Public Relations

Three tips that will keep your blog operating at full steam in good times and in bad

blogging

The conversation with the PRSSA kids yesterday went really well, considering that we’ve got the accreditation team on campus, it was hour 13 of my day and I was still wearing a tie at that point in time. We talked about a number of things that would lead to a good blog and I honestly think a couple folks there might want to take a shot at developing one of their own.

One of the questions that came up during the discussion was that of “best practices” when it came to running a blog. In other words, if they got past the three basic rules I laid out for blogging, well, then what?

We picked through a couple examples that were based on their interests and kind of came up with three basic areas of importance that separated the good blogs from the ones that died on the vine. They aren’t anything particularly shocking, but understanding why they matter can make a huge difference:

Educational Acumen

Having expertise is a great thing, but you have to be able to use that expertise in a way that effectively communicates it to the people who are reading your blog. Otherwise, it’s a waste and the readers will become frustrated and leave.

This is where knowing your audience becomes crucial, as you can meter your use of jargon, your level of explanation and your overall approach to the content based on who is reading.

For example, let’s say you want to run a blog about how to fix old pinball machines. You have spent half your life working on these things and you have repaired more than 100 games that ranged from mild tune ups to massive rebuilds.

If your audience is comprised of first-time pinball owners, you will need to use a lot of visuals to show them what things like coils and targets are. You will need to explain how to do simple things like remove the glass or disconnect a coin mechanism. You will need to offer more caution regarding dangerous things to touch or things that can break.

If your audience is comprised of more veteran repair folks, you can skip some of the basics, rely more on shared terminology and even go into deeper rebuild topics. As one of the students asked, “If people in your audience are really into your topic, can you use jargon?” I explained that it’s not jargon if the people understand it; It’s shared language. Jargon is stuff that you use that other people in your audience DON’T understand.

Additionally, you’ll need consider word choices to help people complete tasks in an effective way. So if you want them to use a hammer on something, there’s a world of difference between “hit” “pound” and “gently tap.” Experts will likely know these differences instinctively, while newbies will need more hand holding.

Passion

Being good at something and liking something are not the same thing. This is the argument I have with my mother to this day: She thought I should have been a political speech writer. Her point was that I was good at speaking, speech writing and that I could really make a difference in how people saw the world. My point was that I hated politics and I hated politicians, so no matter how good I was at this, I was never going to go anywhere in this field.

Or to quote a professor who spoke to my dissertation prep class, “Pick a topic that you really love because you’re going to be with it in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death or doctorate will you part.”

To be good at something and to do well at it constantly, you need to have a passion for the thing you are doing. Never is this more true than in blogging, because without the passion, you’re never going to make it. Here’s why:

  • You have no deadlines. It’s easy enough to blow off an assignment when you have a deadline. When you don’t, you can always push something down the road a bit further. If you don’t believe me, consider the ugly yellow plastic windows we had on one of our kitchen cabinets back at our previous house. When we moved in, Amy asked me, “When you get a chance, could you get rid of those and put new doors on that cabinet?” When we sold the house two years ago, the plastic remained. We got to know the most-recent owners of the home and got a tour of the place a few weeks ago. Ugly plastic is still there. In short, when I WANT to get something done, I’ll get it done in a New York Minute. When I don’t have a deadline, I’ll blow it off.
  • The quality of the work suffers: Mom used to read the State Journal every day when I was working there. She’d often call me up and talk to me about the articles I had written. In one case, she told me, “I read X. You didn’t really want to write that one, did you?” The truth was, I hated the story she was talking about, but I wanted to know what led her to figure that out. I asked if there were flaws or mistakes or whatever and she said, “No. It read fine and there wasn’t anything wrong. I could just tell that you didn’t want to do this.”
    If you don’t have a passion for the topic, as in you love this thing and you want to spend a lot of time with this topic, writing to other people about it, you’ll end up with a really lousy blog. You can’t just have a passing interest. You have to love it. If you don’t it will show up in the writing and people will tell.
  • You will run out of stuff to talk about: People who love a topic will talk about nothing other than that. If you don’t believe me, go back and watch Forrest Gump again and listen to how Bubba talks about shrimp. You want your blog to be like a diesel engine: It might take you a little longer to get started, but once it gets going, it can run long and hard without stopping. If you don’t have a passion for the topic, it’ll be like a bottle rocket: It’ll take off in a hurry, explode quickly and then dissipate.

Dedication

This puts together the above two with the idea of understanding what it takes to make this thing work and forcing yourself to do it every day or every week or whatever. You must make sure you are constantly looking for things to add to the blog. You must make sure you post when you are required to post things. You can’t just blow it off when you don’t feel like writing. You can’t push it down the line because you can’t think about something or because other things become more important. If you are going to develop an audience that has an interest in you, you must continue to find things to give them.

Dedication leads to consistency and leads to success.

Nolan Ryan pitched in the major leagues until he was 46 years old and he credited his workout regimen after games for a lot of his longevity. When he won his 300th game, his family wanted to take him out and celebrate right after the game. Instead, they had to wait for him to finish his post-game workout before they could go out. Even though they pleaded with him to skip it “just this once,” he said, no and went to work.

Think about all the things that you might have succeeded at or failed at. It could be the New Year’s resolution to work out. You get going all gangbusters and then it’s really, really, REALLY cold outside and you don’t want to get out of bed and suddenly, goodbye exercise.

It could be a diet where you have meals planned and things are going along fine, but then you get caught short of your health nut mix and Hello, Taco Bell!

A blog can’t be like that if you want to be successful at it because it takes a long, long time to get an interested and engaged audience and it will take no time for them to leave you like a cheating fiancée on Temptation Island.

Honestly, not every day will be an academy award, but you have to ply your trade every day no matter what.

John Oliver takes on crime reporting

Since it’s not always easy to broach a topic like “What if the police are lying to you as a journalist?” and because trying to keep students’ attention at around the six-week mark of class can be quite difficult, here’s a potential conversation starter for your reporting class. Comedian John Oliver took on the way in which crime reporting works on Sunday’s episode of “Last Week Tonight.” It has a lot of interesting jumping-off points as well as some important looks at how reporting shapes our worldview in terms of safety, race and the law, among other topics.

Before you consider showing this in class, a couple brief caveats:

  1. He swears an appreciable amount, something that might be problematic if you work somewhere that requires penance if you use the word “damn” in the classroom.
  2. He will often take a bit a little too far. He’s done far worse before, but there is at least one reference to Miss Piggy’s sex life, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
  3. The piece picks at broadcast news A LOT, which seems a bit unfair, given that a lot of media outlets follow the same basic pattern of taking police press releases and running with them.
  4. He has a point of view. If you’ve never watched “Last Week Tonight” before, it’s worth mentioning, in that he fact checks the heck out of stuff but like most things with a point of view, he points to things that support his POV. Some people call that cherry-picking, but there appear to be a lot of cherries around this story.

From my own experience in working with the police and covering crime, let me add these thoughts:

  1. The reliance on press releases as a sole source is a bad practice across the board. Oliver points out that a lot of the problems in how narratives are cast comes from press releases from public-information officers. Journalists should essentially know that all press releases come with a point of view, not just those that come from the police. Relying on a press release from Dyson will probably lead to the story, “Study finds U.S. needs more, better vacuum cleaners.”
  2. A lot of the problems here are germane to all of journalism these days, in which the importance of filling the grist mill leads to grab-and-go journalism. A lot of our problems come from not being able to be at the scene or develop trustful relationships with sources or waiting to tell a story until it’s fully fleshed out. This is as true in political coverage, education coverage and other forms of coverage as it is in crime coverage.
  3. In some cases “police said” carries with it a special layer of protection, based on certain interpretations of qualified privilege, in which journalists can rely on official sources acting in an official capacity without fear. That’s why it’s there. Also, he mentions some places are using “police claim” as a substitute for being deferential to police.  Please don’t follow this path. “Said” is supposed to be neutral. The problem is that we lack other people on the other side of the issue to do some “saying” for us. Also, if you stick allegedly in there as another potential fix, please know that every time you use allegedly, God kills a kitten.
  4. He always ends giant segments like this with the “not all (fill in the group) are bad people who act this way” after spending 28 minutes telling you how crappy that group can be. I’ve had my share of crappy PIOs in various departments, but I’ve also worked with some really good police, deputies and other law-enforcement officials over the years. I follow the simple idea of extending them the level of trust I would like them to extend to me. When one of us violates that trust, now it’s game on.

With all of that in mind, here’s John…

 

Maybe do a Google search before trying to sell me something? (A Throwback Thursday look at bad booksellers)

Today’s Throwback Thursday comes courtesy of an experience I had with a book rep this week. As noted earlier, I kind of got thrown into teaching Mass Com Law at the last minute, so I was working off of someone else’s book choices, class structure and so forth. About two days in, a student reached out to me with a panicked email about the e-code not working for her textbook.

I had no idea what she meant, so after about six false starts, I found out that the company who produced the book required me to set up an account with them and thus allow students to “attach” to me so they could read the book. The rep who got this done for me after a few of my own panicked emails was a nice enough guy, and he stopped by Tuesday to see how I was liking the book.

We chatted a bit about the text, the e-system and other items before the inevitable “sales question” hit for him:

Him: “So what else do you teach?”

Me: “Oh, a bunch of stuff. Writing for the media, reporting, editing, blogging…”

Him: “Hey, what book do you use for your reporting class? We’ve got a great one…”

He then went on to sing the praises of his company’s reporting book for a bit, while sitting directly across from this:

As we talked more about me needing a blogging book than a reporting book, he told me, “Oh, we don’t do stuff like that…” explaining that it doesn’t have a big enough niche to make it worthwhile.

That led to this:

Me: “Yeah, it takes a lot to make sure things are up to date for books.”

Him: “Uh huh… Books take a lot of work.”

Really?  Y’don’t say… as you are staring directly at this:

I’m not trying to pick on the guy for lack of situational awareness, but he did manage to notice at least a dozen specific bobbleheads in my collection that were RIGHT ON TOP of the things he failed to notice in those photos. Also, I’m not arrogant enough to think someone should know about me like I’m important or famous, but a simple Google search is the least you can do if you’re going somewhere to try to sell someone something.

In any case, here’s the look at the last time stuff got this socially awkward over my quest to write a textbook about everything on Earth…

 

So… No, then? (or why it’s important to research your readers before you pitch to them)

I understand this blog tends to skew more toward news than some folks might appreciate, given that my entire pitch for the “Dynamics of Media Writing” is that ALL disciplines of media (news, PR, Ad, marketing etc.) can get something of value out of it. The skew is due to trying to cover both the media-writing text and the news reporting and writing text in one spot. It also also comes from the idea that a lot of things people perceive as “news” things are actually valuable for all media, including skills like interviewing, research, inverted-pyramid writing and so forth. Finally, it seems that news folks tend to make more public mistakes than do some of the other disciplines, so I get more content there. (If you want me to hit on more topics in the PR/Ad/Marketing stuff, feel free to pitch me some thoughts. I’d love to do it.)

That said, occasionally there is a specific foul up in a specific part of the field that bears some analysis. Consider that when you look at this email I got the other day. I redacted the identifiers as best I could:

Dear Professor Filak,

​Greetings from (COMPANY NAME)! ​I hope this finds you well. In the coming months, (AUTHOR NAMES) will begin to revise the twelfth edition of their introductory journalism text, (REPORTING BOOK NAME). ​This text strives to give students the knowledge and skills they need to master the nuts and bolts of news stories, as well as guidance for landing a job in an evolving journalism industry.
Right now we are seeking instructors to review the twelfth edition of (REPORTING BOOK NAME) ​a​nd provide feedback. This input is invaluable to us, ​as it ​giv​es​ us a greater sense of how to best address both instructor and student needs. ​If you are currently teaching the introductory news reporting and writing course or will be teaching the course soon, would you be interested in offering your feedback?
If you would like to review, please respond to this email and let me know if you will need a copy of the printed text. You should plan to submit your comments via TextReviews by 2/6/18. In return for your help, we would like to offer you (MONEY).
At your earliest convenience, kindly respond to this e-mail to let me know if you are available and interested in participating. ​Again, please let me know if you will need a copy of (REPORTING BOOK NAME)…
I’m always happy to help people and I’m not averse to making a buck by pretending to know what I’m talking about, but this felt both awkward and ridiculous. One of the things both “Dynamics” books push a lot is the idea of making sure you know what you’re talking about before you ask a question. The books also push the idea of researching your audience members so you know how best to approach them. Either the person writing this email didn’t do that or just didn’t care.
Here’s how I know that: It’s called “Google.”
Had this person done even a basic search on me she would have learned several things:
  • I am teaching the courses they associate with this book. I teach nothing but these courses, as you can find on the UWO journalism department website. The line of “If you are currently teaching the introductory news reporting and writing course or will be teaching the course soon…” tells me I’m on a list somewhere and this is a form email at best.

 

  • I wrote several books, including one that is likely to be some form of competition for this book. (I’m not saying it will be as good or better or anything, but my title includes words like “news,” “reporting” and “writing,” so it’s a pretty safe bet we’re vying for the same students.) This was literally one of the top five items on the first page of my Google search. She also sent her message the same day I got this alert from Amazon:
  • NumberOne
(I have no idea how Amazon quantifies “#1 New Release in Journalism” but I’ll take it.)

The point is, it wasn’t a secret, so it appeared that she didn’t look me up and was like the guy at the bar telling me, “Hey, see that babe over there? I’m totally going to score with her!” and I’m like, “Uh, dude, that’s my wife…”
On the other hand, maybe she did look me up, found the book and asked anyway, which is like the even-worse guy at the bar who’s saying, “Hey man, your wife is pretty hot. Any chance you can give me some tips on how to score with her?”

Thinking about all of that for a moment, I did the polite thing and emailed back, explaining how I felt this would be a conflict of interest (it is), and that any advice I gave her would be likely be somewhat problematic as the author of a competing book (it is).  I also noted that I know the book she is pitching well (I do) and I know the authors well (I do), so this would also be a bit awkward for me (it really is). Here was her email back to me, which again made me think she wasn’t actually reading this:

Hi Professor Filak,

Thanks so much for letting me know. We will certainly keep you in mind for future projects!

So, again, the point of the blog isn’t to beat people up for doing things poorly but rather to offer advice on how to do things better. Here are a few basic tips:

  • Research first, then write: You don’t have to do an Ancestry.com profile on every person to whom you market or with whom you engage in outreach, but it’s not hard to Google someone. Most people put more social-media stalking effort into learning about the “new kid” at school than this person put into finding out about me. In marketing, you often have access to proprietary data as well, so you can find out if this person had any previous engagement with your organization. In my case, I used that book for more than a decade and still keep up with it, so that might have been something she could have found.
  • Personalize when possible: If you are sending out 100,000 requests for something like a survey and you are expecting a 10 percent response, you will not have the ability to personalize all of the information on everyone’s card or email. That makes sense. However, when you are microtargeting a group of people with a specific set of skills or interests and that group isn’t going to overwhelm a data center, work on personalizing your content. That line about “If you are currently teaching the introductory news reporting and writing course or will be teaching the course soon…” could have easily been tweaked to say something like, “I see you have taught writing and reporting courses at UW-Oshkosh…” and it wouldn’t have taken much. Making these minor tweaks shows that you have done your research. Engaging in some personalized communication shows your readers you care enough to see them as individuals as opposed to a wad of names on a spreadsheet.
  • Try not to screw up, but if you do, don’t ignore it: The one thing that stuck with me when I got that response email from her was that I didn’t think she figured out what she was actually asking me or why it was weird. I had that feeling that if I had written her back and said, “I’m sorry I can’t do this because I’ve just been placed in an intergalactic prison for the rest of my life for murdering a flock of Tribbles with a phaser I set to ‘kill’ instead of ‘stun,’” I would have gotten the exact same email back. The whole exchange really reminded me of this scene:
 The thing that is important to realize is that you are going into a field that has two important and scary things going for it:
  1. It’s small enough that you’re really about two degrees of separation from everyone else, so people know other people.
  2. People in the field love to talk.

If you end up screwing up because you didn’t do the first two things suggested above, don’t compound the problem.

I have no idea if I’ll ever get approached by this publisher to review anything, but I know I will always carry with me the memory of this interaction. Had it been a great interaction, that would have been good for the publisher. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

A quick follow-up post on the UW-Oshkosh student media situation

The Advance-Titan staffers at UW-Oshkosh met with some folks in the administration Thursday to discuss the issue of reaching sources and the role of UMC. From all accounts, a lot of things got done and some more things need to get done.

The group agreed that some sort of plan, policy, procedure or other form of mutual understanding of how the A-T, UMC and the folks at UWO work together needs to be hashed out. I didn’t attend the meeting, but in pulling from some notes, conversations and emails, it looks like the students and the A-T board members were respectfully heard.

Chancellor Andrew Leavitt made it clear that he favors the free expression of ideas and that no one is punished for talking to the press, which was both good to hear and completely unsurprising to me. As I’ve said before, I really do like this guy and I really do think he has students and student media’s best interests in mind. I’m sure it’s not an easy job to balance all the audiences he deals with on a daily basis, but as far as I’ve been concerned, he’s always made me feel like he listens to student needs and he is honest about his positions on everything.

After I posted the email addresses of Leavitt, Peggy Breister and Cory Sparks earlier in the week, asking folks to express themselves, I know a lot of you all did just that. I also know that Leavitt personally responded to all of the emails he got, as multiple people told me they received a note back from him, thanking them for his interest in all this and reaffirming his commitment to student journalism at UWO.

The academics who shared those notes with me told me how impressed they were that he was willing to do this, with at least one of them saying, “My university president wouldn’t do that!”

Even more, I shot a quick email to the UMC to offer Breister or Leavitt an opportunity to give me their take on the meeting and I got this back:

Dear Vince,
Peggy Breister and Alex Hummel shared your request for comment.
I understand the staff of the Advance-Titan may be producing an account of our good meeting and valuable conversation yesterday. I would like to respect the space and opportunity the student journalists have to develop and publish their story. I won’t be commenting at this time.
Thank you,
Andy
I would like to respect that space as well. Rome wasn’t built in a day and nothing was going to get fully fixed in a meeting involving a dozen people at a table. It’s my understanding the students have schedule a follow-up meeting with the administration to codify some of the issues brought to bear this week and develop a plan (or whatever we’re calling it) that can bring peace with honor.
My hope going forward, and I don’t think I’m being a Pollyanna here, is that these folks build a really good set of guidelines and standards that will establish collaborative opportunities and clear boundaries in regard to who does what and in what way. I really want that to be something that when some other institution invariably hits the same kind of snag we’ve seen here, we can share the UWO policy and say, “Here. This is a thing UWO built that really works well. Feel free to adapt it to your needs.”
Thanks so much for all you all do for student journalists. I’ll post again on this once there’s something new to say.

The Second Kind of Dumb: Investigating allegations that my university, UW-Oshkosh, is “muzzling” student journalists

“There’s two kinds of dumb. The guy who gets naked and runs out into the snow and barks at the moon, and the guy who does the same thing in my living room. The first one don’t matter. The second one you’re kinda forced to deal with.”

– Hoosiers

For as long as I’ve been here at UW-Oshkosh, I’ve told basically anyone who would listen that we’ve got a great place for young journalists to learn the trade. That’s why it really upset me when a former student sent me this article from FIRE about how the campus was “muzzling the campus watchdog” with a rather heavy-handed policy:

 Journalists at universities are essential to keeping the public informed on campus activities, whether through reporting on mundane affairs or acts of impropriety.

Administrators at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh have impeded this function, imposing an onerous process on reporters, including student reporters, who want to interview university employees.

Journalists at The Advance-Titan, an independent student newspaper at UWO, maintain they must go through particular steps in order to secure an interview with university employees. While university officials have refused to outline the details of this process in writing, these hurdles have been in place for at least two years and impose a constant barrier to the work of the paper’s journalists, whose reporting focuses on UWO and its personnel.

FIRE stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and its mission is “to protect fundamental rights on campus concentrates on four areas: freedom of speech and expression; religious liberty and freedom of association; freedom of conscience; and due process and legal equality on campus.”

I’ve worked with them on a couple occasions in various areas of student press and found the organization to be really interested in making sure people’s rights don’t get stepped on just because they work or learn on college campuses. The folks there aren’t above being a tad hyperbolic, but I haven’t known them to be flat-out wrong on something. I’d heard rumblings similar to those FIRE described from former and current students about “having to go through UMC to get an interview” with pretty much anyone on campus.

I’ve raised a stink about stupid policies, administrative overreach, borderline threats to student journalists and all sorts of other things on this blog, regardless of where they were happening, so to have something like this basically show up in my living room really ticked me off.

Still, journalism is the field in which if your mother says she loves you, you go check it out. So, I read the article, dug into some research, talked to a couple students and then reached out to the head of the University Marketing and Communications department, Peggy Breister.

Breister has worked in UMC for about five years at UWO, currently serving as the department’s executive director. She also has news chops, having spent 25 years of reporting and editing experience in our state and having earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. I asked for an interview, but added that I knew she was busy, so I included a number of questions about the FIRE story, the university policies and the situation at hand in case she wanted to type up some stuff.

She responded via email and here’s a chunk of her response:

We ask media to contact us when they would like to do a story about the University. We are here to help reporters connect with the individuals who can best respond to their questions. We have not changed our practices. Since the A-T is the media, we feel we should work with them in the same way that we work with other media.

We don’t require the A-T to provide us with written questions, but that is often the way we receive their initial requests, often due to deadline, or it is what is requested of us by the individual they are seeking to connect with. Reporters are welcome to request interviews, send questions via email, etc. We do not pre-approve questions or responses. We do try to clarify vague requests to help us identify the topic and appropriate source.

We try to make connections so requests can be responded to quickly. I think we have been very responsive. The A-T also does many stories that we are not involved with.

Several things concerned me with this response:

THE NON-ANSWER: I know I don’t always ask the best questions, but I think I was pretty clear with this one:

What is the explicit policy regarding student journalists and access to university employees? Is it true that all their requests must go through your office?

I spent at least five minutes playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” with Breister’s response, trying to find a simple yes/no answer to that second part and some clarity for the first one. In regard to the first part, Breister responded by pointing me to this part of the university website, which isn’t so much of a  policy as it is set of vague tips on how faculty can talk to media folks about stuff.

In regard to the second part of the question, I got about four half-answers to completely different questions: We prefer if media folks contact us. The A-T gets the same treatment from us as we give to other media outlets.  We never ask for questions from them in advance. We’re working really hard here.

All of those things might be true and yet none of them really addresses the important issue, which requires a simple yes or no answer. Or, as I explained it to a equally peeved colleague: “It would be like if you asked if I thought you were a good classroom teacher and I responded with, “Well, there’s no doubt you’re here at a University, and nobody ever questioned your research skills and I know you think teaching is really important.”

Eeesh.

THE NON-DENIAL: The FIRE article really lays it on thick when it comes to allegations of First Amendment denial, information hoarding and generally weaselly behavior. As someone who prizes objectivity and fairness in journalism, it was a bit disturbing to me to see no mention of trying to get UWO to comment or trying to check this out with the university. I appreciate the heat FIRE likes to bring, but let’s play fair. So, I gave Breister a shot:

What is the rationale behind limiting access in the fashion the FIRE article describes? Or if you feel the article is inaccurate, please feel free to explain the inaccuracies here…

Nowhere in her email did she address the FIRE article, either to agree with it or to refute it. The closest she came was this:

I’m sure you have seen this piece, but I include it in case you have not: https://advancetitan.com/opinion/2022/02/23/student-journalism-must-not-be-censored

I guess if a national organization dragged me to the middle of the internet and started smacking me around, I would like to think I’d stand up for myself. Or, if they were right, I’d issue some sort of explanation as to how sorry I was about it or that I’d do better or whatever it is we make people say these days so they don’t get  put in Twitter Jail.

Maybe that’s just me, but not hearing a full-throated defense of my own institution made me a bit queasy.

THE RAMIFICATIONS: In reading through that email, I saw the lack of a clear policy, and that created problems for me on two fronts.

First, as a student-press advocate and journalism educator, I was concerned how this was going to impact my students. I don’t advise the paper anymore, but I send plenty of kids into the field for class assignments that get published there or elsewhere. I train them to go to sources for interviews and get answers from people who have them. Any restrictions that prevent these journalists from getting to those sources is worrisome.

Second, as an employee of the university, I know I’m governed by a lot of policies and rules. I also know that I’ve been interviewed for more than a few stories over the years, both through UMC hookups and from folks independently reaching out to me. If there’s a rule as to how I’m supposed to deal with something, I’d like to know what it is before I accidentally violate it.

Also, I’d like to know what the penalty is for breaking that rule. Contrary to popular belief, me having tenure doesn’t mean I can show up dressed like and acting like Rahad Jackson. Even more, there are plenty of people out there without tenure who would be operating under this policy, so that’s a concern.

So, I pushed back with two pointed questions that sought yes/no answers about the university’s policy regarding interview-seeking behaviors and the veracity of the claims of FIRE. I also provided this simple explanation for my concerns:

I guess what concerns me most is that student journalists (even those in my classes who aren’t operating student media outlets) are being told they HAVE TO go through UMC for anything on campus.
If that’s not true, let’s disabuse them of that notion and make it clear that UMC’s job is to help facilitate interviews when journalists need that help. I’ve worked with UMC many times at multiple universities over the years where some TV station wanted a professor who knows X and the UMC played matchmaker. That’s totally acceptable and makes sense.
If, however, it is a situation where the students ARE being told that public employees at a public institution are being actively withheld from them unless they go through UMC, lest some form of punishment (whatever it is… lack of access… a stern talking to…) befall them, that’s different.
If you can more clearly answer those concerns, it’ll make things a lot easier and simpler for me when I’m teaching the students and working with student journalists in various capacities.
Breister was clear in her response:
Hopefully this information will help you in your contacts with students:
UMC has guidelines related to media relations that we ask people to follow.
There is no policy, nor is there a penalty for not working through us.
OK, fair enough. I have worked in journalism, student media, education and parenting long enough to know that a lot of wires can get crossed over time and what I say isn’t exactly always what someone else hears. Let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt, right? Bygones be bygones and all that…
So, I forwarded this to the one student who had been helpful to me as I tried to iron out what was “suggestion” and what was “required,” hoping this would close the book on the situation. If nothing else, it’s a good note to have on file for any future staffers.
Then, someone forwarded me this email between Breister and a former editor of the paper that just pissed me off:
Well, shit, sheriff, I guess this changes things a tad…

 

TOMORROW: What has happened, what needs to happen and what should be done about this situation.

Principal failure: Why public relations matters for school districts and how some places are really, really bad at it

Few organizations have a greater need for public relations assistance than do educational institutions. Between edgy parents, state oversight and a rotating stream of burnt out teachers, schools tend to have a need for a calming influence and a clear voice during turbulent periods.

I’ve dealt with a number of administrations over the years, primarily when someone does something dumb that infringes upon the free press rights of students, and I’ve found that if these folks just had someone to help them plan what to say and how to say it… well… they’d end up a lot better off.

Here’s an example of what can go wrong without some PR help:

My daughter is entering her junior year at the local high school, which had been looking for a full-time principal for about a year. Like everything else, the administration at the school was kind of in flux due to the pandemic. Eventually, though, the school hired someone for the job.
With school right around the corner, the parents recently received an email from the new hire at the school:

August 11, 2021

Hello Omro Foxes!

Welcome back to the Fox Den.

    I am Chris Fox, the new Principal of the Omro High School Fighting Foxes.  Yes, that really is my last name.  I am settling into the building and meeting new people everyday.  I look forward to meeting all of the outstanding students and their families as we begin a new school year.  We are going to have a great school year lifting each other to new heights and continuously improving.  The maintenance and custodial crews are working very hard to improve the building and put a clean new look into the Fox Den.  Teachers and staff are enjoying their summer but are very excited about meeting the students in their classrooms again.  We want to welcome all returning students and our new students to Omro High School.

The letter goes on to talk about new people in new places and all the great stuff we’ll be seeing this year. Overall, he seems like a nice guy, he has some humor (our mascot is the fox, so that’s kind of amusing) and he’s got some interesting background. This could be a good start to the year.

The next day, we get this emailed to us:

As a parent (OK, probably more because I’m a nosy journalist…) I was a bit perplexed that within a period of less than 24 hours, we went from “Hey I’m the new guy and I’m excited” to a tersely worded statement from the superintendent saying the “new guy” is now the “former guy.” So, I shot an email to Superintendent Jay Jones, asking what the heck happened, knowing full well he probably couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me anything. His response came on Aug. 13:

Good Morning Vince,
I am not allowed to provide the reason that Mr. Fox decided to resign. Mr. Fox has employee/personal rights that must be followed. He tendered his resignation this week and the board met last night and approved the resignation.
Sincerely,
Jay Jones

In doing some basic math, I realized that if Fox sent his “glad to be here” message on Wednesday and the board approved his resignation on Thursday, that resignation was likely turned in before that initial message went out. At best, it was the same day he sent it. Regardless, his response made things weirder, not clearer, for me.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen something like this, oddly enough. The principal who was supposed to take over my grade school when I was in eighth grade bailed on us just before the start of school to take a better job with more money.

So, I went to his LinkedIn page to see if maybe a rival school had ponied up a better gig and found this:

(A bit flummoxed, I sent a note to an Omro Facebook group, asking if anyone knew what was going on. Of the flood of messages I got, about one-third came from parents who asked the same thing, one-sixth made jokes about how this was somehow Joe Biden’s or Donald Trump’s fault and the rest chastised me for “starting the rumor mill” or being a general a-hole for digging into the man’s private life. )

I could continue to dig into this guy and this situation for days, trying to get someone to answer the basic “What the heck is going on around here?” question, but that’s not the point of this post. The point here is that there were several simple things public relations professionals could have done to help the school district cut all this off at the pass. Here are a couple of those things:

PLAN FIRST, WRITE SECOND: I have seen a number of these three-line press releases before from school districts, police folks and other organizations that should be hiring PR professionals. They come across like a Jedi mind trick: “We are making a statement. You will have no questions. Go back about your business with the innocence of a newborn kitten.”

That’s not going to happen, so you need to plan for it.

People are going to be upset, curious, nosy, worried and a dozen other things in a situation like this. We have lived through far too much to just let a statement like that stand without question. We also were just told a day earlier BY THIS GUY that he’s happy to be here and now he’s gone? Asking “What the heck just happened?” is a normal, human response that you should be ready for.

Public relations practitioners learn early to plan out a strategy for the entire lifespan of a crisis, or at least as much of it as they can easily foresee. They won’t make a move without understanding how that move will lead to three other things happening down the road. They come loaded for bear with answers and explanations that they can anticipate needing to provide after receiving questions and concerns from their audiences. Only THEN do they make a statement publicly.

Speaking of which…

BE TRANSPARENT: My buddy, Pritch Pritchard, used to tell me how hard it was for him to get his PR students to understand the antithetical concept that says people trust you more if you tell them everything that is happening in a crisis situation. Pritch was in the Navy for 25 years and did public information, so he also noted he had similar problems explaining that to people above his rank and pay grade as well.

The goal of PR, he explained, should be transparency. The more you hide something, the worse it gets.

To explain this to my writing students, particularly those who were going into PR, I once played the Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue” for them. There’s a point in the song where part of it gets bleeped out:

We talked about all the things it could be and their imaginations ran toward the truly vulgar. As it was, what actually got bleeped out was the phrase “the S.O.B.” (A later version included the full version of that abbreviation.) They all seemed stunned that it could have been something that benign, which made my point that hiding (or bleeping) this thing only made the situation worse in the minds of the audience.

In bringing it back to PR and education, you will deal with a TON of concerns that parents have about what goes on at their kids’ schools, and rightly so. Those of us who are parents worry about what’s being taught, who the teachers are, what students are doing to each other, what rules are being violated, who might be bullying someone, if there’s vaping/sex/other terrifying stuff happening in the bathrooms and more. When someone up and leaves like this, our minds tend to wander to the most terrifying things that could be going on.

Not telling us anything gives our minds a chance to really kick into panic overdrive.

All we know is that Fox resigned. Did the board discover a dark secret about him or something he did and thus issue an ultimatum like this?

 

Or was Fox the good guy here? Was it Fox had a beef with a policy regarding masks and pulled out at the last minute? Was it a promise someone made to him that they reneged on and thus he did the only thing he could do? Did the board operate in bad faith, thus bringing into question its ability to hire the next-next principal?

Or was it something more personal? We’re in a pandemic, so everything is out of whack. Was it a family issue or a personal matter that he couldn’t deal with at the same time as being principal?

The mind can go in a dozen or more directions, but trust me when I say that literally 99.7% of the things that MIGHT have led to a resignation like this are far less problematic than the remaining one or two that jumped to the front of my mind immediately.

(And I’m not alone on this. I won’t repeat what I thought here, but when I laid this scenario out for a half dozen family members and friends, they each immediately jumped mentally to the same “EEEEWWWW” scenario that was in my mind. One response was great: “I’d CCAP the guy,” a friend said, turning our court record database search system into a verb. I had already done so. I found nothing there that would shed light on this situation. )

PR practitioners know that you want something like this dealt with quickly and in a way that restores the faith of the audience. This is where transparency serves the best interests of everyone involved. I understand there are rules and regulations, but transparency is crucial to keeping something like this from getting far, far worse in the minds of your constituents.

Which leads to the final point:

EMBRACE SYMBIOSIS: In the animal kingdom, symbiosis happens between different species that coexist in a way that can benefit each. The clownfish using the sea anemone for safety while the anemone receives nutrients from the waste of the fish is a good example. My personal favorite is the oxpecker and the rhinoceros:

In a case like the one involving the principal and the school district, a little symbiosis could go a long way in keeping both parties happy while reassuring parents of what happened here.

Sitting down together to plan out what they want to release, what they agree upon saying and how best to present this information to the public should be PR 101.

Fox has a legal right to say he doesn’t want the reason for his resignation to be released. That said, he might have been amenable to allowing the district to say certain things while avoiding other specifics in a press release to avoid any wild speculation. The district might be worried about what people would think if the administration said any more than the three lines in that press statement. That said, maybe getting permission to put a little more meat on the bone there would have helped the parents of the district be less fearful of what’s going on.

A symbiotic agreement on what can be said or how to best present what is clearly a weird outcome, couched in a series of odd moments, could benefit both sides, even as this relationship is clearly over. A good PR practitioner would find a way to arbitrate some sort of closure that would allow Fox the ability to exit in a “peace with honor” way while moving on to whatever he wants to do next, while simultaneously giving the district the ability to move forward in its next hire.

When it comes to public relations, it’s often about making everyone as marginally happy as possible. Good PR practitioners know that a truly quality solution benefits each player in the game. If only the practitioner’s client benefits, other stakeholders and member of the public can feel distrustful if they realize they’ve been duped. If the practitioner’s client doesn’t benefit, well… why is that client paying for this person’s services?

In many cases, practitioners serve as counselors, psychiatrists, arbitrators, surrogate parents and wise overseers for people who have become too involved in a situation to see the forest for the trees. It’s the practitioners’ ability to see what each move the client makes on the chessboard will result in six or seven moves later in the game that make these media professionals valuable.

At the very least, they can tell you what NOT to say that will only serve to make things worse, a maneuver that many educational institutions could really use help with.

Advice, reflections and things to consider for students: Transitioning Careers from News to PR, Part IV

(Editor’s Note: This is the final part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

If you missed them, here are the first three pieces:

To close up this look at the news-to-PR transition, I wanted the folks to give the students some advice or some observations they had regarding where their journeys took them in the field. The line of “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” seemed apropos, so I wanted to hear what these folks learned between knowing what they were SURE they were going to do when they left college and what life actually brought them:

 

A 25-year marketing vet who spent 10 years in news before making the shift had a broad sense of what was in the field and what students should know:

“One thing I’d tell current students in the Journalism field is that the field is ever-evolving. It’s important to remain adaptable with your skills and your mindset. The thing you start doing right out of college will likely be very different from what you retire from, but the storytelling will always remain. Storytelling has been the one constant in all of Journalism and its various offshoots.”

 

A content manager for a firm that specializes in thought leadership looked at this from both ends of the discussion:

To news kids: Don’t be snobby about an entire profession. Careers are long and you might end up doing PR for a while because the skills you’re learning are transferable. Oh, and the talk about PR people not working hard – complete and utter nonsense. If you want to stay in news, pick an area or specialty (either topical or in approach) and stick with. GA reporters are a dime a dozen. Not picking an area of focus is probably my biggest regret. I was so focused on the basic skills of journalism that I didn’t really get to know topics.

To PR kids: The value of journalism goes well beyond advancing the interests of whomever you represent. PR and journalism shouldn’t be symbiotic, but they CAN help each other. The news media serves a vital purpose and is getting attacked by people who seem to think authoritarianism is better than democracy. PR people should understand the importance of good reporters and editors in a free society and do what they can to help.

 

A California-based marketing manager for a tech company said the things she learned in a newsroom made her a better practitioner in her current job:

“Working in newspapers gave me a unique set of skills and experiences I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere else.

“Content marketing is filled with bullshit artists. Having newsroom experience on my resume gives me credibility that would’ve taken much longer to earn, had I started my career in marketing.”

 

A VP who serves as a content strategist at a major financial firm had the most amazingly honest and totally straightforward advice:

“Media is an incredibly small world. You’re going to run into people over and over again throughout your career. So don’t be a dick.

“That obnoxious PR person who wants you to cover their brand? They may be the mayor’s PR person 5 years from now. So be friendly. And honestly? Cover the dumb stories from time to time. If your audience finds it interesting, you did your job, and you probably made a solid PR relationship along the way.”

 

A marketing and PR practitioner who graduated during the 2010s planned to spend her whole life in news. When it didn’t happen, she realized a few things:

“When I was in college, I was 100% sure I was going to be in print journalism forever. If you would’ve told me I’d be working in marketing, I probably would’ve laughed. Little did I know, that was just the first stepping stone of my career. That being said, here’s what I’d tell students today:

  • Get involved in student media and extracurriculars. I learned more from those “in the trenches” experiences alongside my peers in the newsroom than I did in a classroom. It gave me a chance to try new things and put my skills into action. Plus, the people I worked with there are still friends, colleagues, and references.
  • Just because your major is “journalism” doesn’t mean that’s your only option. I used to think that if I was a journalism major, I would only be qualified to be a reporter. Professors aren’t lying when they say the skills are transferable.
  • Journalism isn’t dying. It’s actually a really exciting time to pursue a journalism or journalism-adjacent career, in my opinion. There are new platforms emerging and new stories to tell every day. We will always need people with the ability to tell those stories — and that’s what the skills you’re learning allow you to do. “

Do you have the skills to pay the bills when you change fields? Transitioning Careers from News to PR, Part III

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

In case you missed it, here’s part I. And here’s part II.

If I had a dollar for every time a student asked me in an exasperated voice, “Why do I need this stuff? I’m going into (fill in the field they plan to enter)!” I’d never need to work again.

The analogy I use as an answer is this: I’m putting tools in your toolbox that you’ll likely need in that field and pretty much anywhere else you’ll go in journalism. You might not use them every day, and you might use them in a different way, but they’re tools you’ll be glad you have eventually.

To what degree I’m right has often been a mystery. Sure, former students sometimes send notes or emails or texts and tell me that they’re still using these skills, even as they move from Job X to Job Y to Career Change 1 to Career Change 2. That said, there are days I wonder if I’m flying blind.

I asked the folks nice enough to talk to me about their career transitions from news to PR if the tools we put in their toolboxes in college really helped or if they had to do a serious course correction once they changed jobs.

The answers vary, but for the most part, it sounds like we’re being pretty successful.

A former broadcaster and college media adviser who works in public affairs and public relations probably captured it best:

“I honestly don’t think the skills are all that different though – it’s all about writing. In PA/PR, it’s just that we tend to focus on the positive. But we also have to deal with the negative. The biggest difference is that when we go negative, it’s framed in the best possible light instead of just giving the facts. Like you, I went to school when we were all pretty siloed. And I was hard core news. But in the end, it’s all about the words. And that is a skill that easily translates.”

 

A marketing pro with 25 years of experience in the field said her news background gave her not only the ability to work with words, but the sense of how best to use them when she moved to PR:

“The skills I learned in college related to news writing certainly transferred into all that I’ve done. Learning how to tell a story with all the right parts was the very basis of everything I’ve done all these years. Those skills were honed and expanded upon as I took each new job in my 25+ year career.”

Knowing how to tell a story was about half of what people said they learned. The other half was learning how to tell that story to a specific audience. In other words, instead of following the model of “Here’s what I want to tell you,” these professionals learned the “How can I tell you what you want to know in the best way possible?” approach.

A California-based marketing manager for a tech company said she developed her audience-centric approach in her last stop in her news career:

“The skills 100% transfer. Everything I learned from my 6 years in journalism provided that bridge into marketing, and continues to provide a unique skill set that has served me well on this side of the fence.

“My last position in journalism was an engagement editor, where among other responsibilities, I lead the newsroom’s social media efforts. This experience landed me a position in social media at a marketing agency. After that first position, having a solid background in journalism gave me an edge for several copywriting/content-focused roles, including one where I lead content marketing for all of the agency’s clients.

“Journalism taught me how to engage an audience and tell a story, along with mass communication skills. Those skills (along with having newsrooms on my resume) have put me at an advantage in every single position I have worked in since leaving the newsroom.”

A VP who serves as a content strategist at a major financial firm said she learned a lot in school and as a news journalist that transferred to her new position. Even more, she said she continues to ask questions about how best to serve her readers every time she plies her trade:

“The skills totally transfer. Knowing how to talk to people, keep a conversation going, get people to talk, find the interesting nugget, etc. is helpful in any job or really any life situation. I always say that between my journalism career and then agency career, I’ve covered just about every industry, which is great for dinner parties! I may not be an expert in, say, fiber optic cables, but I worked on a brand that creates them, and if fiber optics happen to come up in conversation, I know enough to jump in and sound half intelligent.

“Learning how to communicate to your audience is probably the top skill I’ve used consistently throughout my career. You don’t really think about it in straight news as much, but you learn it instinctively – always asking yourself: Will the audience care about this? Do I need to explain this concept or will doing that insult their intelligence? Is this a topic they like to read about? Is this a format they prefer?

“Later as I got into B2B publishing and then agencies, those are the questions I still ask myself every day when planning content. It’s just different than straight news, because instead of your audience being “all humans who can read and live in this area,” it’s “grocery store managers” or “hospital system executives.” Knowing your audience and thinking about things from their point of view is key whether you’re creating an infographic, pitching to a journalist, or writing a tweet.”

Even though most folks said the skills transferred, more than a few said they still had to struggle a bit when it came to making the switch. Not everything they did in news worked in PR and not every PR need was taught to them during their college career.

A content manager for a firm that specializes in thought leadership said it took a while to settle into the new job and new expectations:

“The skills transfer, but the processes took me a while to figure out. I’ve only worked for one PR firm, but the systems in place are so much more structured than anything I ever experienced in newsrooms, even when I worked for Gannett. Most days, that’s a good thing – the people in charge know what they’re doing and really think ahead – but I do miss the freedom of just jumping in my car to find a random story.”

A PR professional at a prestigious private university also said that although the skills transfer, he’s not done learning yet:

“I find the writing I do in my current job very challenging, which is a great perk frankly. And I can read the minds of reporters and editors with a fair degree of accuracy. I wouldn’t be able to do my current job nearly as well without my journalism training and experience. That said, I learn everyday from my colleagues who do not have a journalism background. Their skills and viewpoints are different but complementary.”

Did college help get people ready for all media careers or was it “silo city?” Transitioning Careers From News to PR, Part II

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

In case you missed it, here’s part I.

When I went to school about 30 years ago (good God… My soul is starting to shrivel…), all of journalism was taught in a siloed approach: If you wanted to do newspapers, you took those classes and never saw anyone but newspaper people again, until you took the law or ethics capstone. If you did broadcast, the same thing was true, although we had a little more overlap with each other than with the kids in the strat com courses.

The PR and Ad kids seemed to be swept away right after the intro class and moved into some parallel universe where we never got to see them again. They showed up at graduation like they had been with us the whole time and we all were like, “Who the hell is that?”

My first couple teaching gigs, things were not only siloed in terms of news vs. integrated marketing communicators, but in some cases openly hostile. I remember hearing “F—ing PR kid” so often, I started wondering if the field had a branch in adult entertainment.

Professors of these varied disciplines often didn’t talk unless forced onto a committee. In student-reporter newsrooms, the students and the faculty members had an almost pathological disdain for anything involving PR. The old news theory of the “separation of church and state” when it came to ad folks and editorial folks reinforced the siloed approach we took in teaching them.

As digital publishing and social media started becoming more important than dead trees, airwaves and fax machines, it became vital for us as professors to bridge the gaps and find common ground for our students. Given the way in which academia moves at a snail’s pace and professors tend to think a great deal of their own sense of self, it’s probably a safe bet that silos remained the norm.

The folks who were nice enough to talk about life in news and PR told me that their experiences in this regard depended on a couple things: where they went to school, when they were there and how interested they were in getting a well-rounded education in the field.

For example, a VP in content strategy who attended a major journalism program said the school operated in silos, but made a few efforts to round out her experience:

“There was an attempt to ensure we got a well-rounded education in all areas of comms. So I took courses on photography for non-majors, design, branding, strategic communications, advertising, etc. although I don’t remember anything really deep into PR while in school.

“It did feel a bit siloed, and some of the courses I was required to take felt like I was checking the box because I wasn’t interested in them. Looking back, I wish I had been more invested in strategic communications, marketing (I have no memory of marketing classes being offered, but it was a while ago!), branding, etc. since that’s more of the stuff I do now.

“Also, although we were required to take statistics, the course wasn’t really applicable to marketing/comms work. Nowadays, I use consumer data all the time, so learning more about how to read that info and apply it to building marketing personas would have been super valuable.”

A practitioner who works in the field of thought leadership for professional organizations said his experience was not only more siloed, but also more hostile when it came to the news/PR divide:

“Other than being in courses with PR majors, it was silo city. The journalism professors were respectful toward PR in the classroom, but the newsroom was another matter.

“The editors/professors there had a clear disdain for the PR folks they dealt with. I think they had a right to feel that way – many of the PR folks in the city and at the university weren’t worth much.”

For a marketing manager who attended a smaller school around the same time as the VP, the siloing was a bit stronger and shaped her ideologies about the disciplines a bit more:

“It was fairly siloed. There were a few Ad/PR people in my freshman/sophomore year journalism classes, but by the time I got to the junior/senior level it was pretty much all news/editorial folks in my journalism classes. To be fair, I also did not really take any classes with an advertising or PR focus at that time.

“I don’t recall professors trashing the other side. But PR was definitely discussed through the lens of how a reporter might deal with them (ex: you can’t rely on a PR person for 100% accurate information. Get several perspectives for your story.) I remember having the perception that advertising/PR/marketing was “the dark side” and they were all sell-outs, but I think that came more from my peers.

“As far as how it aligns with my life experiences today, I guess I did sell out and join the dark side. Journalists have a much more negative view of marketers, while marketers have a pretty positive view of journalists (at least those who eventually join the dark side).”

A marketing professional in the manufacturing field who attended the same medium-sized university about 20 years earlier found stronger demarcations in how she was taught. Those silos made the transition more difficult:

“The subject was taught in a very siloed approach. You could major in Journalism, but with a News emphasis or PR/Advertising emphasis. Marketing was thrown into the PR/Advertising genre, but wasn’t its own entity.

In fact, I took a few PR/Advertising classes and the closest I saw to marketing was when we created an advertisement. We were to create an ad that could be pitched for print, radio and television. This was my first taste of marketing, though it wasn’t called that.

“As teams of 3-4 students, we created story boards (with actual drawings and cutting and pasting with scissors and glue) for a product and had to pitch it to made-up executives who were students in the same class. That experience alone was enough for me to say that I’d rather not be in advertising. It didn’t seem right for me since I was intent on writing. I followed my passion.

“The rest of my Journalism degree was focused on news writing for newspapers. It was very straightforward in its message: Write a story, include all sides, but give it an angle, create a strong lead, build the story through others and put the fluff at the end in case there are space issues on the page. I had a knack for that.

“While I’m very thankful for my training in college, it doesn’t mirror what I do today, except for the fact that newswriting and marketing are both storytelling, just in different forms.”

A few other folks mentioned that even when journalism departments tried to get them to see the field in broader terms, it had little impact. A former news reporter who now does marketing for a well-known private university said he had a focus on news and nothing else really mattered:

“I was 100% focused on news/ed and newspapers. I was guilted into taking one online-focused class and dropped my only magazine class after like two weeks. I remember nothing about PR from J-School but I would have completely ignored any discussion of it.”

The one thing that gave me hope that maybe things are changing came from the most recent grad (within the past six years) who went through a program that is actively trying to change the silos. She works as a content marketing manager for a business-to-business organization, and noted that her experiences in school spanned the field:

“It was definitely not siloed. I was a journalism major with a writing and editing emphasis. Within the journalism department, we had some core classes that included students with other areas of emphasis in the program (such as PR or visual/photojournalism) as well as journalism minors. This was great because it built my skills in a variety of different areas and introduced me to people with similar interests who would go on to be great connections throughout the “media” industry at large.

“It was definitely the start of my professional network. It was also encouraged to pursue a minor and participate in extracurriculars, such as student media, to help you broaden your skills even further. I knew quite a few people with art/graphic design minors who were interested in a more visual-focused kind of career, people with English minors for a different perspective on writing and editing, radio-tv-film for a broadcast focus, and so on.

“Within those classes and extracurriculars, professors and advisers pretty clearly shared how the skills you were learning about applied across the board. In almost every class we talked about the importance of good writing, editing, and storytelling. Those skills apply whether you’re a PR pro writing press releases, a reporter covering breaking news, or a marketing guru writing website copy and blog posts.”

Transitioning Careers from News To Public Relations, Part I

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

—

I got a text from a former student recently that helped launch this series:

Hey Vince,

I am currently applying for a communications and marketing manager position at the school district I currently cover. Would you be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me?

This guy was probably the best reporter I’ve taught in the past 10 years, simply by the dint of being a persistent little cuss. He would dig into stuff that nobody else had the patience to go get. He wouldn’t stop poking people who had records, refused to comment or otherwise dodged him until he could get the story that needed to be told. He also tended to be the person who other people told stories that often began with, “You didn’t hear this from me, but…”

The idea that he was considering a move from news into the public relations and marketing portion of the field told me two things that I pretty much already knew: The skills we teach in our journalism-based writing courses need to transfer among the disciplines of the field and that reporters were actively looking to get out of the crumbling mess that is news.

Public relations is a booming field, as there are approximately six practitioners for every one news reporter, according to a recent study. That number is up from a 2-to-1 ratio just 20 years ago. As newspapers continue to “shed” jobs (a term that should be replaced with “axe murder jobs for the sake of corporate greed,” but I digress…) and public relations continues to grow, I have no doubt that more news journalists will be taking their talents to PR.

Thus, I wanted to know what people who had made that transition saw and thought as they decided to make it and how they think we are doing to prepare them for life beyond college in a rapidly changing field.

What follows is a series of thoughts, comments and suggestions from an array of people who were nice enough to share their experiences. They come from various universities, work in different states and serve a mix of roles in the field.

Let’s start by looking at what they’re doing and how/why they made the move.

The continued downward spiral of few good newsroom opportunities, organizations cutting jobs and the general degrading of news jobs was a common theme for a number of people who made a quick switch to the other side of the field.  A California-based marketing manager for a tech company said she made the switch from news to social media promotional work after years of job fatigue:

“To be blunt, I left journalism because I got exhausted with the low pay and yearly layoffs that often felt like the Hunger Games.

“In the year before I left, the company I was working for did an extensive reorganization where everyone in the newsroom had to reapply for ‘new’ jobs, complete with resumes and interviews with editors from other papers in the chain. Of course, there were fewer positions on the other side of the re-org. The process took 6 months and was so psychologically exhausting that it felt like a type of PTSD. And I was one one of the “lucky” ones to get a job that was basically the same as the one I had. I can think of at least one person at that paper who got a job they didn’t apply for (and probably didn’t really want).

“Marketing was the easiest field to transition to. I was the social media and engagement editor for my paper, so I was able to land a social media manager job without much hassle.”

For many people, the move wasn’t a hard break, but rather a series of small moves that had them using their skills in different ways.

A marketing manager for a manufacturing company in Wisconsin has worked as a marketing professional for the past 15 years at various institutions. Prior to that, she spent the 10 years after her college graduation as a news journalist:

“My move to the PR/Marketing side of things occurred somewhat naturally through my various places of employment. I went from writing hard news stories at newspapers to writing news stories in magazines and newsletters for non-profit organizations and then for corporate jobs.

“As the industry morphed into the digital thing it is today, the shift was made somewhat naturally as society and our culture became more interested in short stories than long stories. Ultimately, the storytelling part of my training has remained constant through my career, no matter what kind of story I was telling or for what kind of media.”

A VP at a major financial institution, who serves as a content strategist, also noted the gradual movement over time from news to marketing:

“It was sort of a gradual transition driven partially by necessity. I started out as a newspaper reporter (2003), and then over a 5-year period, I went from news to B2B magazine publishing (2005), then custom publishing (2007), which morphed into content marketing (2008ish).

“Over time, I became more of an agency person than a journalist. I got out of news initially because I was a magazine major and really wanted to break into magazine publishing. When I moved to the custom publisher in 2007, the company primarily created magazines for brands, so that was my entry into agency-land. That also happened to be when social media became ‘a thing,’ so the whole industry changed, and the company I was with adapted as needed along with it.

“By the time I left in 2014, it was a full-on marketing agency and I was a content strategist more so than an editor or writer.”

 

In some cases, the small moves were less linear, as was the case for a PR professional who works for a firm that represents professional organizations, like law firms and management consultants, in the realm of thought leadership:

“I got out of newspapering right before the economy crashed in 2008 — and when I wanted to get back in, there were fewer good opportunities (I faced some geographic constraints, too). I actually did sales/tech stuff for a few years and then some freelance writing and editing. I decided writing and editing was more for me, so I signed on with the PR firm to do that kind of work.”

Many people mentioned the issue of needing a job but being limited to a certain geographic area, such as this former broadcast journalist who also taught college courses and advised student media:

“So I was a broadcast news producer before grad school. Then taught for years and ended up making a move to DC due to my husband’s work, and PR jobs here are everywhere. I am a director at a large consulting firm serving government clients.”

The same thing rang true for a former copy editor and writer for major media outlets, who shifted to PR after more than a decade in news:

“I made the move to PR because my commute was untenable and neither my job nor my family was going to move. I looked at good employers within a reasonable distance of my house and started applying.

“Much to my own surprise, I haven’t missed journalism for a moment since I left nearly nine years ago. I don’t even miss election night pizza.”

Next time: The pros discuss the things their education did (or didn’t do) for them in terms of preparing them for life beyond the newsroom.

The Junk Drawer: Raiders and Haters edition

“No, I don’t know where your mask went…”

Welcome to this edition of the junk drawer. As we have outlined in previous junk drawer posts, this is a random collection of stuff that is important but didn’t fit anywhere else, much like that drawer in the kitchen of most of our homes.

Let’s take a spin:

I SUPPOSE ALL NUMBER 16s LOOK ALIKE TO SOME PEOPLE:

A friend forwarded this to me to point out the truly awful nature of Brett Favre’s accuracy issues:

Point taken. Brett made Vinny Testaverde look like a pin-point passer. However, that’s not the only thing I noticed here.

When Favre threw his 278th pick of his career, he passed longevity legend George Blanda, who did spend an appreciable part of his career with the Oakland Raiders. The problem here? That’s not a picture of Blanda. It’s fellow Raider and fellow Number 16, Jim Plunkett.

Jim Plunkett - All-Time Roster - History | Raiders.com

Plunkett, the guy in the first picture, only threw 198 picks while Blanda, the guy in the second picture, who started his career before Favre was born, threw 277.

I suppose there’s something to be said for being accurate when you’re trying to pick on someone else…

THE GREATEST HEADLINE EVER (AT LEAST I THINK SO):

When you get to my age, you start to wonder if you actually saw some of the things you saw, or if you are literally stuck in “legend mode.” (As in, “I swear to GOD that happened… It didn’t? Where the hell did I get that from?”)

Case in point, I’ve often talked about one of the most clever and off the cuff headlines I’ve ever seen, even though I never could find a copy of it. When  up-and-coming-performer Jason Mraz played a concert at Ball State in the early 2000s, it was a disaster witnessed by one of our newsroom design vets. He promised to not only write a review for it, but he had the headline picked out.

Given the student and given the performance, I spent a week fearing what he would come up with. When it ran, I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d seen in years.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my copy of that paper and no one else seemed to have it. Eventually, I figured I just made it up. However, another former student let me know that Ball State just digitized all sorts of archives, including the student paper. I did a little digging and I”m so glad I did.

Behold the glory of Emmet Smith’s snark:

Speaking of great headlines…

YOU HAD ME AT “VASECTOMIES”…

To keep up with what’s going on the PR side of the business, I signed up for a press release service that literally sends me about a half dozen emails a day. Every one of them is some organization promoting something or other and I’d say that when I’m not working on PR stuff for a book or a class, 99.99% of them end up in the trash without a second thought.

Then there was this:

I have to admit it was a good release and campaign, in that, it did the following:

  • Drew my attention with a headline that had me thinking, “What the heck is this? I gotta find out.”
  • Fulfilled the promise set out in the headline.
  • Clearly and in descending order of importance told me what was going on, why it was going on and why it mattered.
  • Tied two things that could seemingly not be further apart together in a coherent and logical way, once I actually read into it.
  • Took a risk, but a calculated one that probably paid off better than if these folks soft-peddled it.

And, finally, speaking of things take some testicular fortitude…

HATERS GONNA HATE, TEXTBOOK AUTHORS GONNA TEXTBOOK, I GUESS…

I’m in a number of teaching groups online where we to our best to help each other out. I didn’t think I was overdrawn at the favor bank, so I asked for some help to find a textbook for a freelancing class I’m going to teach in the fall.

Here was the one response that kind of bugged me (I cut the name off to save the embarrassment):

Couple things:

  1. I was looking at trying to find a book, so you telling me not to bother isn’t really helpful. It would be like calling Triple A for a tow after my car broke down and the operator saying, “You really should just use public transportation. It’s safer and more ecologically friendly.” Maybe, but that’s not the point right now.
  2. Saying “In my humble opinion” doesn’t make it humble when you say it this way. In fact, it’s rarely humble. It’s like whenever someone says, “I’m not racist, but…” I’m bracing for some stuff that would make Archie Bunker blush.
  3. “Too expensive and useless…” Um… Dude? The very first chapter in all of my textbooks I’ve done for SAGE is about how to know you’re audience. Maybe if you read one of them, you’d know why this statement kind of rubs me the wrong way. Then again, maybe not.

HATERS GON HATE soul train haters gun hate haters gonna hate dance trending GIF

Time to go back to writing another chapter for an expensive and useless textbook I’m working on. I’m guessing I shouldn’t ask this guy for a back cover blurb…

Vince (A.K.A. The Doctor of Paper)