This week, my class was honored to have not one, but four professionals working in the PR and news world speak to us. NBCDFW’s Omar Villafranca, Denton PD’s Ryan Grelle, Dart’s Morgan Lyons and my former boss, Buddy Price from UNT were gracious enough to spend a Wednesday evening us, and gave us useful tips on how to succeed in our chosen careers. Most importantly, those gentlemen opened up about the hardest parts of their jobs. If they can successfully navigate through those tough situations, then I believe it is a testimony of their talent and skill.
Buddy is the news manager at UNT’s news service. Previously, he worked as a reporter for eleven years, held a position at IBM, and even co-owned a company for a while before his partner bought him out; that’s just a summary of Buddy’s resume. He has worked for corporate America, and now works for a public institution; he has been a reporter, now he is in charge of media relations. One of the challenging aspects of his current job is the difficulty of controlling the amount of information that is disclosed at a public institution. IBM for example, he says had a tighter grip on what information was released about the company. I have had the opportunity to see what the UNT news service does, and it isn’t always a fun job of just dealing with the media on positive stories about the university. They manage crises and aim to protect the university from negative press. As much as companies might want to disclose their information, certain things can become a PR nightmare if made public.
Ryan Grelle is the Public Information Officer for the Denton Police Department. This is the second time he’s speaking to a class I’m taking, and he is always full of interesting insights. If you follow Ryan on Twitter (@DENTONPD), you might not need to watch TV certain nights, because he tweets 911 calls. I think Denton PD was the first to tweet those calls in the US, or among the first to do so. Ryan’s challenge in his capacity as communications officer is getting his colleagues to tell him information when things are about to blow up instead of keeping him in the dark till the last minute. Nobody likes practicing reactive PR if they can avoid the situation beforehand. You are more likely to find an effective solution to a problem if you have enough time to think.
The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) transports over 2000 people day. Well that implies that business is good, but it also means that they have dissatisfied and satisfied customers. I believe that it was easier for companies to hush the negative comments their customers made about them a few years ago, but that has changed thanks to social media networks. If a dissatisfied customer decides to complain about a product to the whole world, he/she can do so, and that’s not good for any organization. I’m sure Morgan, who is Dart’s Media Relations Director, has to handle such situations on a daily basis. He however says the hardest part of his job is trying to navigate changes in the way information is delivered. He says they at Dart are trying to figure out how to make use of the new tools that are available, and cut the clutter in their releases, because news media offers even less space for stories than traditional media.
“Everybody wants to be on the news,” said the NBCDFW reporter, Omar Villafranca. Though he did not say that this was the hardest part of his job, I’ll assume that it is difficult for him to deal with people who think that every aspect of their lives is newsworthy. Omar told us about this man who sent a picture to their newsroom of hail in his backyard. Great picture, but Omar said after taking a closer look, they discovered that the ice was perfectly shaped. Whoever saw only square shaped hail?
No comments:
Post a Comment