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Butterflies in your stomach. Dry mouth. Fantasy of escaping through the back door. It’s inevitable: at some point in your career, you’ll need to speak in front of an audience. Whether at a small meeting, a conference, a general session, on a panel, or on your own. For most of us, it’s about getting out […]

For reasons that escape me now, I said yes to my son Max when he asked if we could go to Comic Con together this past weekend.  Sounded like a fun day out in New York City: hanging with 125,000 pop culture fans at the Javits Center, more than half of whom came dressed as […]

Last week, I read a well-done blog from a writer and social-media consultant named Paul Gillin lamenting the death of BtoB Magazine, which Crain Communications said it is folding into Ad Age as of the first of next year. What especially caught my eye was this observation: “The advertising market for business publications is in […]

PR execs are not supposed to parrot the boss. At least on paper. Despite the tremendous changes throughout the PR field, one thing remains a constant: The ability of PR managers to take an alternative (if not contrarian) view of the party line and say to the top brass, “That may not be the best […]

I am among the unlucky who didn’t watch ‘Breaking Bad’ over the years and missed out on the binge-watching and chatter over Sunday’s finale. We must all make choices in our TV viewing and apparently I made a bad choice and there’s no going back to viewing all the seasons since I now know (spoiler […]

What is it about CEOs? How can so many of them be so smart and so accomplished, and yet still say so many bad or dumb things? It’s enough to keep a communications team up at night—and if they get to sleep, they have anxiety-driven nightmares. Just this week, Guido Barilla, the CEO of one […]

I was quoted in the newspaper the other day. The quote was technically inaccurate—I didn’t say what the reporter wrote that I said. But it was correct in the substance. In effect, the reporter understood my meaning, and got it right, but wasn’t writing down or transcribing my words verbatim. The quote was an approximation, […]

I picked up a sound piece of advice the other night, during a college admissions event my daughter and I attended.  Among the questions the prospective students asked of the alumni panel was whether the class sizes are so big that you can’t see, hear and learn in them.  The very articulate Class of 2010 […]

Last week’s episode in which Ketchum helped place an op-ed piece by Russian President Vladimir Putin in The New York Times has shined a less-than-flattering spotlight on the PR profession. In the Putin article, titled, “A Plea For Caution From Russia,” Putin seeks a solution to the violence in Syria. “Recent events have prompted me […]

When I started out in journalism—in daily newspapers—every so often you’d have a colleague opt out of the reporter’s life and move into PR instead. It always seemed like a loss, because some of those colleagues were the most capable among us. But journalism’s loss was PR’s gain. Today, in 2013, that’s perhaps more true […]