In a lifetime that’s embraced sixty years in one form of communicating or another, I spent some time in public relations when the keyword was empathy: understanding your public, identifying with it and working to an understanding between communicator and audience.Today it seems most of that thinking has gone by the board. I get a lot of queries as to how pr people can get their stories accepted by ethnocultural media.

Recently a colleague and I met with the staff of a large pr company and in a very productive discussion one of the things we learned was our audience had never looked at an ethnic newspaper, listened to ethnic radio nor looked at ethnic TV. They’d have discovered most of these media are in a language other than English or French and maybe, just maybe, would have appreciated news releases in their language of choice. In any case, why not contact editors and producers and discuss their needs?

The basic fact pr people have to learn is in today’s multicultural society there’s much more to communicating than getting hold of a
mailing list and just firing off press releases.
—30—

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 8:05 am and is filed under TV Commentaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.