MDIA5001 Chap.1 Media writing today: journalism, PR and branded content
Media writing today: journalism, PR and branded content
Week 1 spends most of its time on a question that sounds like throat clearing and is not: what counts as media writing, and who else is writing the same words for different reasons. The course sets journalism beside public relations and advertising deliberately, because in practice the three feed each other.
A public relations practitioner is defined here as someone running a planned and sustained effort to build goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics, and to look after reputation. Journalism is defined much more plainly as gathering, writing and publishing factual information.
The link between them is material rather than theoretical: the practitioner supplies much of the information the reporter needs, usually as a media release or a briefing, and the reporter supplies the route to a mass audience. That is why the first assignment can be built from a press release at all, and why knowing how a release is engineered is a reporting skill rather than a marketing one.
The course then names the direction of travel. Scholars quoted in the opening lecture describe the boundaries between journalism, public relations and advertising as porous, blurring, even vanishing, and place that shift under the heading of media convergence; many former reporters now work on the other side of the line.
Branded content is introduced as the sharpest case: content produced or funded by brands, an umbrella covering advertiser funded programmes, advertorials, native advertising, custom publishing, product placement and sponsorship. Brand journalism is dated to a marketing officer at a fast food chain in 2004, who wanted a way to inform people while also persuading them to keep engaging with the company.
Hold both halves of that sentence at once and you have the ethical problem the rest of the course keeps returning to. The week closes on the machinery you will use all term: the inverted pyramid, the five lead types, the 5W1H checklist, headline and byline conventions.
What this chapter covers
- 01
What media writing covers: print, online, social, audio and the shift from traditional to new media
- 02
Public relations defined as planned reputation work, and journalism defined as gathering, writing and publishing factual information
- 03
The media release as an engineered artefact: headline, 5W1H first paragraph, background second, quote third
- 04
Why a press release is a starting point and never a finished story
- 05
Porous boundaries: convergence between journalism, public relations and advertising, and the career traffic between them
- 06
Branded content and brand journalism, and where disclosure has to sit
- 07
The inverted pyramid and its four parts, introduced here and reapplied in every later week
- 08
Lead, nut graf, body and tail, and the two sentence paragraph convention
- 09
Five lead types, and why there is no single correct opening
- 10
The course shape: ten teaching weeks, a flex week at Week 6, three assignments and no examination
Reading a media release for what it is not telling you
- +1Separate the checkable from the asserted. That the scheme exists, that it launched in a stated year, and that the university says it has produced a 60 percent reduction are all facts about the release. The 60 percent itself is not a fact about the world until somebody outside the organisation can see the measurement behind it. That distinction is the whole difference between reporting a release and republishing it.
- +1Attribute everything that came from the organisation, in the sentence that carries it, not in a note at the end. The convention the course sets is person, title, organisation, so the director is named with their role and their employer the first time they appear. A reader who does not reach your second paragraph should still know who is making the claim.
- +1Identify what is missing and say so in the copy rather than to yourself. There is no baseline, no measurement method and no independent audit, so the figure has no denominator. One clause, such as noting that the university has not published the underlying data, is honest, costs eight words, and is exactly the transparency the ethics row of the marking rubric is looking for.
- +1Decide what a second source would have to be. Not another spokesperson from the same office, which adds volume and no independence, but a waste contractor's tonnage figures, a regulator's reporting, or an academic who works on procurement. This is the move the rubric describes as initiative beyond the supplied material, and it is the single most reliable way to lift a competent story into the top band.
Key terms
- Media release
- An announcement written and issued by an organisation to give reporters a ready made version of a story, complete with a suggested headline, the essential facts in the first paragraph and a quotable spokesperson.
- Public relations
- Planned and sustained work to build an organisation's standing with the publics it depends on, and to manage its reputation so that opinion and behaviour move in the organisation's favour.
- Media convergence
- The process by which the boundaries between journalism, public relations and advertising become porous, in production practice, in career paths and in the formats audiences encounter.
- Branded content
- Content produced or funded by a brand. The umbrella covers advertiser funded programmes, advertorials, native advertising, custom publishing, product placement and sponsorship.
- Brand journalism
- Editorially styled content published by a company about its own world, dated in the lecture to a 2004 marketing initiative and designed to inform an audience while also keeping it engaged with the brand.
- Byline
- The name of the reporter who wrote the article, carried at the beginning or the end of the story, which is also where accountability for it sits.
Media writing today: journalism, PR and branded content FAQ
Why does a journalism course spend its first week on public relations?
Because most of the raw material you will handle in this course arrives from a communications office, including the eleven press release publishers the first assignment names. A release is not neutral information. It is a document engineered so that a busy reporter can lift a headline, a set of facts and a quote straight out of it, which is efficient for the newsroom and extremely convenient for the issuer.
Knowing the anatomy of that document, where the 5W1H sits, where the friendly quote sits, what is deliberately absent, is what lets you use it as a starting point rather than reprinting it. The rubric for the first assignment rewards exactly this: the top band asks for contextual data, independent verification or research beyond the provided material, and the failing band describes an article that copies the provided material.
Reading public relations well is therefore a reporting skill.
Is branded content the same as advertising?
It overlaps but it is not identical, and the difference is where the reader's expectation sits. Advertising is understood by the audience to be paid persuasion and is usually signposted by its form.
Branded content is produced or funded by a brand while borrowing the shape and the credibility of editorial work, which is why the term covers such a wide range: advertiser funded programmes, advertorials, native advertising, custom publishing, product placement and sponsorship all sit under it. The ethical weight falls on disclosure.
When content wears editorial clothes without saying who paid for it, the reader is being asked to extend trust they have not agreed to extend. When you analyse branded content in the tutorial work for this course, the useful question is not whether it is good but whether an ordinary reader, scrolling at speed, could tell who was speaking.
Assessment move
Build one artefact this week and reuse it all term: a two column sheet with the parts of a media release down the left and the parts of a news article down the right, with arrows between them showing what transfers and what does not. The headline transfers as a starting point but has to be rewritten for search. The first paragraph transfers as raw material but has to be rewritten as a lead in your own words.
The quote transfers verbatim if attributed. The framing does not transfer at all, and neither does any adjective. Second, get the inverted pyramid into your hands rather than your notes: take any story from a quality outlet, delete its final paragraph, and check whether anything essential was lost. If nothing was, the structure worked, and that is the test a subeditor applies.
Repeat it until you can feel where the cut point is. Third, start a running file of the vocabulary the course uses, because these words appear in rubric rows: lead, nut graf, body, tail, attribution, standfirst, byline. Fourth, read the three assignment briefs in Week 1 even though two are not due for months.
The course is assessed entirely on those three artefacts, and the topics you meet in Weeks 2 to 10 are much easier to absorb once you know which assignment each one is feeding.
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