The four-word stacked headline appeared in the print version of The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday: WPP’s Sorrell Faces Probe The online headline went for the jugular, “WPP Is Looking at CEO Martin Sorrell’s Possible Misuse of Assets and Allegations of Improper Behavior.” Before digging in, let’s get the disclosure out of the way. I …more
The two agencies pen literally thousands of news releases for their clients each year, many addressing M&A. How tough can it be to apply this expertise to their own announcement? Of course, what the news release states doesn’t necessarily align with reality. As a public service, I’ve addressed the news release distributed over Business Wire …more
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how even smart people often fail at discerning poor quality information from the good stuff. It turns out that my cousin, Todd Quinn, a business and economics librarian at the University of New Mexico, deals with this issue every day and even teaches classes to help …more
Does PR Get Storytelling? As one way to answer the question, we randomly selected 50 news releases and applied three tests to them. Test #1 We analyzed the use of adjectives and adverbs, often a shortcut to genuine storytelling. If you say you’re great, no one believes you. . On the other hand, sharing a …more
Nieman Lab published an article last week, “Even Smart People Are Shockingly Bad at Analyzing Sources Online,” that lives up to the headline. In one exercise, those in the study — a mix of fact checkers, historians and students — were asked to compare two websites and make a judgment call on the one they …more
