High School Journalism Workshop

Wow, how the summer has flown by! Our group is putting the final touches on our campaign and preparing to present our final project to Nan next week. Currently we are finishing up the workshop’s new brochure, updating the website and preparing Robert and Nan’s folder, which consists of all of our research, media lists and gant charts.

Next Monday or Tuesday we will present everything to Nan, Robert and the class. Hopefully Nan will accept everything we have done, if not we fail the class! But I think that my group has an advantage over the other groups, in that Nan is very open to new ideas. She is limited in help and ideas, with regards to the workshop, thus giving us the chance to really make the campaign our own and put our own personal touches on it. I appreciate Nan trusting my group and giving us the opportunity to have creative experimentation.

If all goes correctly, next week we will be finished with class and the Auburn University Journalism Workshop will have a new and improved campaign in place!

I was looking through the PRSA website, this afternoon and ran into Joel Strasser’s lists of ten do’s and don’ts  of dealing with editors. This struck me as very informative and interesting seeing as how a large percentage of public relations deals with pitching stories  and writing press releases, to be handled by newspaper editors. Since a lot of PR practitioner’s success rests in the hands of editors, it is important to understand how to work with the effectively and correctly.

So, here are ten do’s and don’ts of dealing with editors:

1. Don’t demand that an editor send or read you what he or she has written.
2. Don’t try to use the promise of future or existing advertising as an argument for getting into publication.
3. Don’t call an editor and demand that your story get into print.
4. Don’t hound an editor about a press release that may have been sent to him or her.
5. Don’t get someone to call an editor unless the caller is personally conversant in the technology he or she is trying to explain.
6. Do prepare appropriately written press materials, either in the form of press releases or press information kits, that you can give or e-mail the editor so that your accurate detailed product or service information can be in front of him as he writes his story.
7. Do try to meet with an editor to personally explain the details and operation of your products or services.
8. If your products or services lend themselves to this technique, let the editor have a hands-on tryout so that he can accurately evaluate and report on his experiences with it.
9. Do as much as you can to help the editor understand your products and your industry.
10. Do offer editors opportunities to visit your facilities and watch your product being produced.

As the semester comes to a close, things with this campaign are beginning to run toward the finish line. They seem to be running quite smoothly too, if I might add. We have created media lists, brochures, websites, and are soon going to be compiling a book with everything we have done over the semester to present to our client, as well as one to give Robert.

This is proving to be a large task. The books should obviously be organized and thought out and I have spent the weekend thinking of how to lay them out. The only logical conclusion I can come to is to place them in the ROSIE ordering (for Robert that is). Of course, that shouldn’t have been too hard of a decision to come to now should it? Haha.

So now that this big decision is made, next is getting all the materials together and organized. This, I feel, will take a bit of effort since the 3 of us are working on such different aspects of the campaign. However, I have all confidence that in the end we will be able to pull it all together and produce a great campaign for the High School Journalism Workshop.

The whole is only as good as the sum of its parts.  That is a saying that has stuck with me throughout my college career.  It basically means that the end product can only measure up if everything that it took to create it is up to par.

In a campaign, we need to see it as such.  Our campaign may seem successful overall, but when you start dissecting each part of the campaign you may begin to see that as a whole it is missing something.

If we as a group do not do as well on the brochure as we could have done, then the HSJW will not be as successful as it should.  Sure we may have increased worthy applicants by 10%, but if we were unable to reach those without Internet access with a high quality brochure then we have missed part of our target audience.

In the end you have to rightly judge your overall campaign.  Did we as a group do each entity with the best of our abilities?  If not then all-in-all we have not succeeded.

As we are summing up our campaign, I cannot help but look at where we started.  When we began, there was a sense of uncertainty.  Uncertainty at what exactly our client wanted.  Uncertainty at what we as a group were capable of.  In a week we are going to present our campaign to our client and find out if our efforts paid off or not.

We have had a worthy campaign, one that means something.  That will not always be the case.  We might as well set ourselves up for disappointment for the future because we could very well get a client where we have to create a convincing campaign for something that we do not believe in.  I am not talking about unethical, just not something that we can pour our whole hearts in.

I have to say that this campaign has been exciting.  I am looking forward to what Nan will continue to do with the HSJW and where it will go.  I can only hope that our efforts this past summer will bear fruit and that the HSJW will go on to many successes.

The most important and the first thing to do in any campaign, is to identify your target audience(s). This is essential to the success of the campaign and if falsely identified, can be detrimental.

Today in class, Christina and I were talking about how we were going to create the high school journalism workshop’s website, in addition to the admission brochure. One thing that came up in our discussion was the fact that it is essential to create a brochure to be mailed out to each individual high school because a large population of our target audience may not have Internet access, thus making the website not an appropriate medium of communication.

Like our client’s circumstance, many times it is important to analyze your target audience and determine whether one form of communication will be accessible to all. In our present day, it is all to easy to fall under the assumption that everyone has access to the Internet. Unfortunately, more people in the world do not have access to a computer or the Internet, than those who do.

Whatever the case, we must always take time to properly analyze our audiences and determine what and how many forms of communication are needed to successfully reach all members of the audience.

Plug-ins are a great asset to a blog/website.  They allow you to communicate with your audience in a completely different way without just typing words onto a page.  There are plug-ins for podcasts, photo galleries, random quotes that change every time you refresh the page.  Pretty much anything to give your blog/website a punch of individuality can be found in a plug-in.

A great tool to help you decide which plug-ins to use is, Wordpress Plug-ins.  Of course these are great for wordpress, which is what we are using, but not to worry there are others out there.  For our campaign we are just concerned with the ones that will help enhance our blog/website which is located in wordpress. 

I am excited to come up with figuring out which plug-ins will benefit us and which ones will just fill up space.  I personally like the plug-in that will allow users to listen to a podcast.  Of course in our situation, a podcast is really not necessary.  That is something else that you must consider.  Knowing your client and your audience and giving them what they want and what they need to keep them coming back.  My group and I will be deciding which plug-ins to use and I will post later and let you know which ones we have chosen.  i may even link you to our website if you are lucky.

This week, my group and I are focusing on creating a new website for the High School Journalism Workshop. Currently, the present website is clustered with an abundance of information and seems very unclear to the viewer.

When creating a website, it is important for the user to remember that there are a couple simple rules to go by. According to Grantastic Designs, there are five simple rules to web design:

1. Your website should be easy to read
• You should choose your text and background colors very carefully. You don’t want to use background colors that will obscure your text or use colors that are hard to read. Dark-colored text on a light background is easier to read than light-colored text on a dark background.
• You also don’t want to set your text too large or small.
2. Your website should be easy to navigate
• All of your hyperlinks should be clear to your visitors. Graphic images, such as buttons or tabs, should be clearly labeled and easy to read.
• Link colors in your text should be familiar to your visitor (blue text usually indicates an unvisited link and purple or maroon text usually indicates a visited link), if possible.
• Your visitor should be able to find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. If not, they are very likely to click off your site as quickly as they clicked on.
3. Your website should be easy to find
• Websites are promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, banner advertising, electronic magazines (e-zines) and links from other websites.
• Not only should your website be easy to find, but your contact information should be easy to find.
4. Your webpage layout and design should be consistent throughout the site
• All graphic images and elements, typefaces, headings and footers should remain consistent throughout your website. Consistency and coherence in any document, project a professional image.
• Color-coded web pages need this consistency.
5. Your website should be quick to download
• Studies have indicated that visitors will quickly lose interest in your website if the majority of a page does not download within 15 seconds.
• If your business does not have good brand name recognition, it is best to keep your download time as short as possible.

This week, we hope to meet with Nan to finalize her ideas on the website and then by next week have the website completely up and running. Let’s hope all goes well!

When targeting a large audience, one of the best methods of communication is a website.  When you have access to a website, it is easier to disseminate your message to a large number of people because now it is one of the main forms of communication.

Our target audience happens to be students in high school.  According to clickz.com, 52% of southern homes use computers.  That does not mention the number of those students that do not have access to computers at home, but they do have access at school.  It is fair to say that a great deal of the students that we are trying to reach have access to the Internet in some form or fashion.  Of course we are also communicating with our audience via snail mail with brochures that we will send to the schools. 

My group and I are currently in the process of creating a website for the HSJW that I feel will greatly benefit the program.  Most students look to websites for information and feel that those programs that do not have websites are behind the times and that they might not become interested because of that.  All in all I feel that my group creating a website will be the best asset that we have for this campaign.

I recently applied for a position with one of Atlanta’s top public relations and communications agencies. Although there was no posting for a job opening, I took a chance and sent them my cover letter and resume anyways. I was very interested in this agency and liked what they had to offer clients. In addition they have a impressive list of clientele.

Anyways, within a day or two, I received an e-mail from a lady in HR asking me to complete a writing test. The writing test consisted of a hypothetical situation and asked me to write a one-page media strategy, pitch letter and press release based on the scenario. I am aware that many agencies use this method to narrow down job candidates, but I was nonetheless a little surprised to receive this request. In all of the job hunting and applying that I have been doing over the previous months, I never received a writing test.

But my point, is that, I think that this method is a great way to really test and evaluate potential employees. Writing under deadline is something that PR practitioners do everyday and this method of narrowing people down, allows for agencies to get a better idea of how they might perform in a job. This in turn allows for more qualified candidates to advance to the next stage of the interviewing process.