Origin story

 I've always loved stories.

Perhaps it was inevitable, being the daughter of a librarian and an avid bookworm. I come from a family of story-lovers and storytellers too - older cousins who were screenwriters, playwrights and journalists - plenty of journalists. They showered me with books and magazines - both those they brought for me whenever they visited and volumes left behind at my grandparents' home - and imbued me with a love of stories.

Growing up, dinner time was spent with my mum absorbed in a book or maybe a Newsweek or New Yorker magazine and with me digging into the latest edition of the Babysitters Club.

I eventually realised that other people consider it rude to read at the dinner table but at home, dinner was quiet, page-turning bliss.

I read voraciously and wrote obsessively - plays, poems, short stories and too many unfinished novels to count. I was editor of my secondary school yearbook.

Journalism seemed a natural fit for me and as soon I could, I made my way into the profession, interning at my local newspaper the summer I turned 15 years old.

While I did get a few stories, as an eager beaver intern, one of my main duties was to hover by the fax machine (dating myself there) waiting to pull press releases sent across by PR agencies and 'storify' them. As it turns out, the time spent pulling the story out of promotional pieces was helping me to hone skills for later in life.

A few short years later, when I became a ‘real’ journalist, I quickly found where my true love lay in the profession. Truth is, I was never a journalist’s journalist, never a news hound. The craft of nosing out the news from unwilling sources was never something I was especially good at or even enjoyed.

But a feature? Loved it. I found fascination in the most mundane. I was relentlessly curious about the exceptional stories hidden just below the surface of the everyday. A letter in the paper, a person I passed every day - they all glimmered with the possibility of 'what's the story here?’. To be honest, they still do.

As such a story-lover, when I eventually I segued into public relations, I thought I’d make my way back to journalism quickly. To me, that seemed to be where the real stories were to be told. PR, communications, public affairs, didn’t seem like a space where storytelling lived.

I did make my way back to journalism within a year but I also made my way back to PR many times, moving back and forth between the two professions five times in 13 years.

And as I moved, the world started to change around me.

When I first went into PR, I realised that the storytelling skills that led me to and were honed in journalism also helped in communications, helping me to craft stories that needed less storifying by interns. ;)

But I still couldn't put my finger on what my skill was. I still felt more like a journalist than a 'real' PR practitioner especially since I was still running my own magazine and blog, Islandista, on the side.

However, the rise of digital and social media and the well-documented struggles of traditional media, particularly the newspaper industry which I started in, brought certain changes. On the one hand, it has dangled the possibility of just reaching your audience more directly without going through media gatekeepers (more on that in another post) but on the other hand, your story now has to be extra compelling to cut through the noise.

As a result, communications teams across both the for-profit and non-profit sectors, have pivoted towards telling their own stories using the methods, style and tone drawn from the world of journalism.

And so, for the girl who loves stories, everything has come full circle as storytelling and public relations have converged. The ability to find the story amidst the stats and the desire to delve deeper and pull a feature story out of a press release has aligned with where communications and PR now are.

So in this space, we'll be immersed in stories. How to find the story, how to tell the stories for maximum impact, especially for social good. Where to tell your story, who to get to help you tell it and even when to share it.

I'll look at other stories, examining how narratives are made, how they shift slowly or rapidly and how a word or phrase can make or break the story you're trying to tell.

Sometimes I'll have the answers, sometimes I will still be working it out as I write.

I welcome you to join me as we figure out what's the story here - because there's almost always a story here.