Writing for Public Relations

Annie Grayer of CNN shown in a CNN photo gallery of reporters covering the 2020 election campaign.  Read for Oct. 28, 2024:  Your two chapters this week describe two kind of audio and video script writing: an audio news release (ANR) and a video news release (VNR). That’s OK, as far as it goes, but the world of PR scripting for audio and video is broader than those two artifacts. Next week, we’ll cover advertising, and a script for a “public service announcement,” (PSA) a kind of ad open only to nonprofits or government agencies, will bring this genre of writing back. And the week after that, we cover speech writing, which is another format in which, like VNR and ANR and other video and audio scripts, you’re writing for the ear. In other words, your audience won't see or read your words, they will hear them. Think of the many ways audio and video are used in communication: Radio and TV. While the media world has diversified, these can still be key ways to reach key publics. O...

Cover of 2017 Rockwell-Collins Annual Report (one of the last ones, since this is now Collins Aerospace and part of a larger company). Annual reports cover the previous year, so this would have been published in 2018. Read for October 21, 2024 : Public Relations writing involves several levels of corporate writing, and reports are an important part of corporate writing. The annual report, for a publicly traded corporation or a nonprofit, is not only a legally required statement of financial data, but often a key PR and marketing tool, too. I’ll write about that in the second half of this post. I am not assigning a lab assignment based on chapter 1 of your style guide--we won't try to write a report--instead, the writing this week be be based on chapter 6 in your text on Media Kits. That's what I'll write about first here (but although I don't assign chapter 1 for lab writing, note that this blog post does cover reports and there will be some quiz questions about them). ...

Sample of tri-fold brochure. Outside panels arranged as 3 layout units. Read for Sept. 9, 2024 :   There is a difference between controlled and uncontrolled PR media. News releases, although they are usually posted on an organization’s web site, are considered “uncontrolled” because their main purpose is to generate coverage via news media. You send a news release to "The Des Moines Register" in the hopes that the Register then published favorable information about you. But the Register controls if and how and in what form its audience sees your information—the format and context of the story is not something you control. A brochure is controlled media, and generally a concise publication that describes something that’s important for your organization to promote. For example, Mount Mercy University has what its admissions department calls “one sheets,” which are one-page printed descriptions of each academic program. These are a form of brochure. A brochure thus: Is a des...

August 2014--The Gazette devotes a whole page to three Op/Eds from MMU.   Read for Sept. 23, 2024: Several years ago, before “Black lives matter” was a #BLM movement, there already was anxiety in this country over the pattern of local law enforcement being more violent in their interactions with minority, especially Black, communities. Hang on. This is not going to be a liberal rant about systemic racism or white privilege, although I agree that both are real. But, in CO 280 that year (maybe 2012 or so), I required students to maintain a personal blog. Earlier that fall, a Black man had made headlines by being shot by police, and that triggered an emotional reaction from one of my students, a Black woman. So she wrote a blog post about it. In that post, she described how anxious she was about her younger brother and her fear that he could end up being shot due to some interaction with police. She described how he had been stopped for speeding, and was shaken and afraid during that...