BYU Public Relations Alum Emily Hellewell Shares Her Experience in the Communications Industry
Fresh out of college, BYU Public Relations (PR) alum Emily Hellewell landed a job in Washington D.C. with National Public Radio (NPR). Eventually, her career brought her back to Utah for positions with BYU University Communications, Bonneville Communications Corporation and now Deseret News as the company’s newest vice president of marketing and creative services.
In the Q&A below, Hellewell gives insight about her experience in the communications field with regard to the creativity, problem solving and versatility that comes with working in such a tough yet exciting industry.
Q: What excites you most about working in communications?
Hellewell: The thing I’ve always loved about being in communications is the variety of it. You can work in any industry, in any size of company, and so you get a lot of exposure to a variety of businesses and organizations — nonprofit, for profit, privately owned, publicly traded. There’s so much variety and potential for where you can go and there are so many different practices of communications. There’s writing and editing, social media, events, strategy and just so many different types of work and so your day to day looks different. I really love that variety.
Q: Tell me about your current role at Deseret News. What about this position is unique or exciting?
Hellewell: I started working at Deseret News at the beginning of June of 2024 and so I’m still getting my hands wrapped around it all to understand the particular needs and challenges of the organization. The thing that’s exciting to me is there is a lot of opportunity and potential. It’s an organization that’s in a tough industry — media is tough but the Deseret News in particular seems very willing to try things out. We’re trying to reach an audience, we’re trying to engage them, we’re trying to find what they want and what they need and reach them where they are and we have some amount of latitude to be able to do that. We can take all the great things from traditional communications while also being more cutting edge. It feels like a very creative space in that way, especially in my role leading communications and marketing for Deseret News.
Q: What parts of public relations work have you found to be the most challenging, and how have you navigated finding solutions to those challenges?
Hellewell: Public relations is challenging because the media industry itself is changing so dramatically. There are fewer reporters covering more things. Pitching to a reporter who covers a very specific niche is not an option anymore. Getting attention through traditional public relations is really hard and so it requires you to be a little more creative.
Alternatively, brands and companies have more spaces to talk about their own brand using social platforms. They can share more about what they are doing and who they are, rather than waiting for the local paper or the national paper to cover them.
I try to find a range of solutions to overcome these challenges. It's not going to be just one solution. I really want our PR team to grab the attention of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Plus, our social team and marketing team are working on how we talk about ourselves in the channels that we already own.
Q: What is one moment from your undergraduate experience that has impacted your career?
Hellewell: In the communications major, I had an emphasis in public relations. At the time, PR students spent a semester writing for the Daily Universe. That was really exciting to me because I got to try out journalism — and I loved it! At the end of that semester, I even considered switching majors, but as I was so close to graduation and I also really liked PR, I stayed.
But working in a newsroom gave me a lot of good experience. My first job out of college was working at NPR on the communications team. I believe I was hired, at least in part, because I had newsroom experience. I knew how to talk to journalists and interact with journalists because I had been one. Even now at my job at the Deseret News my newsroom experience also comes into play. I think that even though you’re niche and focused on your specific discipline it is helpful to participate in a class, experience or workshop in a tangential field. Working in a different field provides a broader BYU education that helps you get more experience that makes you a more attractive employee in the future.
I also really appreciated that I had a lot of professors for whom teaching was their second career. They had worked in the industry and then were also teaching or came back to teaching. That was really helpful for me because they gave a lot of insight and added color to what we were reading in our textbook. That real world experience from their careers helped me relate to what I was learning.
Q: How has BYU's dual heritage of faith and academia influenced your approach to communications and life?
Hellewell: It was lovely to be in a space where faith was openly talked about and the basic tenets of beliefs were the same among all or almost all the people that I interacted with. Campus felt like an open place to be expressive about what you were thinking about and going through and it gave me a little more confidence and helped me develop my own testimony.
I would hope that simply living the principles of the gospel make me a kinder and more compassionate person. Those things are really crucial in any type of communications role because you’re interacting and engaging with other humans; being kind and compassionate is the best way to do that.
Q: Anything else you would share with students about your journey as a communications professional?
Hellewell: I have people that I work with who are on my team who are designers — graphic designers, illustrators, other design roles that are called creatives. My role is creative in the sense that I problem solve in unique ways. I have a limited budget, limited resources, limited time, and I have to figure out how to take big ideas and chip away at them piece by piece. What do I do when I come up against roadblocks? Think creatively and think in new and different ways. I figure out different alternatives and different ways to solve an issue because solution one might not work all the way, solution two might not work all the way but maybe by solution three we can get there.