Call Me Katherine: Issue No. 10

Choosing not to work with the press does not stop the story from happening, it only stops you from being a part of it.                             

It was this revelation when I was getting my Masters at UNC-Chapel Hill that started me down a path of discovery and innovation.  Through a series of events, I had started appearing regularly on the local NBC affiliate news to provide expert comment on a variety of social issues.  Like public speaking, I was self-taught in my approach in working the press.  And it really seemed to work. Increasingly, I was asked to comment, help report, and really shape these stories.  And I learned first hand about the power of the local press to shape public opinion (something known as the “agenda-setting function of the press” and it has been widely studied and cited for decades).

I would use my daily news media experiences as the basis for class projects and mini-research studies while getting my masters.  It surprised me how little my student colleagues or even professors chose to work with the press when they were called.  “They will twist my words.” “I can’t possibly boil down this complex social issue into a sound bite.” “They only care about ‘if it bleeds it leads’.”  These were familiar refrains as I talked about my work in the newsroom at school.  Of course, there were no media relations training class offered to us either which I knew compounded the problem.

I also learned from my news media colleagues their side of the story.  They were under tight deadlines to get 3-4 stories in the can each day, some even more.  So when they searched for experts for stories, they didn’t usually vet the credentials of whomever they got beyond the basics and yet this expert would undoubtedly influence public opinion about the issue. They just used whomever called them back first.  Additionally, many reporters, producers, editors had never take one class or knew much themselves about the social issue they were addressing through their coverage.  Much like those of us in social work who had never had a media relations class, many journalists never had a social issues class.

I set about trying to change that by showing by example that we could create an interprofessional collaboration between social work and the press.  I designed my own permanent placement in a newsroom and procured my own funding to make it happen.  It was an invaluable experience to me, with lessons learned that I still use to this day.  And by evaluating the experience at its conclusion, I learned that the journalists I worked with showed significant improvement in not only their personal productivity in getting stories done each day, but also felt more confident about the quality of story the were producing with my help.  Ratings by viewers went up as well with many reporters receiving compliments online and personally on stories we worked on together.

I learned pretty quickly that we really can make these two disciplines work together more affectively and, more importantly, the communities that we serve require that we both step up our game in making that happen.  I designed and taught a media training seminar at Duke for CEOs and management for the nonprofit community but found corporate and government leaders showing up too, thanks to positive word of mouth.

I’m very proud to say I am the first social worker ever placed in the newsroom to help in the production of social issue stories, though others have since replicated my model. This week as I sat on a planning call to potentially do a media training workshop for realtors in High Point and explored the potential of doing a public speaking training for a local chamber of commerce, I was reminded how many full circles my life has had.  Everything I’ve done, even when I didn’t see a connection at the time, ended up serving me in some higher purpose down the road or helped me have the skills in certain areas that I really needed to succeed in what I’m doing now.

And I’m grateful.