Down in the dumps - an unhappy Friday at work
A day in the life of a Comms and PR manager
So earlier this week, I sent off a quote from a lecturer to a journalist, and today I discovered it wasn’t picked up. This can happen and it’s always disappointing news. It’s why we always manage the expectations of our colleagues. To check, I signed up for a paid subscription to the outlet, read the article and saw that the journalist only quoted a random member of the public and a university lecturer. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have included our quote, which was perfectly fine. I’m really disappointed, especially because this was my first time working with the lecturer and it would have been great to bring that success story to him. Now I’ll have to let him know it wasn’t picked up. It really would have been great news coverage for us.
But that’s just the icing on the cake. This was my Friday—
9am - I nudged a colleague about a news story I wrote where I’d interviewed him about being on a TV show. His response: Is this the final version? Parts of it don’t read very well. So I have to be lovely, warm and kind and offer to make edits.
10am - I get random questions from a colleague about a newsletter going out. They’re very concerned that changes they wanted made to a pdf and a webpage haven’t been made yet (never mind they only gave us 2 days’ notice from their last email, and are in the habit of sending about 5 emails at a time asking different things. I’ve been trying to save my colleagues from the madness and only giving them the requests as needed, rather than bombard them).
11am - Turns out I have been left off of an email chain. The newsletter has gone out, the pdf and webpage have not been updated in time. She sends an email saying how disappointed she is with this, wants to know when they will be updated, and has cc’d in my boss’s boss. I flag this to my manager, along with my draft response. I’m told not to say anything.
12pm - I interview a person for a news story, tweak a press release I’m working on and hear from a journalist who is open to receiving an op-ed from us. I spend the next few hours working on that with our expert, fine tuning their words and passion for the subject into tangible, pithy, hopefully newsworthy reading.
1pm - I get an hour for lunch but only take 30. Too hyped up about the possible op-ed getting picked up.
2pm - speak with my mentee, a young person I’m mentoring in comms. They’re lovely as usual and while it takes us a while to catch up, I hope our shared experiences are useful.
3pm - My manager wants to know who was leading on the project about the un-updated pdf and website. I am above all honest, and say it was myself and the other colleague, but that if anyone was slow, it was me. Because not forwarding on a request that’s 2 days old is apparently slow (never mind some colleagues take weeks to respond to me sometimes).
4pm - My disappointed colleague has no interest in working on an op-ed that we’d agreed to do for a magazine, and it’s due in 10 days. They want to know if my boss’s boss has agreed to it. This will be the second time that they have pulled out of doing an article for this journal. Except that it’s my name and reputation on the line with this journalist, which will be damaged if we don’t turn in anything and I end up having to apologise for a second time. If this does happen, I simply won’t give the colleague another opportunity.
4.30pm - Get a random call from a colleague who didn’t know she was supposed to work with me to write a series of thought leadership articles, and wonders if we could do one a month. While that is possible, it’s also a lot. I explain the process of how I work (pitching, getting accepted, then writing), and we agreed on a plan of approach.
5pm - My expert agrees to the article we’ve drafted but has made it longer than the desired word count. I trim it down, turn in the op-ed to the journalist, and hope to God they’ll use it. We’ll see.
6pm-12pm - Eat dinner, write, fret that my other colleague will refuse to do the magazine article and it will damage my reputation with the magazine’s editor. We’d worked together very well in the past, so it will really bother me if this blows up.
10am the next day- discover a journalist has not used a comment I sent them, and do shadowboxing in the kitchen to get out my frustration. Nothing works. I still look flabby.
