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The new Chief Strategy Officer at FleishmanHillard, Marjorie Benzkofer, talks to us about how she keeps 4,000 employees working in concert and why brands continue to struggle aligning their values and actions.

At the heart of PR is storytelling. The ability to describe the goals and purpose of an organization stems from communicating a clear narrative. Building a brand newsroom allows for a living, breathing example of your priorities. While it’s nice to have a large budget, small expenditures can be used to create a respectable brand newsroom.

With school beginning soon (yes, the summer has flown by), we turn to educators, most of whom are or were PR pros, to tell us what areas of the profession communications students need additional training in. Then we ask PR pros to give us their assessment of incoming PR candidates and their training needs.

We assume journalists decide what to cover based on what their readers want to know about, right? Maybe not. A study of travel writers finds their top criteria is their interest in a topic. This means those who pitch to travel journalists must adjust their tactics.

With the unofficial start of the summer on July 4, Americans break out their grills. Demand for beef rises as a result. How can a vegetarian staple like hummus compete at this time of the year? Sabra Hummus did its homework and combined its research with humor for a campaign that goes to the heart of customers’ anxieties.

There was a slew of PR-related studies released recently. Some contained good news for the industry, others did not. Included in the findings: a good portion of executives in the U.K. don’t know what the abbreviation PR means; earned media remains a good bet; PR firm profitability remains in good shape; and MuckRack has added publisher data to its suite.

With PRNEWS’ Top Women in Healthcare Communications awards luncheon coming up later this month, we asked our data partner Shareablee to look at the most socially active pharma and healthcare insurance providers for the first months of 2019. Clearly, these sectors need to address their social media strategies as both suffered major downturns in consumer engagement vs 2018.

There are few topics that touch more people than healthcare. For the broader public, healthcare often is equated with cost. Fair enough: American healthcare spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is enormous. We asked finalists for PRNEWS’ Top Women in Healthcare Communications to discuss several issues, including communicating about cost.

This month Katie Paine looks at two crises in organizations that couldn’t be more different. First she analyzes the so-called mysterious deaths of Americans in The Dominican Republic; then she looks at scandal-plagued Deutsche Bank. The two took different crisis management approaches, though both ended up with similar results.

Creating and crafting a compelling story only looks easy. It’s hard work for PR pros. But how about teaching the basics of storytelling to members of the foreign service? Bob Pearson’s been doing that for several years. He shares tips he’s gained that have helped and can augment your storytelling too.