Nice work if you can get it: The Royal Family is seeking help with its public relations
The good news for unemployed journalists: There’s a job opening in public relations.
The bad news: It’s doing PR for the Royal Family.
This is like the Hindenburg advertising for a firefighter, like Rasputin advertising for a physical therapist, like Lauren Boebert advertising for a life coach.
But there it is, right there on LinkedIn: Communications assistant for the Royal Household, on-site, full time, salary $32,000. Gee, I wonder what happened to the last one? Probably went fishtailing out the royal parking lot spraying gravel and screaming, “This, I don’t need.”
Not for the same money you could make working at the Home Depot. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about the relationship between the Royal Family and the real world? “We’d like you to build a bridge across the North Sea. Here’s 50 bucks for the effort, buy yourself something nice.”
Like being in the entourage of Jay-Z, part of your compensation is the reflected glory of working at Britain’s most storied address. “It's developing your skills on a worldwide platform,” reads tha ad. “And it’s pride in joining the team at the heart of a world famous institution. This is what makes working for the Royal Household exceptional.”
Yeah, lucky you.
In the most unfortunate ad copy ever, the LinkedIn in job description says the successful applicant will be responsible for handling “Museums, Historical Sites and Zoos.” That may be the most valid script to come out of the royal palace since the Magna Carta.
But it’s not just that the Royal Family is — how do we say — “different.” As their PR flak, you would have to feed logical explanations to a public that is in no mood for logical explanation. For conspiracy theories, that broad expanse of humanity that considers itself “Royal Watchers” makes QAnon look like “60 Minutes.”
Faced with a cancer diagnosis, Princess Catherine asked for a little peace and quiet. But of course that wouldn’t do. A medical condition couldn’t be the explanation for her absence from public life — it must be because the princess is actually a space alien who has left Earth for a few months to visit her family on Planet Zorg.
Either that or she fancied herself too good to perform typical royal tasks, which include showing up at ribbon cuttings at the British equivalent of a new Sheetz.
But then when she laid bare her most private health-related details in a video last week, the response was twofold: One was a great wave of sympathy, as newspapers whose headlines the day before were blaring for Kate to open up and come clean were now blaring, with no apparent sense of irony, that the public has been a fiend for not respecting her privacy.
The second response was the never-before-heard-of, fail-to-compute circumstance that all this time someone in the Royal Family had been telling the truth. You mean she’s not a space alien? Who would have thought?
So if you’re an up and coming marketer and you want to step into that hornet’s nest, knock yourself out. The ad continues that “The Royal Communications team promotes the work, role, relevance and value of the Royal Family to a worldwide audience. The reaction to our work is always high-profile.”
High profile is one way to put it. Although you could say the same about working at an inner city liquor store. The other loaded line in the ad copy is that the successful applicant will need to be “able to effectively connect with a diverse range of individuals, both internally and externally.” Whether it’s the press or the Royals, just think of it all as one big asylum.
But there are benefits! They include a “complimentary lunch on-site” (work at your desk) and “20% off at our Royal Collection Trust Shops.”
Seriously? Sounds like the Royals' PR department could use a PR department.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: The Royal Family is hiring — for a public relations assistant
