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Return to other love letters/hate mail  Preliminary background on the Cujo story... John Miller, a student in Ms. Professor Sharon Alter's Women in Politics class (taught through the Women's Studies Program at Roosevelt University), had a class assignment: Volunteer 15 hours of time to a political campaign. Candidate must be female. Since Stephanie prefers to create volunteer work tailored to the skills of each volunteer, she queried John for his skill set. He explained he had strengths in accounting and writing. So Stephanie assigned him the task of writing a practice news release that -- if good enough -- would be considered for media distribution. John responds: From: John Miller JMiller2@mail.roosevelt.edu Sent: Thu 10/7/2004 Subject: RE: Infromation requested Stephanie, Unfortunately, I have friends coming in from out of town for the weekend, and will not be able to meet such a time frame. Additionally, I think it is very unreasonable for you to ask me to write a press release on you. Especially when I have never written one, and I have never met you. I don't pretend to be an expert in the ways of politics. I do not know your position on nearly anything, the overall Libertarian movement, or JJJ position on the draft; obviously, no one else does either. What you are asking would minimally take me a good 40 hours to research, and formulate a effective press release. I would assume that you could do this in 30 minutes, with your vast knowledge of all three entities. I have offered to give you 15 hours of my time to do conventional volunteer work. That is the reason why I asked you what sorts of tasks were available. Furthermore, It is somewhat suspect that you may, or may not use my excessive effort. What may I ask is the point of this "exercise"? Is this to waste my very valuable time? I work 40-60 hours a week, and go to school full time. Again, I don't mind volunteering, but I require something a-lot less time consuming. You may not have any such task in your organization. If so, please let me know this, and I will find someone else to donate my valuable time to. Thank you. John Miller Stephanie responds... Hi John, Based upon your previous email, it appears you have no interest in completing the available volunteer work for my campaign. If you find my proposed volunteer duty to be too difficult or unreasonable, I suggest you dedicate your time towards a more traditional campaign (i.e., one that will assign you a task such as posting fliers or handing out campaign materials). Regardless, I’ll answer your questions. The point of my proposed volunteer exercise is for you to experience hands-on how politics shape the media. Because I run a campaign on $0, the campaign gains the most momentum, and reaches the maximum amount of people, through free news coverage. Free media coverage can be attracted by creating and distributing news releases. I set the deadline for the task to be next week, as your emails reflected the status of urgent, thus suggesting you wanted to embark on a project as soon as possible. A standard press release is approx. 600 words. Some vary, but that’s the industry standard. For example, some releases may only be seven to ten sentences long (sometimes more, depending upon the topic). Sample: http://www.prweb.com/pressreleasetips.php The volunteer task I assigned to you should only take approximately 3 hours: |
