JOUR 4460

My final semester at the Mayborn school was not going great. I had never been a great student, but I wasn't terrible, I was getting by. Then I entered my senior year and I was starting to hit against a wall. All at once I needed to find an internship and I needed to get prepared to enter the real world. I had put off the work of preparing for a career for too long, and I needed to get it done. At the same time, I'd decided to work on campus during my final semester. I thought I could handle it, but I've been increasingly wrong. I felt like I was drowning. This week in my class on PR communications, we had a guest speaker; DCTA marketing and PR manager Adrienne Hamilton. She was there to give a talk about best practices, and how to find and keep work in the business. It's exactly the kind of advice I needed to hear, so I was listening. But soon her talk got a bit more real than I thought it would. She recounted a story of a coworker who she had gotten along well with, ...

The first and most important job of crisis communication is to clearly communicate what is happening. The Iowa Democratic Party has completely failed at that task. Greg Byrne As a PR student who is also a political junkie, the ongoing fiasco of the Iowa caucuses has captured most of my attention for the past week. Traditionally the "first in the nation" to hold its presidential nominating contest, the Iowa caucus has long had an important place in both major parties' selection process. Candidates shape their entire strategy around getting a strong result in Iowa; winning the caucus can turn an existing frontrunner into a guaranteed victor or it can catapult an unknown into the national spotlight. But it can't do that this year, because the process has failed to identify an agreed upon winner. And that failure could end up permanently downgrading how the Iowa caucus is seen both in the political realm and by the public at large. This piece is not going to be about t...

Purveyors of disinformation think of their services as a kind of strategic communication. But it is a fundamentally different practice. Greg Byrne (Image from Security and Human Rights Monitor ) How Is PR Different From Other Strategic Communications?  There is nothing inherent to human brains or human perception that distinguishes between true information and false information. Information is information; what distinguishes true information from false information is whether the other people we interact with agree that it is true or false. Whether that distinction lines up with objective reality has only tenuous relevance. What matters is that while advertising and marketing take that paradigm and run with it; creating whatever information they wish and using it as they see fit; public relations restricts itself to taking information that exists, determining its veracity, and presenting that information in a way that shapes a narrative to the organization's benefit. Publ...