Week Nine

I believe the key messages from this weeks readings were… that local media are extremely important in the community’s acceptance or rejection of an issue, that building a long term relationship with a community is important and a newsletter fosters a sense of community, and that providing a community with information about what’s going on lets them feel involved and improves community relations, making the whole process easier for everybody.

The key points in the readings could be applied to my groups work in that…newsletters are one method of getting information out to a community on a mass scale and that is something we’re trying to do in our program. The problem we have with that though is that we are working for a non profit organization and therefore our budget is limited to nil. Printing out a newsletter can be expensive. An alternative could be that we create an e-newsletter and send it out to existing members but then we face the problem of just reaching an audience that is already familiar rather than recruiting new members.

The readings made me think more about PR theory and practice in that…even a small publication like a newsletter needs a lot of effort and research put into it to be successful. PR professionals really need to have a good sense of people and what they want in order to create that communication bond and trust between an organization and their publics.

The readings related to the other reading I've done in previous weeks in that…they emphasized the importance of building long term relationships with your target publics in order to gain their trust in the organization and its reputation. They also related to the group work readings which stated that communication methods that are practical are needed so that your message is clear and obvious to your particular demographic or community.

Required reading for Week 9

1. Smith, A. (2003). Community relations: How an entire industry can change its image through proactive local communications. Journal of Communication Management. 7(3) 254-265.
2. Tymson, C., Lazar, P. & Lazar, R. (2006) Producing a newsletter. In C. Tymson, P. Lazar, P and R. Lazar, (Eds.)The new Australian and New Zealand public relations manual (5^th ed.) (pp. 564-575) Manly: Tymson Communications
3. Baverstock, A. (2002) Newsletters (pp 47-62) in Publicity, Newsletter and Press Releases. Oxford: Oxford University Press.