Writing for Public Relations

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...

Newsletter cover from State University of New York, Potsdam, posted on their web site. Read for Sept. 16, 2024: —Newsletters are a particular kind of PR periodical, and your text describes many types, from employee newsletters to subscriber-based, special interest newsletters. In the past, newsletters were a key print product that made sense when an organization was communicating with a public that has a high degree of interest in some ongoing topic about the organization. A public for a newsletter can be small. This is a newsletter Joe writes just for editors of the MMU Times. There are still printed newsletters, although I think most newsletters these days are circulated via email. Newsletters, in their email form, are still a current valuable PR tool—and depending on who the public is you need to communicate with, printed newsletters can also still make sense. The writing in newsletters is similar to what appears in an organization or corporate magazine—I will write a lot in this bl...