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As we’ve seen in recent weeks, a tumultuous news cycle—compounded by an online community rattled by recent violent events—can be a breeding ground for rumors, hoaxes and false reports. In the last few days alone, the San Antonio shooter was misidentified as a member of both the alt-right and alt-left movements, Twitter swirled with rumors of Snapchat’s demise and Facebook pulled a failed fake-news curtailing experiment.

Disney recently barred a Los Angeles Times film critic from pre-screening its movies in retaliation for unfavorable coverage, and many critics and critics associations are showing solidarity by refusing to review or give awards to Disney movies. The feud calls into question Disney’s media relations strategy—rather than defuse an issue it had with one media outlet, it poured fuel on the fire and in the process, the story it disputes has been amplified.

There is good news and bad news in this latest PR Council survey of its roughly 100 member firms. First, the good news: 66% of those who replied said revenue for 2017 is ahead of 2016 and that projections are on target or better than first forecast. The not-so-good news is that management consultancies want to eat PR’s lunch.

In this first article of a five-part series produced with partner PublicRelay, a media monitoring and analytics firm, we will examine the common challenges of measuring communications data so it can be turned into useful insights that will help not only communicators but the business overall.

Juli Briskman, who worked in marketing and communications, was fired from Akima LLC for using the photo of her flipping-off President Trump’s motorcade as her profile photo. While we don’t know Akima’s exact social media policy, many companies have taken similar actions—in the eyes of employers, an employee’s personal social media pages reflect on a company.

Scheduling tweets and recycling old content are best practices, but the NRA failed to take into account that it is an extremely crisis-prone brand and scheduled a tweet that looked insensitive in the context of the Texas church shooting. This should be addressed in every brand’s crisis plan.

When Papa John’s blamed its declining sales on the issue of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem, many found the correlation hard to believe. DiGiorno Pizza saw the opportunity to call them out for it on Twitter and did not hold back, while Pizza Hut subtly thrust itself into the spotlight.

A difficult week for Twitter continued with an 11-minute shutdown of President Trump’s Twitter account. What steps Twitter plans to take to prevent another hijacking of the most influential Twitter account in the U.S. remain to be seen.

As so often happens when a violent tragedy strikes and claims human lives, brands were taken along for the sad and sobering ride this week. As the usual questions about gun control and immigration arise for America, questions arise as well for Walmart, The Home Depot and Uber about what and how they should communicate to their stakeholders to reassure and to help.

By now, nearly everyone in Washington, D.C., has heard about the seemingly damaging article in this morning’s Politico. Former DNC chair Donna Brazile writes that she has solid proof that the Hillary Clinton campaign rigged the party’s nomination. The question for PR pros, of course, is what advice would you offer to Hillary Clinton now? Should she contest the article, hold a press conference, release a statement or remain silent?