The balance of power in media channels has shifted. It used to be that if a company felt wronged by the media, the next logical step involved arranging a press tour to counter the “injustice.” Thanks to the rise of owned media and paid content sometimes masquerading as journalism, companies are no longer dependent on …more
Correcting a statistic in a media story is easy. If a company reduces its workforce by 100, but the journalist accidentally added a zero so the number reads 1,000, you reach out to the publication and they run a correction. Unfortunately, inaccuracies in media stories are often not so black and white. Context, nuance, history, …more
I’m not a big of fan of research on journalists. The studies always “reveal” the same core points: Don’t mass blast email pitches to journalists. Offer a point of view, not vanilla commentary. Stop foisting non-disclosure agreements on us. Read the room (understand the journalist’s readership). Corporate speak dulls the senses. There should be …more
By Matt Burrows, Senior Account Executive At first glance, dentistry might seem like the last profession you should address to get thoughts on storytelling, with most conversations with your dentist consisting of them asking questions while your mouth is open to the world. So when Dan Tynan — journalist, communications writer and Thought Follower …more
Hong Kong continues to serve as an important media hub for Asia. With this in mind, Alessandra Tinio, an account director in our Hong Kong office, summarized a panel she attended that featured three tech journalists: Lulu Yilun Chen: Senior reporter with Bloomberg in Hong Kong, covering technology. A regular commentator on Bloomberg TV and …more
The public relations function typically constructs media pitches based on the story that the company wants to tell. These stories tend to be pristine narratives — the sun is shining; birds are chirping — that dull the senses. That largely explains why 95%+ of pitches to the business media fail. Instead, we should be thinking …more
The news release was born on Oct. 28, 1906. Fast forwarding to 2015, organizations distributed roughly 762,000 news releases on wire services. Our back-of-the-envelope math figures 30 hours went into each news release at $200 per hour. The punch line — Organizations spent around $4.5B on the creation of news release back in 2015, a …more
You’ve heard the phrase, “read the room.” Huawei can’t read the room. In spite of an in-house communications team that includes talented pros from the West, they continue to make amateur mistakes. The latest comes in the form of an open letter to the U.S. media published last week in The Wall Street Journal. If …more
Note: A version of this essay appeared in EE Times. Beleaguered. That’s the word that seems tethered to Huawei these days. Yet, “beset with difficulties” doesn’t quite capture what the telecom giant is experiencing. As a student of communications — the type with words, not satellites — I’ve been observing Huawei from afar since …more
