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More than a hollow and cookie-cutter corporate document, “Toward a Vision for Racial Equity & Inclusion at Starbucks: Review and Recommendations” reads as a realigning of perspectives and priorities. This is the work of a brand that has taken a hard, honest look at itself and is ready to share what it has learned.

Internal communications is hard. So is change. There may be few things more difficult for communicators than to explain changes to employees. We asked 13 PR pros for their best practices in handling this delicate form of communications.

Patricia Bayerlein wrote about improving internal communications with an eye to better employee experiences in these pages in April. Today she offers methods and dashboards to measure how well a leader is doing in communicating corporate culture and values to employees.

Each month we ask communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There are few better to talk about Facebook marketing than Ryder Meehan, principal & strategist, Meehan Digital, and a former social marketer at Fossil and Samsung, among others, and James Nickerson, lead instructor, digital marketing at General Assembly.

With July 4 upon us it means summer vacation season also has arrived. The question, though, is whether or not communicators, who are responsible for safeguarding the reputation of brands, can ever truly be off the clock. We look at surveys about vacations and being able to log out from your PR job. Another topic surveyed is attitudes on branded content.

Often organizations try too hard to either capitalize on hot news topics or avoid them altogether. Neither strategy is particularly effective. Our resident crisis and measurement guru Katie Paine takes a look at Burger King’s whopping disasters overseas and how the EPA’s attempts at staying out of the headlines have backfired royally.

In our regular feature that looks at presentations, we present slides that offer suggestions on how to pitch media using social media. The thing is, don’t use social media to pitch. On the other hand, it can be very useful to research your targeted reporters and build relationships with them.

In each edition of PR News we highlight takeaways from an article or articles as well as additions to the PR News Resource Center, which is available only to subscribers at https://www.prnewsonline.com/subscriber-resources/

In a Wall Street Journal article about delays in the production of the Tesla Model 3, Tesla chairman and CEO Elon Musk compared Ford unfavorably to his own company, calling the legacy car maker a “morgue.” Ford’s head of communications took to Twitter and challenged Musk to visit a Ford plant.

It’s the early days for Instagram’s IGTV, a mobile-first, YouTube-esq social experience that will facilitate longer, vertical videos. It also will let brands get closer to audiences and allow people to discover them. Bell’s social media manager David Wolpert offers three ways communicators can work with IGTV to tell their brand’s stories.