My University Relations Internship

I will be reporting and writing for University Relations, which is a sub-division of Institutional Advancement at WestConn. University Relations (UR) is divided into Public Relations, which is the media relations and marketing communications component, and Publication and Design, which is the graphic arts, design, and publishing component. Both departments seek to advance WestConn to the public and university community through targeted and controlled use of the media.

Toward that end, the department promotes accomplishments of its students, faculty and staff, to the university and community at-large through press releases and announcements of university events, by publishing Communique and WestConntributers, and by providing the press with requests for news on various topics of interest to the community.

The public relations department is run by Paul Steinmetz, who spent 24 years as editor of The News-Times, the regional daily newspaper of Southwestern Connecticut.

The department works closely with Alumni Relations, and Development, which also fall under the umbrella of the department of Institutional Advancement.

This will be a new experience for me. The idea unfolded for me as I worked with Irene Sherlock, (one of our MFA faculty on a course last year) who works here in the University Publications and Design office. Through our various discussions about feature writing she suggested I look into an internship with this department. She spoke highly of Paul Steinmetz.

As a reporter and a writer for University Relations I will be interviewing and writing for various formats like press releases, radio (local and, more recently, international), feature stories for Communique and WestConntributers, and cut-lines (a term for the captions found under pictures!). I will also be responding to the press service, which solicits stories for various news publications. For example, NPR will be using an interview of a WestConn student they conducted after UR responded to an open request for an interviewee for a specific story on higher education.

In many ways this is very basic news writing; making sure you get the five W’s covered and presenting it in an inverted pyramid structure. The type of formats, however, will dictate the form used, and this is something that I do not yet know about. For example, if you Google, press release, you will find that there are many different ways to lay out the information on the page for a press release. Yet, I imagine that there will be standards for this that I will have to learn for the public relations press release, radio copy, etc.

Interviewing is an area I am not skilled at. In this environment most of the people who I will be interviewing will want to speak with me, after all, it is about positive publicity, but I wonder if there will ever be conflict between what the interviewee wants conveyed and what the UR department wants to convey. I guess that is the politic side of things, which I am interested to find out how to respond to.

I am looking for experience particularly in the area of feature writing. I feel like I still have a limited sense of how to do this kind of writing, especially when the topic may not interest me, and to make it interesting. I hope to be able to begin to have a sense of my own style as a feature writer, and I am looking to gain confidence in my non-fiction writing during this internship. I also hope to gain a better sense of the world of news, and how to create it.

I believe that the interviewing process is key, and I am intimidated by it. So I hope that I will begin to feel more in control of the process, whereas, right now I feel like it controls me. I don’t always think to ask questions beyond the obvious. Now, I know that PR is limited and somewhat circumscribed, but I guess that is where the challenge lies for me. I think that this will help me to become better aware of myself as more than just a repository for news, but a shaper of a message, which is my one of my goals as a non-fiction writer.

I have a rather skeptical view of public relations; I see it as spin, but at this level I think it is a little more benign than, say, the Bush Administration Spin. But, any spin, is spin, nonetheless, I guess (sorry.) I have always been interested in communications and media, and I think that Americans have a strange relationship with it. I like to explore some of these ideas in my poetry and in my personal politics, so if I get any further insight into the machine of public relations while doing this, it will be a bonus.

I also imagine that this kind of writing is just good for the grey matter, a way to strengthen writing muscles that I don’t ordinarily use. I have found that I am a better reader of non-fiction, having studied it a bit, and this is also a plus, both personally and creatively. I find that I use more of the interesting non-fiction that I come across, as a kind of muse for some of my work, than I used to do before.