I realized the other day that each of our three interns this fall is younger than my oldest child. I’ve long been the elder stateswoman at Buchanan PR, but now I feel officially old. So I’ve been thinking about all that has changed in the PR/media world since I was in my early 20s, and all that has not.
When I was their age, I was working in a newsroom where we wrote on typewriters with big letters on special stacked carbon paper for the teleprompter. Every morning, we were handed heavy rolls of paper from the wire machines, which actually still made that ticker sound. One newsroom I worked in still had an editing room for film.
When I transitioned into public relations, we frequently stayed into the night assembling media kits, which we then dutifully stuffed into envelopes and rushed to the post office. The invention of the fax seemed revolutionary. We received packages of clippings from services that relied on people to cut stories mentioning our clients out of their morning newspapers.
OK, we’ve established that I’m old. (Full disclosure: 56 – the new 36!)
But what hasn’t changed much in all those years is the root of what we do. Reporters (those who are left) and PR practitioners still strive to tell compelling stories. What lies behind just the facts that can make people want to know more? What messages make people care? It’s our job to dig out those stories and write them in a powerful way.
What’s changed is that there are now so many ways to convey those stories. I still believe in the value of a daily newspaper and one still arrives on my driveway each morning, but I’ve come around to social media. I was dragged kicking and screaming onto Twitter when I started at Buchanan, but I have been convinced you can construct a tantalizing Tweet. I was a big believer in good old-fashioned networking, but now admit the amazing reach of LinkedIn. The power of Pinterest. The fun of Facebook. (Okay, enough with the alliteration!) Almost all of our clients have also grown to see the value of social media, as an effective public relations tool. And that’s a good thing, because it’s here to stay.
For the most part, our interns are public relations majors in college, a major that didn’t even exist when I was in school. That’s a good thing. They come armed with skills in how to pitch reporters, create media lists, and increasingly they are schooled in how to best use social media in PR. Educators just need to remember to teach them to tell a good story, too.
So the interns may be younger than my daughter, but at this point they just feel like colleagues to me. They’ve been raised with a whole new playbook at their command, and most days I find it’s them teaching me new skills.
I do, however, draw the line at Snap Chat.