week ten

What we see and hear from the media are issues that are properly framed and organized from numerous pieces of information. These framed issues help to make complex issues comprehensible. How we understand the issue has to do with how it is being framed. PR practitioners make use of the media to frame issues and news in ways that would stand out from their competitors and attract the crowd. This leads the public towards a certain viewpoint, and encourages them to believe what they see or hear to be true (Gross & D’Ambrosio, 2004).

Apart from language, understanding the culture of the country and organisation that the PR practitioner has to lisase with is important to effectively transmit the message across. This reduces the chances of miscommunication and misunderstandings. Personal interaction and relationship building between the PR practitioner and the client is also important to effectively persuade stakeholders to the organisation's point-of-view.

As stated by Stanton (2008), “In Singapore, the primary purpose of public relations is government propaganda”. This indicates that public relations serve mainly the purposes of the government in order to achieve constant successes economically and socially. Singapore has acknowledged the importance of public relations and has an institutional organisation, the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore (IPRS), to facilitate the growth of this area in Singapore through the acquirement of knowledge and networking skills in this field. However, many of the PR practitioners in Singapore lack the explicit understanding of the meaning of public relations, and this department is often confused with the advertising, marketing and publicity department. PR practitioners serve as the link in communicating with other organizations and the public, while advertising is the promoting of the organisation through paid advertisments, marketing refers to increasing awareness among the public through free advertisments, and publicity refers to the gaining media coverage. Although these fields appear the same at first look, they have their own individual targets to reach and should not be complicated together to achieve optimized effect in increasing awareness and gaining publicity for the organisation.


Effective media releases contain information covering the 5Ws (Who, What When Where, Why) and 1H (How). Apart from simply providing information, media releases have to stand out from the rest and attract first the editor's attention to enable its publishing and next the public, to retain their attention and read through the rest of the article. This is usually done through a catchy headline or lead sentence. Other framing techniques include kickers, subheads, photographs, photo captions, selection of sources or affiliations, selection of quotes, pull quotes, logos, statistics, charts and graphs and concluding statements or paragraphs of articles (Reese, et al., 2001). Media framing in media releases serve to simplify complicated issues and are presented in a manner that the audience can relate to (Gans, 1979; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). Thus, they would be more receptive and willing to take on similar perspectives as those presented in the media release. Therefore, media releases are important bridges between the organisation and the public, and need to be written concisely and effectively to facilitate the transfer of information.

with love,
cookie biscuit.
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