No. 8 - Just a PR story?

I have been writing a lot about my experience at my summer internship. It was my first time ever being in a real newsroom, so it greatly affected how I will move forward as a reporter.

I feel I did a lot of public relations stories over the summer when I look back on what I really did. I was often assigned to write event precedes, and to make them more interesting I would add human stories to it if I could.

One of the stories I was the proudest of is about a walk to raise money for a local organization that supports families with children who have been diagnosed with cancer. I was able to talk to the family who would be speaking at the ceremony that year. I asked the family a lot about what the organization meant to them.

The source I talked to gave me excellent quotes, during the interview I even joked that something he said would become the headline. It actually did become the headline. I bring up how great the quotes were from this source because it definitely contributed to my feeling of accomplishment with that story.

After the story was published I even got an email from one of the executives of the organization telling me how much they enjoyed the coverage, which probably shows just how much of a public relations story it really is.

I would like to think that the work I did this summer helped build community, which an article in Medium identified as one of the three ways that local news is important. I could be wrong, but I would hope that reporting about how organizations help the community would in some way help build community.

I found an article explaining ways a fundraising even would be able to get news coverage.

While the organization didn’t have to work hard to pitch the story to my editors I did see some of these methods used by organizations over the summer.

One of the tips from the article was to find newsworthy stories related to your organization. I wrote a story about a son who donated a kidney to his father. The donation also happened around Father’s Day, which was the day that we ran the story. The story was pitched to my newspaper by Mayo Clinic because they knew that it would be an interesting Father’s Day feature, but they also knew that it would be a good way to try to get more people to donate a kidney.

I found coverage of a Relay for Life event on KBIA, and it looks very similar to event precede coverage of local TV news stations. If this type of coverage is typical, I guess that I am glad that with my event precede coverage I was able to write about the people actually impacted.