preview

Reflection Paper On Public Relations

Decent Essays

I spent part of the last week shadowing John Pless at EPB in downtown Chattanooga. John is EPB’s Public Relations Coordinator in its Marketing division. Shadowing him gave me a better insight into how public relations works externally and internally for a large corporate company. When I arrived, John took me upstairs to his cubicle, and immediately showed me a press release that he had just finished. He began talking about the importance of the press release and his role within the company. Not only did he write the press release, but he also had to write a notice for all of the employees and was going to work on a letter to send to all of EPB’s customers. John said that as important press releases are for the community, internal communications are just as important. As John talked about himself, where he started in his career and how he ended up at EPB, I began to really appreciate the major I had chosen. I have spent most of my time at UTC so far focusing on journalism. However, getting to shadow John let me see a side of communications that I was not as accustomed to. I had seen press releases before but I never really understood or appreciated the time that goes into a simple press release. He said that any release he writes can take a week or several months. Writing in public relations is different from writing news stories or doing a TV news story in the timing of when the information goes out. When writing a story, it’s usually done over a few hours, or more,

Get Access