There is a photograph on Mitchell Hobbs’s bookshelf that was taken at a Christmas party on the back lawn of The Lodge in 2011. He is standing beside Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Both are looking at the camera, smiling warmly and have an arm behind the other’s back. At the time, Hobbs was working for the prime minister as a media and electorate stakeholder officer. He had begun the role shortly after completing his PhD on the politics of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, in 2010, and delighted in the way it enabled him to apply his academic research to this real-world context.

A few months after posing for this photo, however, a choice to support his partner’s career, in Sydney, meant he was leaving the job behind. Hobbs speaks candidly about the regret he felt at the time. But he also saw it as an opportunity to return to academia, teach and pursue the questions that had been accumulating since he finished the PhD. So, in 2015, he began a new position: lecturer and degree director for the Master of Strategic Public Relations (MSPR) at the University of Sydney. Inspired by his experience on Gillard’s staff, he set out determined that the degree would balance the highest calibre of theoretical inquiry with the attainment of practical, industry-based skills.

Richard Stanton launched the MSPR in 2006 and led the program for its first eight years. Sean Chaidaroon worked with him for some of this time. Then Alana Mann oversaw the degree before handing the reins to Hobbs. The four core units that Stanton established have remained central to the degree: MECO6908: Strategy Selection in Corporate PR, MECO6909: PR Management and Conflict Resolution (renamed Crisis Communication in 2016), MECO6912: Political Public Relations and MECO6913: Public Opinion, Policy and Public Sphere. The degree structure continues to resemble Stanton’s original vision, but the units themselves have been transformed. Two years ago, Hobbs received a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, which acknowledged his innovative redevelopment of the PR curriculum.

Hobbs explains that MSPR units need to instil “critical understanding of [the PR practitioner’s] place in the world and significance, and the ethics and responsibilities that come with their skills”. At the same time, “students also need to know how to apply those skills, how to localise that knowledge, and how to put that into action in a way that can generate results”. Interweaving these two pedagogical concerns – the understanding and the application – has been part of the degree since its inception, but Hobbs has made this a key priority. Their confluence ensures that graduates “can basically hit the ground running in their employment”.

Part of Hobbs’s redesign involved mapping this vision onto the units’ assessment tasks. He explains, “We created a mix-model of assessment. Many of the assessments are now focused on the attainment of industry skills by requiring students to develop a portfolio of professional work. Other assessments seek to foster scholastic outcomes and critical reflexivity regarding the practice of public relations.”

Hobbs and his team ensure the “understanding” component of the curriculum covers the various paradigms that comprise the field of public relations – from systems and ecology theories to dialogue, rhetoric and the critical school. “Previously the program had a strong focus on systems and public sphere approaches, which are still relevant and something that I use in my own research, but there are other perspectives out there, which are more dominant in North America and Europe,” Hobbs says. “So, I make it a point to attend the PR Division of the ICA [International Communications Association] Conference as regularly as possible, in order to bring the latest scholarship back to our program at Sydney.” Students consider public relations through a range of theoretical lenses: ethical, legal, political, cultural and social.

The “application” component finds students developing a range of professional outputs for creative agencies using integrative communications. Students prepare campaign portfolios that incorporate various tactics, including writing media releases, organising events, writing speeches, planning budgets, harnessing social media and using industry-standard software for designing flyers and brochures. Students are applying quantitative and qualitative research methods and deploying strategies to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Hobbs also encourages MSPR graduates to develop necessary soft skills, such as level-headedness. “There’s so much vitriol on social media and so many trolls. Companies and organisations will face all sorts of criticism as part of their daily operations, and good PR people need to leave their emotions at the door, not take things personally, and engage with genuine criticism and feedback,” he says. Hobbs knows that the ability to remain calm in a conflict scenario or crisis is an essential quality. He teaches students to foresee a PR situation and ask, “What do I need to protect? What do I need to change? What do I need to advocate for?” Their responses must align with an ethical practice that is “transparent, respectful of the audience [and] seeking to have win-win outcomes for organisations and stakeholders.”

In addition, Hobbs and his team prioritise written and interpersonal communication. “The ability to work with people, journalists, colleagues, and to be enthusiastic and engaging – being enthusiastic about your job and having other people catch that enthusiasm – is such an important skill in PR, which is all about relationships,” Hobbs says.

He dwells on the working-with-journalists part. Hobbs worries that “public relations somewhat unfairly has a reputation problem” and suspects this is “because there’s a bit of a professional misunderstanding between journalists and PR practitioners.” He describes their relationship as marked by the “occasional power struggle”. Studies show that 60 to 70 percent of mass media content comes from PR work, yet it is “the journalists and editors and producers who decide what goes into the media cycle”. PR practitioners need to navigate some tricky terrain to ensure this “symbiotic” relationship is functional. This is one reason why, in 2019, Hobbs changed the name of the popular elective MECO6901 from the adversarial Dealing with the Media to the more diplomatic Media Relations.

In October 2017, after a thorough application process, the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) accredited the MSPR. PRIA endorses degrees that “ensure their courses align with current industry practice”, employ staff who “play a vital role in progressing the profession in concert with the industry body” and equip their graduates “with best practice skills and competencies”. In other words, this achievement affirmed how successfully the MSPR (alongside its Graduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma pathways) has managed to bridge the divide between academic knowledge creation and industry. Currently, the University of Sydney is one of only two institutions in New South Wales that can claim this distinction at the postgraduate level, and one of only six in Australia.

Hobbs is quick to ascribe the PR program’s success to the commitment and expertise of his teaching team. Until February 2022, when Catherine Page Jeffery was appointed as a second full-time staff member, Hobbs was the only full-time, ongoing PR staff member. But he has surrounded himself with a casual teaching team made up of industry leaders. Sally Tindall, who was Gillard’s senior press secretary, teaches MECO6912: Political PR. She and others – such as Matthew Abbott (former Head of Communications at ASIC and now director of corporate affairs at Zip Co), Michelle Innis (former journalist for The New York Times and now senior consultant at P&L Corporate Communications) and Julia Booth (a communications consultant and author) – have been helping to create an academic culture that produces industry-ready graduates. Their students are finding employment in PR fields such as public and corporate affairs, government communication, and financial and investor communication.

Those graduates are a measure of the program’s effectiveness – and a source of pride. “All my students seem to get jobs and they do quite well in industry,” Hobbs says. “Several of my students have gone on to start in an industry, climbed the corporate ladder and now are coming back and doing casual teaching with the department.” This includes Paul Allen, who is a Bloomberg Australian TV anchor, and Jessie Nguyen, who is an account manager at Primary Communication and a councillor for the City of Canterbury Bankstown.

Another is Charlotte Launder, who completed the MSPR in 2015. When asked to name what was most formative, she recalls assessments that enabled her to design and implement a media relations campaign for a not-for-profit restaurant, develop PR strategies for a local surf lifesaving club, and take part in a political campaign. These experiences gave her “exposure to the industry and the opportunity to apply the skills [she] was learning in class”. Since graduating, Launder has worked at global and boutique PR agencies. Her career took her to London where she specialised in travel and tourism PR. “Being able to travel around Europe while representing industry-leading airlines, hotel groups, cruise lines and destinations has been a highlight of my career to date,” she says.

Since 2019, Launder has been combining freelance PR work with teaching. Her initial responsibility was to MECO2603: Public Relations. This undergraduate unit has been part of the Bachelor of Arts (MECO) curriculum since Catharine Lumby introduced the degree – the only strategic communications unit in a degree otherwise focused on media communications. The unit falls under Hobbs’s purview as MSPR degree director and was part of the redevelopment process he initiated when he assumed that role. One of his first moves was to change the name of the unit, and its scope, from Media Relations – which is just one component of PR – to Public Relations. He describes MECO2603 as a “very sharp” unit that compresses all the best content from across the MSPR units. Introducing media undergrads to PR serves both to broaden their career horizons and help breakdown those “hostilities and professional rivalries” that can plague the journalist–PR practitioner dynamic.

Hobbs names Clare Davies as another accomplished alumna who has returned to teach MSPR students. She graduated with a Master of Health Communication (MHC, see Chapter 13) and her affiliation with MSPR illustrates the close relationship between these two MECO degrees. (Indeed, the two degrees share Crisis Communication as a core unit, which MHC degree director Olaf Werder coordinates.) Davies teaches across MSPR and MHC units. As she explains, “The relationship between PR and HC has always been important, but its role in communicating accurate and trustworthy information that improves individual lives has become critical over the last few years.” Coupled with the evolving media and digital landscape, “Practitioners need to look at novel ways to translate complex issues into communications strategies that empower audiences to take action for their health.”

Practitioners in this field borrow skills inherent to PR: building relationships, facilitating two-way dialogue and innovating communication methods. Davies’s current position epitomises this intersection: she is a PR professional who specialises in the health and pharmaceutical industries. She is a senior account director at WE Communications and across her career has worked with AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Roche, the Department of Health and the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Davies’s PhD project, examining the factors that create, support and reproduce normative ideals of individual health and female embodiment, also stretches across the PR and HC fields.

It is easy to see why MECO colleagues, alumni, industry leaders and contacts from Gillard’s circle have been quick to support Hobbs’s ambitions for the program. These ambitions originated in a conversation that occurred during the earliest days of his work with Gillard. In a Melbourne office, Hobbs was explaining Foucault’s theory of discursive power to another Gillard media advisor. A few minutes in, the advisor responded, “That’s really interesting. But what can you actually do with it?”

“Ever since then,” Hobbs says, “I’ve always been focused on [asking] how is this applied? How can this knowledge be used to have some actual, tangible outcome?” When Hobbs shares this anecdote, he is referring to his own research. But it’s clear that this “penny drop” moment has shaped the MSPR program too. Throughout their degree, MSPR students are learning both to theorise and to do. For Hobbs, as academic, practitioner, degree director and teacher, “that was a really good lesson.”