At first I was a little shocked and somewhat upset at how differently media releases are written for my place of internship compared to how I have been taught while at university. Being a government agency, there is a pretty strict format that must be followed.
While I have been writing up media releases as practice in my internship, I usually just compare what I have written with what my manager has written and she gives me tips on how to improve them so that they meet the standard government format.
So, over the last 4 weeks I had been trying to learn exactly how my place of internship like their media releases to look. Finally, today I was given the task to write up a release and have it sent out to a large number of media!
My manager has previously used some of my headings and lead paragraphs that I had come up with on previous releases, but this was the first time that I was actually allowed to write the entire media release, attach a picture and then send it out to 30+ media.
Safe to say I very much enjoyed my internship this week and cannot wait until I start my public relations career and get to do this every day.
This also made me think about the fact that this will probably be the case for everywhere I go; each organization will have their way of writing releases and this is no doubt going to differ from how I have been taught. So not to self: research previous media releases written by the place that I am looking to work or have managed to score a job and learn their style of writing and format!
Lana Lynch
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4 comments:
That's a really smart idea - googling past media releases for a prospective organization! I'm definitely going to do that when I apply for another job/internship cause you right, everyone writes them differently so its hard to know exactly what your manager wants.
Hope the internship is going well! Good luck!
I had a similar experience the other day at my internship and was shocked at how different the media release were to be written compared to how we were taught throughout university. I guess for me it was different because i am in the non for profit sector.
Hope your enjoying your internship.
Sandra
Hi Lana,
I have experienced this confronting issue on numerous occasions too! Of course I was aware that theory and practice are often two quite different things, but I was quite shocked to find just how different the standard was for each organisation and receiving channel.
I did a semester in Canada last year, and my professor told me my writing style for media releases was completely wrong (this was after getting HDs on the pieces written at Curtin..). I've also noticed a large disparity between the style in my consultancy and corporate internships. As a general rule, the consultancy releases had more room for creativity and poetic language. The corporate releases I write now however, are always very succinct and rarely use particularly ornate phrasings.
I suppose this is good practice though, as we'll learn how to align our writing styles with the demands of different publics and clients.
All the best with your internship!
Hey Lana,
I agree with you when you said media releases are different from what we were being taught in class.
When I drafted my first media release, I had the same feeling as there's a format to follow and it was nothing like what I had learn from PR220 and PR250. But that's the fun of it, right? And I guess there are a lot of things that we are unable to learn from only textbooks and classes. Only real-life experiences can give us the knowledge that we really need throughout our career.
Cheers,
Vivian Lee
Curtin Miri :)
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