This is a speech-writing assignment as part of the course requirement for Writing for PR Practitioners II of the Public Relations-Corporate Communications program at Seneca College.
“The pen is mightier than the sword,” wrote novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839.1 But let’s fast forward to here and now. The mobile phone is mightier than both pen and sword combined.
Hello. My name is Charmaine Deogracias.
I’ve never given up on the pen, it’s in my heart. I draw power from it when I click, tap and type. And now I shall harness both skills in a new field. I am a journalist by heart, digital marketing specialist at work, now taking up Public Relations and Corporate Communications.
When I earned a degree that could’ve made me a diplomat years ago, I took a different turn to become a news correspondent. How my heart leaped for the adventures of being a journalist. It was the jumpstart I needed for my journey ahead. Yet it stayed in my heart no matter what path my feet took.
But digital technology happened. Social media changed the news landscape overnight. It was overtaking every facet of information delivery and I found myself in the crossroad. Should I stay and stick it out as a journalist in traditional media, or reinvent myself and explore how to transfer my skill to digital media?
I took a radical move. I left my comfort zone, ventured to unfamiliar and cold territory - literally in Canada to begin again. The Social Media program gave me a good start in exploring what else I can do. While I believed I am wired to be a journalist, I knew that I can channel the heart for it, the training from it to any career. And a digital marketing specialist I became.
But the journey did not stop there. As the world stood still at COVID, my wheels turned to yet another career path. The company I worked for offered me an option to study any program of my choice.
Journalism is my comfort zone. Ink is the blood that runs through my veins that I felt going back to it will keep me alive. A journalism-related program would’ve been an easy choice. But where is the challenge in something I can do even with my eyes closed?
If I have to learn something new, it must really be new. It’s not about moving up, but getting ahead that I pursued a post graduate program on Public Relations and Corporate Communications.
From a storyteller, to a digital marketer, to a communicator, that was the progression I was setting my career for. But studying PR and corporate communications now made me realize that the PR practitioner and communicator is a storyteller, a writer, and a marketer of sorts. It’s not a progression but an amalgamation of the journalist and the marketer, that I am.
As it is in journalism, public relations and corporate communications is a stickler to the writing discipline - form, style and structure. And as it is in marketing, selling ideas, promoting a brand, engaging various publics - these too are the core competencies of PRCC.
I never thought that public relations is a door to what will feel like home to a journalist and marketer. It's where the two worlds meet. Both fields intersect at some ways of doing things - research, strategy, digital media, creative and critical thinking.
And writing, yes there’s a lot of it in PRCC! Just when I thought I had writing fatigue for all those years of writing as a journalist, I’m right at it again but different. I am learning to write how to earn media, the one I know and the one I am in.
If the late Stephen Hawking had the “Theory of Everything,” and journalists have a story on everything, in PR, communication is everything. It’s delivered in all forms, sizes, and media.
As a digital marketer, I do relevant research that will resonate to a target audience. In PR, I learn to do research not for content marketing, but to develop a strategy to capture an audience.
When I said I wanted something new but I was bred familiarity, then what is new? Ah, investor relations is new. Business and finance had been my Achilles' heel. In PRCC, learning it felt like learning a whole new language.
I wish I was told I am going to eat subprime debt crisis, stocks, bonds, and interest rates for lunch. But forced diets have their own merits, and I am just glad Jeff Roach made it a lot digestible and chewable for me.
To sum it all, PRCC is a mixed world where a journalist can thrive and a marketer can fit in. It is both old school and new. It is traditional and adaptive. And in defining it, I am becoming it.
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