16th April: Tim Marshall

We had Internship class today and it was great to meet Tim Marshal and gain some real world perspective on the life of a person in PR. We looked at the qualities that employers are looking for when recruiting PR graduates. We also looked at PRiNZ trends research and the PRiNZ database. I learnt that most PR people are in-house (approx 2/3rds) and approx 1/3rd are consultants.

He mentioned "father of PR" Edward Bernaise and later I went online to read up a little more about him - found this interesting commentary on "controlling the masses - from religion to Bernaise" http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14763.htm.

He also quoted Anne Gregory by saying that "PR operates where issues collide".

Some interesting stats from PRiNZ preso:
82% of PR consultancies have less than 5 fulltime staff.

I was quite interested in PR people in Investor Relations because they have such high requirements for ethical decision making - preventing insider trading.

Last of all, I asked about some of the companies in NZ that assist PR companies. For example:

Media Watch by Chong (who would charge $500 - $2,000 to monitor a PR as it gets covered by the media - www.chong.co.nz)
Media Monitors (www.mediamonitors.com.au)

Media Com (who specialise in distributing PRs in NZ http://mediacom.nzpa.co.nz/)

All in all - it was well worthwhile attending today's lecture

Tim Marshall is the Managing Director at Communications by Design