Taxes Are Good, Actually
Taxes aren’t fun to pay. There, I said it.
Tens of thousands of dollars of your hard-earned money, the end result of your work, your strife, your sleepless nights and stress headaches and endless meetings that take longer than they should, don’t make it to your pocket by a matter of law, a debt we owe before we earn a dime. Taxes suck, but they aren’t bad, any more than chemotherapy is bad because it sucks. They are how our community takes care of itself.
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Leading Through Adversity: Guiding Principles for Leadership Through COVID-19 And Beyond
By now, it’s clear that we’ll be dealing with the massive changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic for the foreseeable future. Experts predict periodic outbreaks, secondary and tertiary waves of disease, and lockdowns and quarantines at least through the next eighteen months. The whole world will have to redefine how we work, go to school, connect with loved ones, and really every aspect of our lives as we adapt to this new normal for the long haul. Despite this total upheaval, some things will remain ever present, including our need for community as we cope with the anxiety, frustrations, and growing pains that come with change.
The US seems poised to reopen – to some degree or another – over the next few months, with some states already lifting their lockdown measures on restaurants, parks, and other public spaces. Corporate leadership will soon face new challenges with adhering to social distancing policies and the potential for continuing lockdowns, as well as responding to an anxious audience of both employees and customers.
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Fighting the Other Pandemic: Misinformation
In the wake of the explosive COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, governments, health organizations and news organizations have been struggling to contain both the virus and the rampant misinformation about it that continues to permeate the media landscape. Inconsistent and contradictory information has created confusion and a lack of trust, and has done little to encourage people to take reasonable precautions. The goal of any leader or communication professional in a crisis like this should be to develop a clear, coherent and consistent messaging strategy to ensure public health.
The global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused an avalanche of false claims and misinformation. Conspiracies abound, spread through social media and word-of-mouth, regarding the origin of the virus as well as how it can be contracted, transmitted and treated. These rumors lend credence to the global anxiety about if and how the disease can be contained.
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The Great Reckoning: Why So Many Brands Got Called Out
The racial reckoning of 2020 – in which politicians, corporations, organizations, influencers and celebrities large and small have been forced to acknowledge and answer for the structural inequalities present within their organizations and the United States at large – is still in full swing. The tireless advocacy of protestors and activists brought these issues to a critical mass while pushing for justice after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police in May.
As protests continue across the country, companies have felt and answered an obligation – at times moral but often self-serving as well – to release statements showing support for these issues, which an increasing majority of Americans believe in. The best of these statements acknowledge their role in perpetuating inequality and outline concrete steps to dismantling it within their organizations. But many of these statements have rightfully been met with public razing for not matching up with the company’s culture and actions, with many, most often employees and former employees, speaking out about the brand’s own covert or overt structural discrimination and prejudice.
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The Real Danger in Sinclair Broadcast’s ‘Fake News’ Scandal
Over the last month, viewers in dozens of local media markets across the country began to hear impassioned warnings from their trusted local anchors about the danger mainstream media outlets and "false news" posed to democracy. It was soon discovered that these weren't genuine outpourings of principle or belief from the anchors, but scripted monologues mandated by their superiors, and repeated verbatim across the country. Sinclair Broadcast Group, the single largest owner of local television stations in the United States, had sent down marching orders; these were must-runs. Must-runs are nothing new for Sinclair station employees; they've been happening for ages: prepackaged stories designed to be aired over a specific period of time during local newscasts, and very often politically charged. They've included mandatory daily terrorism stories, hit pieces on Hillary Clinton, and forceful denunciations of "fake news," a term with which we are all by now deeply familiar. The past month's word-for-word diatribes are simply the latest example of this, and notably, have finally caught public notice.
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The Tragedy of Hope Hicks – And How She Failed the PR Profession
The first thing that needs to be said is that Hope Hicks is twenty-nine years old. Hicks’s relative youth needs to be stated upfront because she’s caught up in a scandalous administration that has felled people with far more experience and expertise than she; politics is nasty even when you know what you’re doing, and I very much get the impression that Hicks found herself in the Trump family whirlwind and, before she knew it, was White House Communications Director – a post two others had vacated in under a year before her, and which her immediate predecessor held for less than two weeks. In other words, the Trump administration takes its toll on battle-hardened veterans, and Hicks was prepared neither for Washington, nor the unique stresses of the Trump era. Her failures, then, may be forgivable. Or at least not totally incomprehensible.
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The Year Ahead in Public Relations
There is an undeniable hopefulness in doing year-ahead trend articles. They’re affirmations, at the darkest time of the year, that life will continue much as it has. Against all odds, we made it to 2018 (relatively) unscathed. Despite some saber-rattling bluster from both Washington and Pyongyang at the beginning of the year, no nuclear war has as yet proved forthcoming, and while the ongoing tumult of the President’s twitter account remains a source of constant chaos, it hasn’t turned openly destructive in ways that can’t be contained. So, with the self-aware caveat that this list will be entirely invalidated should missiles start flying, let’s take a look at the remaining 354 days of the year ahead of us and the PR stories I expect to undergo significant developments and dominate the headlines.
Torpedoes be damned! Full speed ahead!
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A Look Back at 2017's Public Relations Winners & Losers
It’s that time of year again! Was it really only a year ago that we were talking about Leslie Jones and the Ghostbusters movie, Pokemon Go, and Samsung’s exploding phone? 2017 has felt like a lifetime. And in that lifetime (as one would expect), a lot has happened. Let’s take a look!
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Everything Counts but Nothing Matters: Roy Moore & the Strange New World of Public Relations
There’s a story that outlines, in crystal clear terms, the strange new world that the art of modern public relations inhabits.
It’s a story that just keeps going: the endless parade of powerful men being exposed as sexual predators and serial harassers. It’s beyond unnecessary to give the rundown; we all know the big names, and as their numbers grow, it becomes a torrent that’s pointless to try to keep up with. And the unmaskings have reached Congress as well, having already felled Democrats Al Franken and John Conyers and Republican Trent Franks.
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Apple's Foxconn Problem
At first, there seems to be a banal inevitability to headlines about Apple benefitting from shady labor practices, which makes it easy to sweep reports that Apple’s flagship luxury phone, the iPhone X, was reportedly manufactured using illegal student labor. Much like news about the president saying terrible, indefensible things or that yet another beloved media icon is facing allegations of being a sexual predator, it’s almost part of the background radiation of our times; Al Franken has been accused of assaulting a sleeping woman, and the most popular phone in the world is reportedly being built by exploited Chinese labor.
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The Weight of Trump: The GOP's Narrow PR Path to 2018
This past Tuesday, the world rocked a little bit.
All told, it was a comparatively minor quake, nothing like the monster tremors of 2016 that seemed to shake the very foundations of reality for a large swathe of the American people. But the first real electoral test of the Trump coalition – that erstwhile basket of deplorables – did not go terribly well for the Grand Old Party. I suspect one would not be remiss in describing the results as fundamentally catastrophic.
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So You're Employing a Serial Predator
Since the Weinstein scandal broke – a long-simmering open secret in Hollywood going back at least as far as Courtney Love’s infamous, televised 2005 warning, and probably a lot further – there’s been a spate of other abuses coming to light. Mark Halperin. James Toback. George HW Bush. Just yesterday, Kevin Spacey was added to the list for an alleged 1986 incident with actor Anthony Rapp. Today? Andy Dick, after a decades-long string of arrests for sexual assault. All of this on top of the Bill O’Reilly scandal earlier this year.
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Szechuan Fury: Are Brands Responsible for their Fans?
I’d like to start with an image: a grown man climbing on top of a McDonald’s serving counter, jumping up and down like a toddler throwing a tantrum because there is not, of all things, a particular McNugget cartoon tie-in dipping sauce.
Let’s continue with another image: crowds of adults surrounding McDonald’s across the country, chanting “We want sauce! We want sauce!”
Imagine scenes like these repeating themselves around the country as people lose their minds over the unavailability of, of all things, a McDonald’s Szechuan-flavored sauce originally released in 1998 as a marketing tie-in with Disney’s Mulan. Imagine all of this is being done in the name of an adult-oriented cartoon show. Now imagine being the people who own it.
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