Keeping Up With The World

Media monitoring

Unfortunately, one of the most common tasks most interns will encounter throughout their experience is A LOT of media monitoring. Let’s be honest – media monitoring can be a long and tedious task. It resulted in me questioning the necessity of this task, particularly when it involves tracking the industries and competitors of your clients as well as the company itself. After this, the filing process is even longer as the details of each article is scanned, cropped, filed in several platforms, printed and calculated.

Each morning, I spend two hours flicking through various newspapers, scanning the articles for 23 names of clients, along with news concerning their industry and competition. Two ladies in our office have a job purely designated to newspaper monitoring – and they still need extra help in the mornings. Meanwhile, other workers in the office are scanning the online world for articles and news about their clients.

Fortunately, this means public relations has the opportunity to become extremely familiar with what’s going on in the world. I learnt to enjoy this task as I become familiar with events, politics and issues throughout Malaysia. 

Your public relations consultancy's client benefits from relevant news is filtered for them through to review without manually searching the media. The client also receives consistent updates with statistical analysis’s concerning the news value in print, online, broadcast and social media, allowing them to compare how the media is presenting their company from month to month.

Those interested in public relations should have an interest in the news and media, as well as a curiosity for the world’s activities maintains your interest through activities such as media monitoring.

And there goes my weekend.

What is public relations? From what I read from the results shown in Google, public relations is the professional maintenance of a favourable public image by a company, other organization or an individual in the eyes of the public. And to sustain a positive image of the company is to uphold a constructive relationship with one of its key target audiences, which is the media.

And so, here comes what has happened in the past two days. It was Curtin Sarawak’s Awards & Scholarship Ceremony on Friday (25th April) and Graduation Ceremony on Saturday (26th April) so I was asked to deal with the press together with one of my colleague, Lillian. As a PR practitioner, being in contact with the media is one of the most important part of the job. Without the media, what are we PR practitioners to do? So, my task for the night was to lead the press to their table and pass them each a hand out of the speeches and fact sheets. Before the event, my supervisor had me go all the way to the HR department to photocopy a few copies of these hand outs and all I thought was “Why do I have to do such trifling tasks?” Where is the public relations stuff that I am supposed to be doing?”.

But as I was standing there, I realize that this was more than just a petty chore. While waiting for the hand outs to be done copying, I got to read through them and understand how a fact sheet is prepared in the correct way as well as how speeches are drafted for the speakers. In fact, what I am doing is actually preparing a media kit for the press! And how could I have not realized that right from the beginning? Guess I was a little too nervous about doing this as this was my first time being present at an event not as a guest, but as a committee member.

Apart from that, I have also learnt an important lesson which is to present ourselves in the best image of our company as this will instill positive awareness among the public towards the organization. Because the way I present myself in front of the press indirectly shows how the company represents itself. Also, preparing fact sheets and writing speeches for people are certainly not some simple tasks. Imagine getting the facts on the fact sheet wrong and drafting a speech with lots of grammatical error. Mistakes like these cannot happen as everything done has to be pretty precise. Public relations do not recognize such minor liability and blunders as they may end up becoming huge faults.


Until my next post,
Vivian Lee
15442668
Curtin Miri

Another step forward; Internship!

Hey everyone!

I am Vivian from Curtin Sarawak Campus and this is my very first blog post. The company I am working with now is Curtin University, and I am in the Corporate Communications department. It has been four days since I started working here, and guess what? My placement started just at the right time. This is due to the graduation ceremony that will take place on the 26th April, which is this coming Saturday and I am glad to say that I will be involved in it. One week into work, and I already have tasks allocated to me in such an event. More updates on that will be coming your way, right after the event ends. But for now, I will be talking about my first few days at work.

Curtin University, a place I can call my second home because I spend about the same amount of time in campus and home. And I am indeed very glad and fortunate to be able to do my internship in campus. From what I heard from my seniors, it is difficult to apply for a placement in the Corporate Communications department as they have quite a number of students waiting in line for their turn to do their placement there.

Well, I am lucky enough to be accepted by the management. I remember walking into the office to see my supervisor, Ms. Marcella Gider, Senior Corporate Communications Officer sitting at her desk at 8.00AM sharp. She was the only person in the office. So I took a seat and discussed some of the things I have to do throughout the internship, then subsequently she introduced me to all my colleagues when they arrived at work.

And starting from the first day, I have been asked to read newspapers, eight different newspapers in three languages to be exact. So, there is the English, Chinese and Bahasa Malaysia version of the newspapers. Funny thing is, I hardly read Chinese and I have to read it with squinted eyes (like the image below) just to read those seemingly unfamiliar Chinese characters.

But, I made it through day by day, reading articles after articles, looking for Curtin-related news as well as exciting local and worldwide news. Reading newspapers may only be fun to a handful of people, and I admit, that I am certainly not one of them but somehow, I am starting to like going through these papers in search of any intriguing and eye-catching news. Well basically, the main purpose of doing this is to compile all the advertisement clippings, feature articles as well as press clippings and put them in separate folders. Media clipping may just be my thing - or maybe not. Shown below are some of the things that I have done, including the cutting of the name tags for committee members at the graduation ceremony this weekend.

Look at the amount of newspaper I had to read on my first day of work!

Oh, and I even found a tiny mistake in one of the articles I read regarding the lunar eclipse in Washington. Can you spot the error?

By the way, here are some local news for you to read - not PR related but just to cure your boredom:

1. Idris: Improvements on PBS accepted by educators
2. Marine turtles lure foreign tourists
3. Ninth Borneo Jazz Festival 2014 expects 9,000 visitors
4. The Obama double in Malaysia
5. Have a break, Malaysia

Well, that is all for now. Until my next post, cheers!

Vivian Lee
15442668
Curtin Miri

If Jesus were around today he’d employ a PR consultant.

So, this is it, the final blog post in the final unit of the final year of my Public Relations degree, hallelujah and praise be to [insert nondenominational tutelary]! 

I’ve reserved the final post in my blogging quadraplex to the media, and the way I and others in our office and in politics in general interact with the media on a day-to-day and issue-by-issue basis.

For me the interaction between politics and the media is the fundamentally archetypal picture of public relations. Media releases, photo-ops, door-stops, press-conferences, attack, defence, parry, repost etc. Political media relations have all of the hallmarks of primetime PR, but alas the West Wing makes it look so simple.

I should preface this by saying that I work for a backbencher and therefor my interactions with the media tend to be on a more issue-by-issue basis as opposed to the daily interactions of a ministerial office. Sorry readers, so juicy Hollow Men gossip from me.

In our office there are two types of media relations/interactions we undertake. The first is issue specific media relations which tends to deal primarily with national media outlets such as the ABC, the Networks , News Ltd’s Dailies and Fairfax’s Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Canberra Times broadsheets.

A pertinent example of this kind of media relations is the recent story about the ‘Supertrawler’ and the pressure by Members on all sides of parliament to ban it from fishing in Australia waters, of which my boss was a significant player. 

Now having announced that she would introduce a Private Members Bill into the Parliament to see the trawler banned from fishing in Australian waters, my job immediately turned into one of fielding calls from every media outlet in the country, an interesting if not fanatical task often with several telephone conversations on the go at once. I cannot say there was any part of my PR degree that prepared me for this, but I think decent organisational skills are probably the key.

On the other hand, we have the two local newspapers we deal with on a daily basis. While no Age or Sydney Morning Herald, both newspapers are probably more important than any daily broadsheet to our primary objectives and goals. Now this is something I touched on my blog about events. It’s all well and good to get in every paper in the country, but does it advance your goals and objectives? If the answer is no then you're wasting your time.

Billionaire Warren Buffett believes that the future of the newspaper industry lies in ultra-local newspapers like those produces by the Community Newspaper Group here in Western Australia, Indeed he recently put his money where his mouth his and purchased 63 local newspapers in the US for a staggering $142 million - and I think he’s got a point.

Local newspapers are relatively inexpensive to produce and they contain ultra-local content, which is what people want and something that politicians should take notice of. Local newspapers should not be frowned upon or looked on as inferior to the big dailies, because I can guarantee on a per distribution area basis they are far more widely read.

Good local news stories, good relationships with local reporters and good messaging to your constituents through the use of local media is what I think grassroots politics is all about, and with that I wish everyone the best in their future careers and highly recommend anyone with a passion for politics should get involved, it’s fun and very rewarding.

Adieu, Ron.

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