Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Since he lost his TV reporting job last year, Jarrett Hill has been looking for his next opportunity. It presented itself in an unexpected way.  Hill was sitting at a corner table Monday night in a Culver City Starbucks, drinking a venti iced coffee and watching the Republican National Convention on an MSNBC live stream.

As Melania Trump spoke, she uttered a phrase that the 31-year-old California native had heard once before — from First Lady Michelle Obama. “… the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams …,” Melania Trump said during her address to the Republican National Convention.

Instinctively, Hill finished the phrase aloud to his laptop screen: “… and your willingness to work for them.” “Kind of like a song that you haven’t heard in a long time and you remember the lyrics as you hear them. Or a movie that you know the line to and you kind of respond to it,” he said.

He recalled the words from Michelle Obama’s speech because, he said, he had thought to himself at the time that it was “really beautifully written.” “I believe I even wrote it down or typed it,” Hill said. “Obviously having no idea that eight years later I’d hear them again from a woman who wanted to be first lady speaking at a convention in front of 40 million people.”...

If their labor was similar to that of many other reporters in town covering the convention, their nationality wasn't. Reporter Jiwon Park and cameraman Bohyun Bang are with Arirang TV based in Seoul, South Korea.

Why were they here?

"It's the president of the United States," Park explained. "We have a lot of interest in the United States. It is the number-one country in the world."

As NBC's Chuck Todd was hustling to a nearby outdoors studio not too far away and eliciting a news celebrity's typical response from passersby ("hey, that's the guy from CBS!" a Mississippi delegate said to his companion), the two journalists from Arirang were virtually unnoticed and blended into the bustle of conventioneers, media and massive security.

The duo has been in the country for 10 days, starting in Washington, D.C. and finishing up in Cleveland.I asked if they had come to any clear understanding of Trump's appeal. They said a little bit but not completely. Perhaps join the crowd, I said....

Test your knowledge of prominent people and major events in the news, by taking our short 13-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with 1,052 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national survey conducted online August 7-14 by the Pew Research Center. The new survey includes a mixture of multiple-choice questions using photographs, maps, charts, and text.

When you finish, you will be able to compare your News IQ with the average American, as well as with the scores of college graduates and those who didn’t attend college; with men and women; and with people your age as well as other ages.

The cats-and-celebs site has its Washington bureau in place and is preparing to mix old-fashioned reporting with new-fashioned packaging.

WASHINGTON — You should know going in that this is a story about BuzzFeed that BuzzFeed would never run. This story is longer than the last 10 articles out of the new BuzzFeed Washington, D.C. bureau combined. Some recent examples:

- An airline ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney lookalikes
- A photo of second-button-unbuttoned “Casual Joe Biden”

- Paul Ryan’s college fraternity photo
- “Barack Obama Is A Wizard”
- A dozen photos of Tim Pawlenty looking sad...

[Can't wait for the sparks and GIFs to fly in the future - JD]