Field Trips

By Bennie Sham, Internship Program Lead (@beesham)

I can't say it enough but it's been an great semester with our current group of interns. Lisa Langsdorf, director at Fusion, organized a few field trips to the Reuters, AOL and the NY Times offices over the past few months. I've never been to any of the offices and was glad that I could join the outings.

At Reuters, we met with an editor who took the time to show us his offices and explain how a newsroom works, where our press releases go and how the editors collaborate on stories. At NY Times, we learned another side of public relations, where the VP of their corporate communications department explained the differences between corporate PR and agency PR. Our meeting with AOL's senior communications manager may have been my favorite. He scheduled meetings with the editors-in-chief of AOL Television and AOL Music, as well as the senior VP and director of corporate communications, where we learned about consumer and entertainment public relations.

Each meeting brought a different view on PR but they all had the same advice: know your industries, know your clients, know your reporters and be honest. Their main pet peeve is an uneducated PR professional.