Tiger Woods’s recent travails have once again brought to light the debate about what constitutes good and bad media- and public-relations. Journalists I suppose are well positioned to debate the topic, but reporters analyzing the efficacy of communications I find disconcerting.
The other night on CNN (inventors of Reality TV) a USA Today reporter appeared with Campbell Brown [...]

This morning, the TV newscast was running a continuous loop of footage of a stroller rolling onto train tracks in Australia just seconds before the train roared in. Miraculously the baby survived.  
And of course, yesterday apparently the full resources of the entire Western news media were engaged in tracking a runaway, flying saucer-shaped balloon [...]

The Ryerson Review of Journalism has an interesting story about the dying art of writing tabloid headlines – classics like the New York Post’s “Headless body in topless bar” from 1983 and inadvertently funny ones like “Grandmother of eight makes hole in one.”
Variety, the entertainment industry newspaper, has been famous for its distinctive “slanguage” headlines [...]

A local all-news radio station here has launched a street marketing campaign that features, among other things, prostitutes carrying signs that say “Should prostitution be legal?  
So what do we think:
a) provocative, attention-grabbing, out of the box thinking?
b) exploitive use of society’s most vulnerable?
c) marketing that exists solely to drive publicity?

I’ll leave it to others to [...]

As the end of 2008 quickly approaches, the media will no doubt remind us of the top stories of 2008. From Obama fever and the economic crisis to Britney’s meltdown(s), you can be sure these items will make “the list.”
What about Canadian news? What will stand out to you? The October election or maybe the [...]

We PR people put a lot of stock in headlines. A headline is weighted heavily in terms of the overall “value” that an article might have. Readers read the headline first, and it’s generally the headline that will make them decide whether or not to read the text.
I know that I’m like just about everyone [...]