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Brand communicators can’t afford to lock away their smartphones for three-hour chunks during workweeks, however you define a workweek. They’re paid to stay connected, monitor brand sentiment, protect and enhance their brand’s or their clients’ reputations. Yet the requirements of their jobs put them at risk of addiction to digital devices.

Plagiarism happens, sometimes intentionally, other times accidentally. What do communicators need to know about plagiarism? And how can they avoid plagiarizing others? And, yes, themselves?

With more than 1.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook already gives marketers better reach and audience insight than any other platform on the web. Now, with Facebook Live, marketers can get face-to-face with their audience in real-time. It’s a new era for both engagement and traffic, when done correctly. But how can marketers leverage the platform to drive more users to their site? Here are four tips to keep in mind to optimize your Facebook Live strategy.

Getting earned media just got a little bit harder. Magazine publisher Time Inc.’s revenue woes continue. “Smelling blood, potential acquirers have been circling the company for months,” according to a report in the New York Times. The pool of full-time journalists may soon get a little shallower.

From phony click-bait news sites, to unqualified sources to falsified stories, fake news, however you define it, is a threat to the PR industry. If our job is to ethically persuade public opinion by working with credible media, it follows that it’s vital that the public’s trust in a free press not be eroded. To go a step further, if the practice of PR is going to survive, good journalism must thrive. For that reason, it is critical that PR pros be more accountable than ever for their work.

Our weekly roundup of stories, trends and personnel moves in PR and communications. This week we feature a story timed to International Women’s Day, a reminder about why communicators need to monitor employees’ social media accounts 24/7 and a fond remembrance of Finn Partners’ Anne Glauber.

There was more going on at the Oscars than the PR issues a pair of PwC employees caused. There was a great deal of social media traffic involving sponsors, film brands and the celebrity presenters, among others. Using Shareablee data provided to us we found Instagram was the dominant social platform during the broadcast. For example Viola Davis’ Instagram feed drove more than half of her total actions. Presenter Hailee Steinfeld posted just five times, all to her Instagram account.

New digital platforms are driving the evolution of communications departments into media conglomerates, generating graphic, video and other content for both broad and targeted audiences. The agenda spans from an annual horizon of what we need to communicate, all the way down to what just happened a moment ago online and whether there is an organic way to join the conversation. So, Southwest Airlines is exploring how to create content from conversation trends, born out of data and presented in a timely manner.

Every brand tailors its image on social media. Every brand engages in crisis management on social media. From intranets for internal communications to publicizing CSR, social media is at the fore of what we do—except for media relations. Somehow, many PR professionals are still timid to venture beyond email when contacting journalists. It’s an understandable instinct. People don’t like their social life mixing too much with work. But social media made it easier than ever for PR pros to stay involved with journalists, and that kind of relationship now comes with the territory for them.

It’s official: Snap Inc. has gone public. Today, the parent company of Snapchat began trading under the ticker symbol SNAP, a day after pricing its eagerly anticipated IPO at $17 a share. That might’ve been a conservative estimate: When shares began trading this morning, they opened at $24 a share, which would value the company at more than $30 billion. But the real question hanging over Snap isn’t about its short-term luster, but its long-term prospects.