The mess of mass communications

There is a great divide in public affairs/public relations in the military.

There are installation Public Affairs Offices and there are major command Public Affairs Offices. I have spent my entire career up until this point working for installation PAOs. Now I am working for a MACOM PAO shop. And I am loving life.

Installation PAOs have a pretty dirty mission. The non-dirty part, the installation newspaper, is the easy part. The hard part is the other two missions – Media and Community Relations. The job there is to either generate media and/or public interest in your installation and events, or to stem the tide of media and/or public interest in your installation and events.

For example, a place like Fort Huachuca, AZ, doesn’t have a lot of “real” Army stuff going on there. That is, they don’t have a bunch of infantrymen or tankers training and preparing for war all the time. But they do have a lot of things happening. In fact, before OIF/OEF, the 11th Signal Brigade, stationed there, was the most deployed unit in the Army. Few people knew that. Army Signal Command is headquartered there also. But the main bill-payer for the installation is the military intelligence school. Huachuca is considered “the home of military intelligence.” Scary, huh?

Anyway, since Huachuca’s nearest big city, Tucson, is a little more than an hour away, generating interest in the installation from media can be tough. You really have to sell what’s going on. And the public? Locally, everyone’s interested. But for really large events, you want those Tucson, even Phoenix, audiences. So you have to push hard.

At a large installation, or an installation with a very important mission, you have too much media interest. And the public is always calling to complain about something or the other. And it’s the installation PAO that has to deal with all of these things. Both selling and stemming.

MACOM PAOs have a much tighter focus. While the installation PAOs have to worry about every single unit and every little thing on the base/post/camp, etc., MACOM PAOs only have to worry about their command.

For example, that Army Signal Command I mentioned earlier? They have their own PAO. And the only things they really have to worry about are selling their command and responding to media questions about their command. This can keep a shop busy, but they don’t have to worry about the hundred little obligations that come with being an installation shop. There’s a lot of freedom.

I do work for a very large and very busy major Navy command. But the latitude I have in accomplishing my job is refreshing.

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