Writing for Public Relations

Screen shot of a Disney.com page--clicking on "news" leads you to this, a web page full of PR content. Read for Nov. 18, 2024: This blog post has a click-bait heading, one you should probably avoid because that structure is trite and cliché, although being able to do it as a joke may mean that you do understand the web a bit. When I am writing about “web writing” and “new media,” the concept bears some explanation. After all, almost any media today is disseminated via the web, whether it’s by posing a version of it on your organization’s web site, or sending a file via email. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Englishman who wrote the original HTML and decided to make it available as free shareware, thus changing the world. Create a whole new information infrastructure that rewires the world (and be British) and King Charles might knight you (although he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II), too. Berners-Lee created HTML about 1994 or so, is shown here in 2014 in Wikimedia Commons image by...

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...

Read for Sept. 4, 2024:  A news release, as we’ve already discussed, allows you to announce something or react to something in a public way through content that you hope the media utilizes. A news release is thus a public document that you want to have published. A “media alert” or “media advisory” is similar, in that it is a way for you to get media attention. But instead of writing a news story or feature story that you hope gets used by the media, an advisory or alert (they are equivalent terms) is a heads up to the media outlets that you circulate it to. It usually tells them that you’re doing something that is deserving of their coverage, although in can be used for other purposes, such as introducing a source at your organization who is a willing expert that media can contact and interview. In effect, the common alert means that you’re formally asking for media coverage of an upcoming newsworthy event. Thus, like a news release, a media alert (I have seen the term “alert” mo...

Read this post by Aug. 21, 2024: Being effective at public relations requires, first, that you clearly understand what public relations is. PRSA logo from its web site. The student branch of the Public Relations Society of America (a major national organization of the PR profession) defines it this way: “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” A “public” is any set of people who share some characteristic that is relevant to an organization. Publics are both internal to an organization and external. For example, at Mount Mercy University, students are an internal public. And “student,” like most “publics,” can be broken down into more discrete publics. There are traditional vs. nontraditional, graduate vs. undergraduate, students from the immediate geographic area and students from father away—a “public” is not a set, unchanging thing, how you think about public depends on who you are ...