I recently had the pleasure of taking part in a panel discussion at my alma mater, Bates College, on what it’s like to work in the communications industry.  This was the first such experience I’d had where I was asked to impart my knowledge – humble as it is – about what public relations is all about.

As a traditional liberal arts institution, Bates does not have a formal marketing or communications curriculum. So for all of the students who attended it was a genuine opportunity to hear about an industry that they get virtually zero exposure to in the classroom. The panel was comprised of myself , Mullen account executive Eugene Kim, Garrand founder and president Brenda Garrand, and Keating & Company CEO Rick Keating.

Rick and myself were the two PR pros in the room, while Eugene and Brenda provided some great perspectives from the advertising side of the industry.

As the students asked questions about what it means, exactly, to “do” public relations – a topic that can at times be difficult to define – observing where Rick and my answers overlapped provided some insight in to what PR’s true function is.  What was most intriguing to reflect on was that, even as the new methods and tools we use for PR – blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. – continue to evolve at an epic rate, the core elements of what they are ultimately used FOR in the PR profession seem to persist.

So. What is PR all about? Here are a couple of my biggest observations from the panel:

1) PR pros are news junkies: One of the students’ questions, paraphrased, was “how would you break what you do on a daily basis down in to percentages of your total day?” The majority (just) of a PR pro’s day-to-day is spent reading the latest news and other informational sources like analyst reports and client materials to inform ourselves of what is happening in the industry. We need to know where our clients fit in to the massive speed and flow of information sent over the Internet, airwaves, phone lines and front pages every day.  We need to know what’s happening. We need to know what our clients want to say. We are addicted to information. The Crackberry may have very well been invented just for us.

2) PR pros are story tellers: After reading, we then figure out how to tell the story.  We formulate an idea, an angle, a story that will carve us out a spot in that massive flow of information and get the attention of media, bloggers, analysts, investors, our client’s potential customers, the world. We meet, we call, we write, we blog, we text, we Tweet. Any mechanism that can distribute information, that can tell the story our clients want to tell, we find a way to tell that story using them. A book; 10 pages; 1000 words; 140 characters. Stories take many forms. Knowing how to craft that story and tell it in a meaningful way is where our creativity thrives.

The questions from the students were great. I remembered thinking that, as a member of the 2006 class myself, it wasn’t so long ago that I was in their shoes trying to learn as much as I could about an industry I knew I wanted to be a part of. For all it’s rapid changes and the pace at which the industry continues to modify the way in which we actually execute on a day-to-day basis, there are some very core ideas and definitions of what it really means to “do” PR.