But public relations can be difficult, tedious work. It sometimes means having a dozen bosses instead of just one. It takes discipline and a certain amount of competitiveness. Any public relations job demands a wide variety of skills that must be put to use every day.

Chief among those skills is the ability to write -- clearly, effectively and for a variety of media and purposes.

Writing for public relations

Here are a few things you should understand about public relations at the beginning of your study of the field:

• much of what a public relations practitioner does involves writing

Most people who graduate from the University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences and go into entry-level public relations jobs report that between 70 and 90 percent of their work involves writing.
The need to write well is something you never get promoted out of in a public relations career. Even top level positions demand good writing skills. Look through some recent job postings on the web site of the Public Relations Society of America.

• versatility

Public relations demands all kinds of writing -- news for print and web, broadcast, letter-writing, speeches and statements, advertising copy, company reports, etc. Your ability to use the language -- and to understand when you should use certain forms and writing styles -- will be a necessity for a good career in the PR field.

• wide-ranging knowledge of media, styles and forms

A public relations practitioner has to have a wide-ranging knowledge of news and issues of the day; has to understand various media organizations and the forms of writing they demand; has to know his or her organization from the ground up; has to understand what is appropriate news and information to produce for the organization.

And that’s just the beginning.

Elements and concepts

Public relations practitioners must understand that they are part of an overall organization, and they must know how they are viewed by that organization. They are not independent agents. Rather, they must answer to the organization’s chain of command -- some of whom may not know or understand (or care) about the professional practices of a public relations person.

A PR person must know the approval process that his or her work must undergo within the organization. Sometimes this approval process is long and tedious and a hindrance to timely production. Still, it must be done because the practitioner is part of the organization. Few PR people work in environments where they conduct their own approval process.

An important concept that practitioners must understand is that of “publics.” A public refers to an audience for the information a practitioner is trying to produce. Generally, public are thought of internal and external. An internal public would be those within an organization -- employees of a large company, students at a university, etc. -- while external publics are those outside the organization but with an interest in the organization, such as consumers of a product or alumni of a university.

This internal and external communication is an important part of the public relations practitioner’s work and thinking. The practitioner wants to communication in the most effective and efficient way to all of the publics associated with an organization. He or she must use a variety of methods to do so.

Types of writing

The following are some of the major types of writing that you must do as a public relations practitioner. Foremost among those is the news release or the press release. This is the most common means you will use to communicate with the news media, which is one of the major jobs of any public relations department.

• press releases

• remember all the principles you learned in writing news stories
• news values
• inverted pyramid
• AP style

In learning how to write press releases, you should remember everything you learned about writing inverted news stories. We’ll review some of the rules.

• video news releases

A video news release is a videotape prepared by an organization and sent out to television stations and other electronic news releases. It general contains the format of a broadcast news report and is produced in such as way that television news programs can run it without any editing. For many companies, VNRs are effective ways of getting their messages on television.

• advertising copy

In some organizations, advertising copy is written by the public relations specialists, not by an independent advertising agency.

• speeches and statements

One of the most common jobs of a public relations practitioner is to write a speech or statement for a company executive. We’ll talk more next week about how this is done.

• company reports

Every company that sells its stock to the public is required by the Security and Exchange Commission to produce an annual report. These reports take a variety of forms -- magazines, books, videotapes, etc. They are often an organization’s attempt to look very good to a public that might want to buy stock. PR practitioners who help produce these annual reports must be able to write, edit and design.

• newsletters

Almost every company and organization has some form of a newsletter. These publications are the responsibility of the public relations department (or in many instances the single public relations practitioner) in the company. They have a variety of purposes and publics, but they all have one thing in common. They are produced to provide information to that public -- information that the organization wants known. They require the most effective of journalistic writing.

• web sites

We discussed web sites earlier in the course, and I would refer you to our discussions of week 6 and week 7. The web has become an important part of the communication strategy for many organizations. Web sites range from being static billboard announcing the company’s presence to an active (and interactive) part of the company’s commerce. One thing remains true of all web sites: They must be maintained and updated to be effective. More and more, public relations specialists are finding the organization’s web site as part of their responsibility.

News quiz questions

Many of the answers to many of the news quiz questions for lecture on Monday can be found at Dateline Alabama, the news site of the College of Communication and Information Sciences.