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As the PR industry looks forward into the next few years, PR pros are being advised to move away from old-school metrics like ad-value equivalencies (AVEs) and impressions. But what should communicators focus on instead? According to Renee Spurlin, vice president of analytics and digital marketing at ARPR, personas and customer journey mapping are the metrics of the future, and all PR goals should be in alignment with them.

PayPal’s director of global corporate communications Amanda Miller cautions the next generation of PR professionals to realize that visuals, owned media and social are just a piece in an ecosystem that should include earned media, too.

PR News’ just-released 2018 Graduate Education Guide for Communicators looks at the career benefits of pursuing a master’s degree in communications and how it can be a differentiator in the talent marketplace.

It’s easy to see why some members of the public view PR with disdain. Plenty of stories featuring unethical PR practitioners have clouded the public’s mind. While the majority of PR pros are ethical, this, ironically, might be an issue. The ethical PR pros we deal with daily have inured us to the sometimes-unsavory image of PR. A trio of communicators argues it’s important to constantly emphasize the truth in PR.

While a successful donation campaign or high number of form fills is cause for celebration, it’s often what isn’t working that gets overlooked, whether you’re updating an existing site or launching a new one. A bad website might be compared to the Winchester Mystery House, famous for its eccentric and haphazard construction, including stairways and doors leading nowhere.

It hasn’t been a good week so far for cracker makers and food phobia sufferers. Two snack food giants, Mondelēz Global and Campbell Soup subsidiary Pepperidge Farm, have recalled iconic cracker products because a whey powder supplier has notified them that its ingredient may be tainted by Salmonella, which can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and fever, among other symptoms.

Communicators probably prefer a press-friendly CEO as opposed to one who’s media-averse. On the other hand, when the CEO’s mouth overshadows the brand and damages its reputation, communicators often reach for aspirin. An example, of course, is “Papa” John Schnatter. Another is Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, who recently spent a weekend deflecting stories.

Confidentiality is paramount to professional communicators, and while embargoes are hard to enforce, Google’s new “Confidential mode” positions Gmail as a top tier security safeguard. The problem with these new security features, says leading digital digital privacy nonprofit The Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that they offer users brittle security measures that can easily be breached.

We can all agree that food is an important part of our lives. So when the CEO of one of the fastest-growing startups issues a memo proclaiming that it will no longer serve meat at corporate functions or reimburse employees on expense accounts for meaty meals, the business world took note. Stomachs growled and the haters started to hate.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft announced a new program called the Data Transfer Project (DTP), an initiative to “create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.”