Kate Rosser, press officer at the Museum of London talks us through her PR day

What’s it like working in a busy London museum? From media relations to social media, Kate Rosser, press officer, communications at Museum of London talks us through her day.

My Day:

6.30am: Wake up to the Today Programme. Switch on BBC News and make two slices of marmite on toast.

7.30am: Leave the house; plug in my i-pod and read my book until I can get my hands on a copy of Metro.

9.00am to 9.30am: I’ve usually looked at my emails before going to bed so I don’t need to sift through them in the morning. I deal with any urgent enquiries from journalists, forward any emails to curators or colleagues that need a response. We make tea and read a paper – updating each other on anything of primary interest to the museum.

We dissect one paper each month in depth. I tend to prefer reading The Guardian, Independent, International Herald Tribune and a host of trade magazines from Museums Journal and The Art Newspaper to Marketing Week and BBC History magazine. I’ll chat with the team while meandering through the papers, thinking about issues, story ideas and generally catching up with everyone. I have BBC email alerts and am constantly looking at BBC online – it’s such a reliable way to stay plugged into the news agenda.

9.30am: If we have a press release to go out we send it out before the morning conferences. However, we’d usually sell-in stories a few days or weeks in advance. So for the next half an hour I’m really just sorting out urgent picture or filming enquiries and I’ll have a look at what has come through on Response Source or Ask Charity – to see if there are any journalist enquiries we could help out with. Keeping in touch with other departments is key to the success of our work, so I’ll often go and chat with the curators or other departments just to see how they are and what’s happening in their world.

10.00am: Meetings and phone calls tend to kick off from 10am. Today I have a meeting in fashion store about a potential photoshoot with a magazine using our collections. The senior curator of fashion and decorative arts, registrar and I look at some of the previous shoots the magazine has done and discuss the loan agreements of objects and practical arrangements about how to do the shoot. People often forget how far in advance museums need to plan some of the simplest arrangements – like just getting an object out of the institution!

10.30am: Rush back up to the office for our team meeting. Today I’m presenting on The Times and Sunday Times – we each dissect a paper from front to back going through key journalists, soft features to pitch for and really try to get underneath the skin of the paper.

11.15am: A film crew arrives, I run down to help them set up in the gallery, ringing one of the curators to come and join us. When the curator arrives, I leave them to it, I’ll check back in half an hour when they should have finished the interview.

11.30am: Our next big exhibition, Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story, is opening in May so I’m getting my press materials ready. I send some emails to the photographers to check if a few objects in the exhibition have been photographed, I then send the jpeg images and captions to our design department to incorporate into the press pack. I’m trying to place a feature about the exhibition in a national glossy magazine and have been speaking to the features editor. I give her a quick call to tell her that I should be able to get her the press pack in a couple of weeks, before other media outlets have it.

12.45pm: Lunch, we tend to all bring our own lunches in and work at our desks. However, today I’m meeting a journalist from The Times with the curator of Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story to discuss a potential story idea. We’re lucky that we have our own restaurant to meet people in, not too far from the office and allowing us to show-off every aspect of the museum, food included!

2.30pm: We’re launching a new app “Soundtrack to London” with Nokia this month, so I have a meeting with its communications team about what we can do jointly to promote this. Luckily, they are able to provide us with an up-to-date wizzy phone that will allow me to show journalists exactly what the app does. After the meeting I go back and create a Spotify playlist with our E-PR Officer, as a sample for journalists to listen to. I give a big London radio station a call to see if it would be interested in launching the app exclusively, that way maybe we can capitalise on some picture opportunities with their presenters using the app.

3.30pm: Every Friday I write an all-staff email with updates from the communications team and rest of the museum. I tend to start collating this every Monday morning, but it gets final sign off every Friday at noon. I add a few lines to this and then update and edit our media lists with any journalists who may have called or emailed requesting to hear from us.

3.45pm: We are launching new corporate hire rooms and I get sent a press release to look over from the designers – it’s far too trade focused for us, we need to add our corporate hire information into it and make it more appealing for the hospitality media. I rewrite the release to make it work for us. We’re running an exclusive with a hospitality trade magazine on the new venues so I let them have it early so they can see what the venue hire offer is going to be. I also check if the rooms are ready to be photographed. Nope! As with any redevelopment, delays are inevitable. I let the magazine know that we’re running behind and ask if they would mind delaying the news about the new offer. Thankfully they’ll delay!

4.30pm: I have a few random feature ideas that I’m pitching, so I email a freelancer and feature writer about coming in to see the collections and a curator – I’m lucky that I have freedom to pitch my ideas without too much sign-off. I’m pitching a piece at the moment to Metropolitan magazine (Eurostar) and Vogue. Sometimes it can take months for a feature to come out. The longest I have worked on a piece is about eleven months – I pitched an idea to World of Interiors about a button and cufflink acquisition in July 2009. The piece was fantastic, a real brand repositioning bit of coverage for the museum, however it eventually ran in June 2010!