My Experience at the DSR (Part 1) - The First Media Release (and Coffee!)

Hello everyone,

It's been about six weeks (six days) since I started my internship and I figure this would be a good time to start blogging about my experience so far.

I had originally intended to do this unit in semester two of 2011 but came to the conclusion that I would be better off putting it off for the semester and starting early in the summer.  This would allow me to do it part-time (one day per week) instead of taking an extended leave from work.

I got into contact with the Department of Sport and Recreational and was excited to hear they were willing to take me on in the new year.  I quickly agreed and crossed my fingers that they would still remember when it got closer to 2012. Fortunately they did.

Fast forward to today and I find myself six weeks into my work experience and loving every minute of it - although Monday mornings aren't getting any easier after becoming used to working nights!

In this blog I will be bringing you some of the highlights of my experience to date.

Week 1 (AKA Day 1):

I knew I was going to like the place when I was offered coffee upon arrival (and liked it even more when I learned it was a daily 9.30am ritual).  Following this much needed caffeine hit I began my first day by sitting in on the weekly meeting for the PR/communications team.  It was daunting at first and a lot of it went over my head initially but as I became more informed about what the department does and some of the programs it manages it began to make a lot more sense.  I was asked where my strengths lie and was promptly given my first task upon answering that it was writing. That task was preparing my first ever real media release, no more preparing media releases for hypothetical scenarios or preparing media releases that would never actually be released - this was the real deal.

I was a little apprehensive, I hadn't actually written a media release in almost a year but I am happy to report that it all comes back to you very quickly. 

Fortunately, the release I was to write was for the Nicky Winmar Football Carnival, a sporting event for a sport I am very familiar with - AFL.  Getting to write about a sport I know and enjoy definitely made things easier and far more enjoyable when it came to writing the media release and researching some of the material. 

I found myself drawing heavily on the journalism aspect of my Mass Communication degree, in particular the semester I had spent as a sub-editor at the Western Independent. I am proud to say my supervisor (Amanda) found no errors when I sent her the story.  That isn't to say my PR studies played no role at all, they assisted me greatly when it came to the structure of the story and the distribution.  For those interested you can read the media release here.

Perhaps the hardest part when it came to my first media release was actually issuing it.  There was no real media list at my disposal so I had to create my own. To make distribution matters harder it is a story that could be of interest to media outlets all across the state. I spent quite a large chunk of time creating a mailing list of my own which should make any future media releases I do significantly easier to distribute.  We got a lot of responses to the release and generated some decent coverage in newspapers and regional TV.

Working for a government department which is primarily involved in positive initiatives and popular policy makes it much easier to do the job. I can't help feel that I was very lucky to end up in a department such as this considering how much negative publicity and public distrust or disinterest there are towards many other government departments. It is nice being able to work on promoting the initiatives the department is involved in without having to be constantly dealing with negative publicity or a crisis. That isn't to say they don't happen and to some extent they very much still do but they are much less common than the problems other departments would have to constantly deal with.

Wow, I didn't expect this first blog blog entry to drag on quite so much as it did.  For the sake of your sanity (and mine) I will stop here for now.  Keep an eye out for some of my other experiences and thoughts from these first few weeks in part two! (coming soon-ish)

Until next time,

Luke Howieson