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#iamacomedian

After a moment of madness and a desire to move to London, I applied for a couple of jobs last month. For reasons I won’t bore you all with, I can’t move until September, so was looking at jobs that start then (mainly grad schemes).

I did one for a PR company which has come through, and I have a phone interview with them scheduled. But after a couple of conversations about it, I’m not sure it’s my thing, and am wondering whether I should just sack the interview off.

they take a product/cause/research write news stories and press releases that chime with/set a certain news flow that day/week and then use connections and contacts to try and get as much press/radio/tv coverage of the above as possible. This is sometimes offset against advertising spend etc.
Can be an interesting, worthwhile job... can be rubbish, depends what you are pr-ing for really.

Oh, There's also the crisis/reputation management?aspect to PR.? lot of PR is keeping stuff out of the news.?

Pay is ok, about 25k entry level, 50-60k senior level, and rising to six figures for in house/director roles, though these are rare.

I'd want to be involved in in a million years, but some of the stuff some PRs get asked to do is fascinating

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020805/Libyan-dictator-Muammar-Gaddafi-tries-hire-NYC-public-relations-firm-improve-image.html

It's odd how PR as an industry has a reputation problem.

I deal with and am friends with a lot of PRs and on the whole, they're all pretty decent, smart people. Most have some background in journalism. I tend not encounter the arts grad types waiting for a husband characterised above.

The industry is about building and protecting reuptations. Naturally it's a bit more interesting if you're PRing a worthy campaign or an exciting artist than if you're account exec for a brand of crisps.

The worst type of PR for me is the "lifestyle business" type, normally a one or two person home-based operation run by people who don't really understand what PR is and give the rest of the industry a bad name. These people will have spent this week sending out releases starting with...

"Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so why not treat that special someone to our client's product that has nothing to do with romance."

There's a company I've dealt with in the past that claims to be a PR firm, but is essentially two girls who run the twitter account for their friend's cupcake shop. That's not PR, it's fluffy bullshit.

If you are interested in PR, follow @markborkowski on Twitter.

If you look hard enough, you can see the PR angle in most stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that fox attack story the other day came from the Countryside Aliance. It's probably not the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I spoke to Max Clifford once (sorry for name-dropping. He seems like a nice bloke incidentally) and it was around the time the press were going mental over "devil dogs killing babies."

I tried to engage him on it and he said "If I was the Rottweiler club of Great Britain or whoever, I'd just place a story about a Rottweiler rescuing a cute kid from drowning in a pond. Picture of the dog sitting next to the kid, quotes from onlookers, quote from a sympathetic dog behavior expert and relieved parents and that's that. Problem solved."

It's a dark art.

(Luxury) travel PR is the one to get into. A big part of the job involves taking journalists on familiarisation visits to far flung exotic places. Plus, it's actually an interesting subject.

I used to work with someone who did the UK PR for Las Vegas, she had a fun job for a while.

The kind of job you end up doing will vary enormously depending on the type of clients you're working on, and the type of campaign. For example FMCG PR (e.g. Food and drink) can be very product focused - you could be organising an event for a load of trade journalists to tell them about a new loaf of bread, for example. Government PR is often about encouraging behavioural change, e.g. you could be encouraging local newspapers to write about the importance of getting a flu jab if you're over 70, to try and reach older people who should have them and who aren't being reached by traditional advertising. Or if you work in corporate communications, this could involve managing the announcement of your quarterly figures, briefing your spokesperson and taking them on the Today programme, for example. It is a mixed bag.

And when a smart, professional member of the marketing team enquires how all the nonsense and bullshit you've come up with fits with the timing, strategy, messaging and identity of your organisation's carfeully mapped communications plan to just shout *COVERAGE! COVERAGE! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND PR!!!!* like a hyperventilating magpie

The industry is full of cunts who like shit music.

I'm sure his job is in Music PR.