Lisa Raleigh is the Director of Communications for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. She has a background in journalistic writing and experience working with magazine production and publication.
Q: What was your dream job when you were younger?
A: I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write fiction and I have done that.
Q: What do communications mean to you?
A: People think communications is anytime you’re having a transaction with another person that involves content. So, a spread sheet could be communications. In the context of my job, it is the function within the college that helps us tell our story through different channels. We put a lot of thought into what kind of impression we want to make and setting the bar as high as we can in terms of the quality of our content.
Q: What has it been like to be in the transition from print to digital communication?
A: When I was at the newspaper, you would send your copy upstairs and they would cut it out with a kind of x acto knife and wax it and paste it up. Digital production did not exist. A lot has changed since then and part of it is digital layout which is fantastic. The way we work here is we think about every story we slot into our story schedule. We think about: is that a web story, is that a print story, is it both, do we want to push it out through social media, is this a story we are only going to push out through social media. So, there’s this whole constellation of channels now that we think about. It’s transformed the way we think about and how we tell a particular story.
Q: What advice would you give to someone going into communications?
A: That’s very challenging because things have changed so rapidly. We have all the tools that we’re using right now and who knows what’s going to be the next big thing that we all have to master. It’s really tough. I think you can’t go wrong by becoming the best writer you can be, I just don’t see how that could be a bad thing. If you can master the art of storytelling, through whatever form, then I don’t think you can go wrong with that either.
By: Jesse Summers