COURSE PROFILE / 05
Writing for PR
PRWR · 216
Course Approach
Workshop intensive course where students worked on beginning to build out their portfolios in PR–first stabs at the press release, corporate bio writing, donation letters, some light crisis management with zoos–all leading to a media kit (featured below).
3/4 of the class was writing and formatting documents with a journalistic or media audience in mind, before at the end turning towards creating our own media documents. This was an adjustment as I had been trained to operate in more theoretical, sage-on-a-stage type environments; students responded well to the more hands-on approach with most (verbalized) issues being pace, which–is part of the structure of the class and a skill I want them to learn.
The class equips students with the stylistic conventions of PR writing but also for taking the standpoint of clients and writing for different audiences. The class is a great opportunity to also explore how the industry works, and how a journalist audience is going to differ from the general public, who is going to differ from internal audiences, etc.,
I inherited the class from Dr. Amy O’Brien, and kept most of it a carbon copy. One addition I made was to have students do mini-presentations on news items they saw during the week, and turn it into a discussion of what makes news and how PR might be implicated (featured right). The course featured a heavy emphasis on local activities and identity, something I want to embed my own flair into in the future.
As PR activities change, the class will need to adapt, but also doesn’t have to–backgrounders have morphed into LinkedIn profiles and Substacks; news releases are still used frequently; and knowing how to ask for money effectively is a skill every professional should have. the back end of the course I tweaked to use Adobe Express instead of InDesign to lower the technical barrier, and we used a large amount of class time to work on fact sheets and media kits that comprised a visual element of the class.
Signature Work- Media Kits
COURSE EVIDENCE
This was a brochure made for a final project (Media Kit) for the class. The student (credit: Emily Smith) designed it so it could be printed as a trifold and featured in the store.
This artifact is great both in its execution but also with the attention to the types of printed media this type of store would hand out to customers and the type of language and stories enclosed within it. It was also made with a great deal of precision in terms of grids and indents for a class where we didn’t cover the visual grammar in much detail.
This was another example of a final project a student (Credit: Alice Frank) made in the course, from a new-ish restaurant they also worked at. Students had the last two-and-a-half to three weeks to work in Adobe Express and start designing various deliverables an organization could have on hand.
The student was able to capture the branding of the organization, which was struggling with an identity to balance upscale with a casual, fun atmosphere. Within the brand guidelines of the business, they were also able to experiment with different fonts and image ideas to help build a brand identity that was relatively new at the time.
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