Nicole’s PRspective

In a journalism class this week we watched the movie Shattered Glass.

This movie is the true story of journalist Stephen Glass and his fall from grace while working at The New Republic magazine.

What an excellent movie on the power of choices and ethics in the mass communication field. I vaguely remembered hearing about the reporter when the story first broke back in 1998, but I had no idea it had been this bad.

While the class discussion revolved around how horrible the Glass character was, it finally hit me why he was able to fool his co-workers for so long. They trusted him. They trusted him to do his job and do it right. Maybe that trust was misplaced, maybe it went on for to long, but if a journalist can’t trust another journalist what’s the point.

Read the story of Stephen Glass for yourself on Wikipedia – I found a lot of the article links from other journalists about the scandal enlightening.

 Here is the movie trailer

I was crusing the blogs tonight, avoiding some homework, when I came across this post

It caught my attention for a couple of reasons
1. The Grunig and Hunt definition is the one we learn in the Prinicples of PR class at CU
2. I am taking a marketing class this semester and the book refers to PR as publicity, that is starting to annoy me

So, I read through most of Professor Sledzik’s blog and I loved it all.

In the Principles of PR class the book includes an entire chapter on Integrated Marketing Communication and how it relates to PR

In the Marketing class the book has the words public relations in one place, about half-way through the book. The section says that publicity can be handled by the advertising manager or whoever handles public relations. Then defines PR as communication with noncustomers, including labor, public interest groups, stockholders, and the government.
This disturbs me in so many ways. The class is not a requirement for PR majors but it is one of the “encouraged” electives. However, the class is required for almost all Business majors, even those specializing in accounting(?). After this class a bunch of accountants will be running around thinking that PR can be handled by the advertising manager.

So, you can see why I am really liking the posts I read tonight, and I realize that I am not by myself in thinking that PR is it’s own separate slice of the communications world.

Side note: the marketing book is Basic Marketing by Perreault, et al 16th ed

At CU, this semester the PR professor is offering a new class. I waited the first week to talk about it just to make sure it seemed as good on Friday as it did on Monday. It is still great and I am going to get so much out of this class. The title of the class is PR Strategies, it covers so many things that you would need to know how to do. To name a few things we are going to be doing: event planning, media kits, he has even set it up with the RTV professors for us to do a mock press conference. It is going to be a great class. I am really hoping that the powers that be decide to make this class part of the normal offerings instead of just a one-time thing.

The new semester started this week at Cameron University. I am not sure what exactly made me want to take 6 classes and a work shop. At least I get to take interesting classes, over the summer semester I took College Algebra – my brain still hurts. This fall I am taking Public Relations Strategies, Marketing, and News Writing (those are the fun ones).

I am also the President of our Public Relations Student Society and have spent the last few weeks working on recruitment and firming up the fall meeting schedule. We have some interesting guest speakers lined up, the first one is the Director of Marketing for a local casino. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.