Week 6

This week's lecture gave additional insight into the different job scopes of PR practitioners and journalists. While journalists are free to interpret information at their own discretion, PR practitioners have to interpret and find an angle directly from the sources provided by the client.

PR practitioners may also look for third party sources to support the organisational positioning of the client. For instance, a PR practitioner doing a feature on sports may also look for sport apparel brands to strengthen the newsworthiness of the press release.

I have learnt that a PR practitioner cannot rely only on the resources provided by the client to create a good press release. A PR practitioner has to do additional research in order to fully understand the position of the organisation in the market. A PR practitioner can include the SWOT guidelines in his research to gather adequate information required for the PR campaign.

Relationships between PR practitioners and the media have to be built on trust and positive experiences from both parties. I have learnt that a PR practitioner's job does not just involve creating a positive image for the client. A PR practitioner also has to foster good relationships with journalists so that there will be a better chance of his press release being used in the publication. In the highly competitive media industry, it is important to have an edge over other competitors and this can be achieved by having positive media relations. However, I have some suspicions on the ethical issues linked to this. Would a journalist publish a media release of a poor quality just because he has close media relations to the PR practitioners?

What do you think?