My first experience with the media
in a completely professional capacity could have gone slightly better, in my
opinion. I’ve already brushed shoulders with a few members of the press from
various newspapers, be it reporters or camera-people. However, those
experiences have been informal at best, and these experiences I am about to
share have to do with being professional and perhaps the shamelessness that
comes with it.
After the Global Goals Health: and
Wellbeing Workout on the 23rd of September (please read my previous
blogpost, *Feel the Burn* to read up on the details of the event) we’ve had to monitor
the publications of our media releases, as per usual. Only the Borneo Post had
confirmed they would publish us, due to the reporter herself attending the event,
however the others were reliant on the media releases we had sent to them via
fax and email. And the event was held on a Wednesday evening, leaving only
Friday for the newspapers to publish my article.
Therein lay my first challenge.
Let me explain. On weekends, local
newspapers in Miri have a tendency to publish paraphrased articles found
online, oftentimes trending in the Miri Community Facebook community. This is
usually because they are short on staff, who take the weekend off. This leads
to two days where my press release would be ignored at the fax machine, buried
in a pile of other such press releases from other people, till the translators
and senior reporters came in on Monday. I had to call around 4.40 pm on Sunday
to ensure that my media release was on the top of the pile, much to the chagrin
of the office boy who was in the newsroom at the time.
Now here comes my second challenge.
I had to be shameless.
My supervisor informed me that she
didn’t quite care how, but my article had to be in at least 3 newspapers within
that week. No pressure, right? The heat was on the moment she didn’t care how.
So for the next day I was calling
the different newspapers and pitching my event to them as calmly or frantically
as the situation required. English speaking newspapers required more decorum,
while the Mandarin newspapers seemed to be more responsive when I spoke
passionately about the article. With the risk of sounding slightly
unprofessional, me and my fellow intern, Chen Hau Yung, managed to get most of
the Mandarin newspapers to publish simply by calling them three to four times
that day, assuring them that they were ‘missing out on an internationally
trending event’ and gave the vague allusion that their readers would think they
were out of date for missing said opportunity.
It worked, they agreed to publish
it.
My joy was short lived, as I
realised that in my desperation to get my newspapers published, I had behaved
in what I considered to be an unprofessional manner, or rather, a manner of the
wrong profession. I had behaved like a door-to-door salesperson, if any
profession at all.
However, to my relief, my supervisor
then explained to me that while Public Relations may be done differently elsewhere,
this was exactly how to talk to a
reporter here in Miri. At the end of the day, it came down to the same two
things. Confidence, and one solid fact.
While we were embarrassed when
calling, we didn’t let it show, so we had managed to portray ourselves as
confident when we felt anything but. We pressed on in the faith that the Global Goals that
we were representing, specifically the third
global goal, would be a famous
enough incident that would speak for itself and get the newspapers to publish
our involvement in it. In this case, our mission was a success.
Sometimes what we aren’t comfortable
in doing or consider unprofessional is really all that is required in Public
Relations. Basically, be shameless in asking for coverage and promoting our
organisation’s beneficial activities. I believe it was a lesson well learnt.
All I can hope is the next time, I see these reporters, they won’t hold that shamelessness against me. Here’s to hoping.
