Media Relations

The U.S. recycling rate has been holding at a paltry 34% for the past few years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. What’s more, recyclable materials that are worth billions of dollars are still ending up in landfills each year.

Whether it’s due to a lack of measurement tools, budgetary constraints or simple inertia, there is a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality when it comes to how communicators can make better use of things live video, audio, animation, gamifiication, slideshows and infographics in their overall messaging.

I was at a PR News Conference a couple of weeks ago, and during a Q&A with a panel critiquing press inquiries, the question came up of when and how to follow-up with a non-responsive… Continued

It’s been a rough week for Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org, a nonprofit “committed to offering women the ongoing inspiration and support to help them achieve their goals.”

What do The New York Times, the Huffington Post and Verizon Wireless all have in common? All three brands have moved from real-time communications to “live” broadcasting—through video.

When putting together a PR event or promotional stunt, communicators need to consider the law of unintended consequences. The folks at LG didn’t think about that, apparently, when they started a race in Seoul to grab smartphone vouchers hanging from helium balloons, resulting in 20 people being injured and seven sent to the hospital.

When we practice good pitching techniques and follow up in a convenient fashion, we’re regarded in the newsrooms we serve as the blaring siren of an emergency vehicle. Bad pitching and inconvenient follow-up comes across as the continual alarm of a minivan. I

With the deluge of data rushing at journalists on a daily basis, there’s a key question you should ask before you send along that press release: So what? If your latest “news” doesn’t have a satisfying answer to that question, you may as well send it to the abyss.

PR News’ PR Agency Elite Awards recognize agencies in 23 practice areas, such as branding, business to business, community relations, crisis management, digital/social media, internal communications, media relations, mulitcultural PR, nonprofit/association and reputation management. All of the finalists will be celebrated at a luncheon on Sept. 10, 2013 at the Grand Hyatt in New York.

A great quotation can be the perfect bait for a journalist and, as New York University’s Don Bates says, “because they’re someone’s ‘own’ words, editors will almost never edit them except to correct a grammatical error.”