Media Training

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.

Everyone has that one item he or she simply can’t live without. PR News asked its readers on Facebook to tell us exactly what that thing is, and the results are in.

Communications professionals spend a lot of time talking about Big Data these days. A keyword search for the term on PR Newswire yields about 500 press releases issued

It wasn’t going to be a popular trip. Or a convenient one. Faced with having to shutter a major manufacturing site in Europe, the CEO of a well-known healthcare brand committed to personally sharing news with the country’s head of government, who had been lobbying for its continued operation.

If Anthony Weiner thought his campaign woes couldn’t get any worse, then Barbara Morgan likely changed his mind. Morgan is Weiner’s communication director and yesterday she responded to a former intern’s tell-all article in the Daily News with a barrage of insults and obscenities, which adds yet another layer of discreditable behavior to the campaign.

A four-year-old lawsuit concerning the false advertising of Vitaminwater as a health drink continues to cause problems for Coca-Cola. The soft drink giant’s legal team has argued from the beginning that: “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.”

By now, you’ve probably seen the video of a FedEx courier carelessly tossing bosses into the back of her truck. The other man in the video is a security guard named Bob Marge, and he wants you to know that he’s sorry.

Personally, most of us know that communication is more about listening than talking. As marketers and corporate communicators, however, our professional training has too often driven us to think of our job as the science of monitoring, followed by the art of persuasion.

Job interviews can be tough, not just for the interviewee, but also the interviewer. Everyone wants to present their best self, but sometimes nerves can get the best of us, which can lead to a rambling of clichés.