Mundanely important or routinely interesting?

Hello, I’m Elaine and it’s nice meeting you here, my PR friends with the sharing of my internship experience at Hyatt Regency Kinabalu!

I’m pretty sure that newspaper clipping or analysis will not be a new thing to you and yes, it’s my first task assigned in Hyatt.

Every day, I will:

1.  Search and cut out relevant news about tourism, airlines and hotels especially 4-star and 5-star rating along with advertisement on hotels’ promotions or future events from newspapers.
2. Let my supervisor look through the news, omitting less relevant news.
3.  Paste the news on paper with date and time stated.
4. Translate and summarise Chinese news, send the translation summary to my supervisor
5. Scan the clippings. 

My supervisor will then circulate the scanned clippings to all staff via email. The purpose of doing newspaper clipping is to let the staff to know about the current news relating or affecting the company and knowing other competitors’ promotions especially for sales managers.

It was a new interesting thing at first and you have to practice your “eye scanning” throughout the newspapers especially on key words. It took me about 3 hours to go through 6 newspapers with a mix of English and Chinese.

I got pretty frustrated at first because of its time-consuming and the effort of cutting and paste. I also do doubt the effectiveness of newspaper clipping circulation: will the staff actually read it or they will ignore the email? It is a daily routine and I get bored at times because you will have to cut out the same news from newspaper but with slight difference of content. I also feel like the task is insignificant and more of a nuisance to do sometimes.

Little did I know that newspaper clipping does hold some importance or contributes to the company’s strategies.

There was one afternoon that I saw and overheard the general manager talking to one of the sales managers about one of their strong competitor’s room promotion, which is one of the clippings that I did in the morning. 

You know the instant feeling that you thought the simple task that you do was not much significant and then later on you found out that it is useful and appreciated by them? Even though just by opening the file to read through the scanned images of clippings means something, or maybe I’m just easy to be satisfied.

Newspaper clipping is much related to PR research and analysis especially on examining potential threats and opportunities. There is no exact quantitative measurement done in terms of the content or frequency of the news related to Hyatt but nevertheless, they are able to know the happenings in the tourism industry especially on the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Environment’s plan or opinion about the industry itself.

The task that I’m doing not only contributes to sales and marketing but also to revenue management. The revenue manager will analyse booking patterns and market trends, forecast the room rates to maximize profitability and revenue performance. Besides, he/she is responsible in liaising with the sales team and general manager. With the collection of competitors’ promotions news, revenue manager can then do the forecast with current news update accordingly.

Till now, I don’t feel that frustrated doing newspaper clipping everyday, at least I know that my effort is not wasted and in fact, reading news is interesting and you do feel a bit smarter (in a sense) with all the diverse information that you read!

Never underestimate the significance of a simple task, it might be mundanely important and yet routinely interesting!

(*This post was amended once in respect of information update and content refinement.)

Chung Yee Vun Elaine

16091427 / 7e2a9644