Autoethnography: The story of starting in a new public relations role

This autoethnography is an exercise in documenting and reflecting on my
personal experience starting in a new role as the national public relations
manager for a large third sector organisation, located in Newcastle, Australia.
In it, I take a social constructionist approach wherein I work from the
underlying autoethnographic assumption that reality is socially constructed
and I, in telling this story, am contributing to the social construction of what is
known about public relations practice. Described by O’Hara (2018) as “a way
of knowing” (p. 14) autoethnography is distinctive inasmuch as it
acknowledges the researcher’s feelings about their lived experiences, and
wherein the researcher is both the observer and the participant in the research.
As such, this story is perhaps somewhat messier than many accounts of public
relations practice, and I seek to be neither objective nor present a totality of
my lived experience. Rather, by reporting and reflecting on my self-personal
interest and professional experience, and my memories of that experience, my
hope is that this autoethnography shows that even for experienced
practitioners, starting in a new public relations role is not without its
challenges