never going to happen!
I've had the job of re-writing media releases as well, from what i have been given i have noticed that you are able to see very quickly what type of stakholder has written the release through their writting style and the way they try and position the reader, did you find this as well?
Hopfully your improved writting skills get you a solid report mark!
Goodluck, Kim
Thanks! It's pretty cool, and re-assuring to know that I can actually write something newsworthy let alone having the correct grammar.
With regards to the media releases I totally agree that different stakeholders have different writing styles. It's interesting that a story can have so many view pointds and through slight changes a news release can be positioned in a completely different way compared to it's original form. I did some work on this one news story about a basketball club running competions as a result form the work throug DSR. I posed them questions relating specifically to DSR and how we helped the club developed and all I got back was a speil about how good the basketball club is. It was really good info but irrelevant to the stroy I was writing for the website. So, my supervisor instructed to scrap the story as it wasnt at all helpfull which was a shame but that how it goes I guess.
Good luck for Gym WA good job for getting a free laptop out of it ;)
Emma
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