Weber Shandwick in China launched a series of popular in-house training sessions this year, further strengthening employees’ learning and development.  With a wide range of expatriate and local staff, the team decided to use this diversity to their advantage and ask staff who have a special area of expertise to share their insights with the rest of the company.   Other experts, from outside the company, generally from the media or related industries, have also been invited to attend some sessions and share their knowledge with the team. Recently, Liu Shinan, editor-in-chief, Business Weekly of China Daily, China’s major English language newspaper held a training session for staff.  

Mr. Liu provided an in-depth discussion about the best ways to write news, especially for China Daily, and how to approach the media.  According to Mr. Liu, the key questions when writing news are ‘what to write’ and ‘how to write’.  The former deals with choice of content, whereas the latter addresses crafting the content in the best and simplest way to communicate to the audience.  He went on to explain the inverted triangle concept of writing news, the importance of answering all ‘five W’s’ in the article: (who, what, where, when and why).   He also discussed the nature of newsworthiness.  Interestingly, Mr. Liu gave a detailed discussion about the key differences between Chinese news and English language foreign news.  For example, with Chinese there sometimes isn’t a pressing deadline, whereas news for foreign media certainly needs to be timely and quick. 

In a different training session, Weber Shandwick staff had the opportunity to hear the story from a different perspective, with a guest talk by Allen Cheng, senior correspondent for Bloomberg news, a major international financial newswire.  Allen and Weber Shandwick’s Brad Burgess gave a joint discussion about foreign media relations.  Some of the topics discussed were regarding approaching and working together with foreign media, news values and best practices. 

Brad gave a presentation on the general landscape of the foreign media in China and some tips gained through his experience.   Allen was very candid about how public relations practitioners can work successfully together with Bloomberg specifically and foreign media in general, and told some very colorful stories about his rich experience as a foreign correspondent in China. 

Other training sessions have included a session on the importance of public affairs by John Russell, executive vice president of Weber Shandwick in Asia Pacific.

The sessions will continue, and have become an invaluable learning tool for staff in China.   

Liu Shinan, editor-in-chief, Business Weekly, of China Daily delivers a presentation at Weber Shandwick’s office in Beijing.

Staff listening intently at the in-house training session.