This headline from Bloomberg showed up in my Twitter feed yesterday (h/t Dorothy Crenshaw): “Public Relations Jobs Boom as Buffett Sees Newspapers Dying” Let’s start with the headline, which is technically accurate. The PR industry is healthy, and newspapers aren’t. Yet, throwing in Warren Buffett’s name as click bait makes it sound like Buffett is …more
The best content wins. The rise of digital communications and forms of digital marketing see to that. This never-ending thirst for content is recasting the PR profession. The chart below (source: LinkedIn and Recode) depicts job hires in the U.S. by function over the past 14 years (source: LinkedIn). No surprise, the job …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
Check out the headline in The Wall Street Journal last month. “Apple Teams with Jack Ma” The headline didn’t say “Apple Teams with Alibaba.” Why? And don’t say because the word “Alibaba” wouldn’t fit in the space for the headline. It turns out that both words take up seven characters. I think it’s because the …more
I don’t smoke. My one and only experience with cigarettes was sneaking some coins into a vending machine when I around 14 to buy a pack of Marlboros. I don’t think I got past the first puff before I concluded coughing wasn’t fun. Still, the professional side of me has paid attention to Juul’s communications …more
The latest study from the Pew Research Center confirms that social media continues to be the driver behind a good chunk of the news consumed by Americans. Being a glass-is-half-empty kind of person, it’s encouraging to see the numbers haven’t changed much over the last couple of years. Taking a closer look at …more
Today marks the day, the 10-year anniversary of Ishmael’s Corner. In the spirit of taking a step back, I reached out to a mix of individuals I respect for their perspectives on that elixir for communications we call storytelling. The backgrounds vary from journalists to storytelling gurus to authors and everything in between. As …more
Tomorrow marks the 10-year anniversary of Ishmael’s Corner. Nice round numbers suggest reflection, so here goes. Building a readership is hard work — not exactly an alert-the-media insight, but one that has stayed with me over this 10-year trek. The periodic sense of toiling alone begat the line: “If a post falls in the forest …more
Elon Musk kicked up a Twitter storm last week, essentially saying (among other things) that the media unfairly picks on Tesla because Tesla doesn’t advertise. He went on to infer that the makers of gas guzzlers and fossil fuel companies get more favorable media attention because they pump millions of advertising dollars into the media’s …more
