Media Relations

I think the main point in these readings are the relationships that a PR person has with the media.

In Singapore's media culture, in which much of the media can be described as being 'under one roof' or rather dominated by Singapore Press Holdings, relationships between PR practitioners and journalists are of the highest importance. As the community is small and often insiders would switch from one publication to the other, relationships indeed have to be a life-long process which is being developed by PR people. PR practitioners will need to access the timeliness of their media releases and keep an eye on how the media works. For instance, if a great disaster was happening somewhere else in the world, it would be unlikely that what the PR person has to publicize would capture as much attention.

However, the contradiction which I have noted is that while Public relations executives and journalists rely on each other, the way in which they are trained are often completely opposite.

Although media releases are meant to be eye catching and to capture the journalist's interest by the very first paragraph, the journalist would need to hunt for the relevant content and present it in an unbiased way in the form of a news article. Personally, as a person studying both Journalism and PR, I feel it is very valuable training as we learn how the two different media branches think as we are often given hands on practices in the tutorials by having to write both media releases and news stories from media releases.