Over the years, I’ve been called many things during my PR career: A gatekeeper, a purveyor of false information, a distorter of the truth, a defender of the indefensible, a maverick, and a cynic. The first four comments were made to me by journalists who didn’t know...
Many corporations are or will shortly start planning promotional campaigns for Major League Baseball’s playoffs and World Series and for the beginning of the National Football League season and Super Bowl. For a PR staffer being assigned to one of those accounts, it...
Below is an article about my experiences with “name” companies, detailing both good and bad experiences I had with the companies when attempting to contact them regarding my recent bout with Covid. In the great Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” Rex Harrison sang a song...
Ever since the May 2 leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe V. Wade, the questions on how corporations should react to the brief has been a constant topic of news articles. And as the date draws closer to the expected release of the Supreme Court’s...
For several years before entering the PR business, I was a reporter and editor at several New York City newspapers and wire services. It was because of my experience during my journalism days that I differed on my approach to handling a PR crisis when I joined the PR...
The early weeks of 2022 have proved one thing: Sports marketers should always have a back-up plan because as Robert Burns wrote in his poem To a Mouse, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” Burns wrote this sage advice in 1785, long before there...
Every public relations program has the risk of turning sour and producing negative publicity for the client. There is no way to prevent this from happening. The reasons are many: A new product might not stand up to the claims of the client that it is superior to...
Sponsors of the 2021 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo had to cancel promotional plans because of the Covid-19 outbreak. Sponsors of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics did the same—but the cutbacks were not limited to the continuing Covid pandemic. Accusations of human...
After several years of being a freelance reporter for a number of New York daily newspapers, I was offered a full-time job at one of them. But it wasn’t as a reporter. I was assigned to a news desk, where I had to read all of the competing newspapers to see if they...
The year 2021 has provided some important lessons for PR practitioners. Unfortunately, all of them are the result of sad events. In the order of the most recent, as of December 15, here are several that I consider provide PR lessons that relate to our business. ...
My first job in the media business was as a sports reporter. But after a few years covering fun and games I knew, as did many sports reporters before me, that there were much more important subjects to cover—like war and peace and politics. But my chance of covering...
Even though I covered sports for about a decade as a journalist prior to entering the PR business, and was also the sports marketing specialist for many years at Burson-Marsteller (in addition to playing key roles on none sports accounts), I always cautioned clients...