Readings for week 4

Insider Info chapter
in FAQs Public Relations by James

Chapter 11 Internal Communications
In C. Tymson, P. and R. Lazar, (Eds.)
The new Australian and New Zealand public relations manual
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Reading the Insider Info Chapter for me was quite interesting, because it gave an easy insight both into the varying roles within the PR branch and into the daily workflow of different practitioners. Instead of giving an overview over the whole content I just want to mention some of the most central points to me:

As from my own experiences, a job in the communication branch can’t be measured in categories like “40 hours a week, 8 hours a day”. The working times of all the presented persons were vastly flexible and aligned to the specific workload of particular projects and communicative high seasons. Additionally, as some interviewee mentioned, you don’t have so much identical or routine work – every day and every project brings varying challenges. That’s what I personally really like about the field of professional communication. Though I think that the portrayed working hours per week were a little bit too high because the people represented in this book seem to be successful and kind of workaholic – most times it was from 40 up to 55 or so…

The chapter also showed that in the practice it is sometimes quite difficult to draw the line between PR and other disciplines such as marketing or management. This led even to funny paradoxes like the self description of Angela Scrymgour: She said that her job involves the “full range of PR activities, such as marketing strategy and promotion, research, event management brand auditing and management, and community support and liaison” (p. 54). Hence it seemed to me that very often the activities of the portrayed practitioners could be described though the approach of integrated communication.

The last point, which is in my mind very useful to students, is the advices regarding what young people should know about the branch as well as about the job application and interviews. There were some good as well as logical insights, such as avoiding mistakes in the application, being proud and passionate what you are doing and to present yourself as an individual but integrative personality.

The last point I have to mention is that the description were sometimes a little bit clichéd and that the practitioner were a little bit stereotyped as workaholics – especially in the “my week calendars”, which seemed to me sometimes a little bit ridiculous with all that “work, work, work, and once a week gym or yoga” stuff…

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The chapter about internal communications was very useful in getting a first contact with the materia, because I haven’t read anything about that topic before. It had a very good structure, used an easy language and enumerations about the most important fact you have to consider when thinking about internal communication.

The core point for me was that not the medium or the message can create meaning or influence behaviour, but good working and maintained relationships within an organization. Also very central was the notion that communication is not to be seen as a specific action or project, but as an consecutive progress which must be held up be everyone. So the role for professional communicators is mainly to imply a framework for a prolific communication and supervise and measure the communication, think about issues and strategies. So the communication within an organization is simply everyone’s responsibility, as the author mentions in the conclusions paragraphs.

ok, the tutorial starts in 10 minutes, I´ve to stop writing...