week eight

Media Writing

The readings for this week focused on media writing.

"Writing is one of the foundations of a successful public relations practitioner and the ability to communicate messages clearly and concisely is one of their differentiating skills." (Treadwell and Treadwell, 2004)

I think the key point for this week's readings is that it is very important to form healthy working relationships with journalists in order to have success in media relations. But the journalists are very doubtful when dealing with public relations practitioners because most of them believe there is always some ulterior motive to contacting them. Also the readings highlight that overall; journalists find writing by practitioners to be meagre and missing the proper aspects to make a story newsworthy. The individual preferences of journalists regarding the way they are contacted and what is sent to them ensures that journalists look out for your information rather than thinking of seeing it turn up in their inbox. Press releases or media releases were already discussed in the professional writing course, so the reading for the week became much clearer. Another point raised in the readings was the disparaging attitudes amongst journalists when it comes to public relations. Practitioners need to target specific media in a much similar way to what they do in targeting their external and internal stakeholders etc. A media person, who is a PR or a journalist, should always be working on improving my writing and should work towards building good relationships with each other.