Latest Posts

More than 5,000 press releases are issued each day and reporters get roughly 100 pitches daily via email. So, how can you produce a release that stands out from the crowd? That was the question tackled by Mandy Menaker, head of PR and brand development for Shapr, and Erin Burke, director and vice president of APCO Worldwide, at the PR News Press Release Writing Workshop at the Yale Club in New York.

“Luxury music festival” or “$100 million lawsuit”? All it took was one weekend of social media outrage for the Fyre Festival, a music festival scheduled to start April 27 in the Bahamas, to see its reputation shift from the former to the latter. Concertgoers who had paid up to $12,000 per ticket arrived at a bare-bones campsite in disarray, learned that musical acts had pulled out of the festival and had a difficult time leaving the island location.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel announcements in PR, communications and marketing. This week stories featured include one about United Airlines settling with Dr. David Dao and CEO Oscar Munoz repenting for the widely viewed video of the doctor being dragged down the aisle of a United Flight. There’s also a story about ESPN illustrating how lines are blurring between internal and external communications.

Every fall, PR News benchmarks excellence in PR, marketing and communications campaigns with its annual Platinum PR Awards luncheon. At the luncheon, award winners are recognized for outstanding contributions to the communications and marketing landscape, from video campaigns to social media initiatives to media events and more. With the Platinum PR Awards entry deadline around the corner on May 5, it’s an ideal time to take a look back at one of 2016’s Platinum awardees, Michelin, and examine how their campaign is having a lasting impact in the communications world and beyond.

What? Another press release to write? Fine. Before you reach for the keyboard, however, think about journalists who must read scores of jargon-filled, dense releases that tired PR pros crank out on demand. With a little practice and a fresh red pen, though, any press release can be transformed from a total bore to a piece of messaging your brand (and the media) will appreciate.

Most of us wish we could apologize to people in our past for one thing or another. As time passes, though, an apology can become a form of stalking or a self-centered quest for redemption. That person whose feelings you hurt badly when you were 18? She doesn’t want to hear from you now. If only you could board a magical aircraft, zoom back in time and make things right. Speaking of aircraft, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz sent an email on April 27 to customers apologizing for breaking the bonds of trust “when a passenger was forcibly removed” from one of its planes.

Leave it to a media company to offer a mini-case study in media relations. ESPN cut around 100 jobs on Wednesday, about half of which affected on-air talent. While the cuts were expected, they went deeper than many industry-watchers anticipated. Thanks to ESPN’s transparency about the layoffs, many of its talking points in its prepared statements became the foundation of coverage from media outlets.

When the mighty Google changes its algorithm, all of PR is pushed in the same direction by the shockwave; here’s hoping that the most recent change will nudge us into a better place. The search engine’s latest move is to demote (but not remove) pages that propagate lies, hoaxes, conspiracy theories and other junk content that more and more is collectively being labeled “fake news.”

Daniella Peting follows one cardinal rule for live streaming: Don’t wing it. Peting, who manages Motorola Solutions’ social media presence in North America and co-leads the company’s Global Social Media Center of Excellence, makes a point of fully preparing every element of a live broadcast from conception to execution.

A salesperson, a PR manager and a marketer walk into a bar…or so your bottom line wishes. The birth of social media forced organizations to draw up new business strategies to stay competitive in the digital space. And so they did—one department at a time. Ask a salesperson what their social strategy is, or even what social media means to her profit goals and she will probably give you a completely different answer than the PR or marketing manager within the same organization. So how can you build a truly integrated communications team? By following these three steps.