We're All Getting Jobs!

Prof. Eisman started off class by telling everyone how pleased she has been with our writing lately. Good work everyone!

Frank Kauffman from Edelman came in to speak about PR. Prior to his career at Edelman, he worked as a lawyer and a journalist. He manages crisis communication, litigation media and trains company officials in media relations.

He gave 3 pieces of advice from famous writers:

1.) "'Big things are almost always best said with small words.'" This quote came from Peggy Noonan, a Regan speech writer.

2.) "'The first draft of anything is...,'" Ernest Hemingway said. Kauffman suggests putting a piece aside for a while before editing it.

3.) "'No sinner is ever saved after the first two minutes of a sermon,"' Mark Twain said. Kauffman said that people get distracted after 28 seconds of speaking with them and that in 30 days, one will only remember 5% of what was said.

Snaps to Taylor for knowing Twain's hometown of Hannibal.

"What are you trying to communicate and how are you able to effectively communicate that?," Kauffman said to ask yourself when determining how to go about a company's PR message. Public relations is simply taking a company's point of view and helping them express it to a targeted audience. Kauffman's job is to bridge the communication gap between the company and the audience.

Companies want to disperse their messages to their audiences before the media does so for them. "By definition, journalism is selective," Kauffman said, "a roll of the dice." Clear, concise communication is the goal.

Before an interview, Kauffman would instruct a company representative to pick three messages to focus on. Each message is a point of view, not a fact. Thus, the messages need to be inductively supported with facts, figures and statistics.

Facebook and Twitter are new great ways for companies to directly contact their audiences. An argument in the class broke out as to whether Facebook would be the fourth or fifth largest country in the world. Prof. Eisman and Kauffman settled the dispute and claimed that Facebook would be fourth behind China, India and the U.S.

Ninety-two percent of journalists rely on online research before writing a story and around 40 percent of the U.S. population relies on Internet sources for news. Kauffman was concerned by this since Internet sites, especially blogs, can be ill-informed. Blogs are very interconnected to news.

Most of Kauffman's clients have their own public relations departments within their companies. A company's PR department will handle common matters and a larger, outside company handles larger PR issues.

In order to get a job in PR, Kauffman suggests working in journalism or law and building up an impressive resume first. He also said that one could work as a PR intern and get a job if he or she is a standout. He said that PR is a very tiring job and that he is the oldest person in his job.

Prof. Eisman promised us all jobs and later retracted to say that she could give us recommendations. "Have I lost control?," Eisman asked.

Kauffman gave the class fun facts about Sandra Day O'Connor including that she dressed up on Halloween and gave out candy from her Chevy Chase house and that she used to date William Rehnquist.

Kauffman's final piece of advice was, "if you can write, you're ahead of eighty percent of the population." Everything is about communication, he said.

The class took a news quiz. The news quiz was not terribly difficult. Due for next class are two press releases from any two exercises on pages 298-301. Write a 140-word summary for each for a Twitter feed.