Public relations as an industry undervalues interviewing skills. You can find training session after training session on how to pitch a journalist and to not follow up with a “did you get my email?” Same goes for writing. Show, don’t tell. Stay away from chest-thumping adjectives like “revolutionary” and “breakthrough.” Yet, most mass communications curricula …more
Our 2019 mantra “The story is always there” points to the importance of the discovery process in business communications. Anyone can sit down with Apple’s Tim Cook after Elizabeth Warren has made her case for greater regulation of the tech industry and come away with a story that triggers clicks. It takes much …more
Business communicators can learn from novelists and their storytelling techniques. I’ve always been partial to the Kurt Vonnegut advice: “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” It’s never easy for a …more
Journalists, particularly those at Tier-1 media properties, are the best non-fiction storytellers on the planet. They toil in a Darwinian world in which clicks correlate to economic health. If they don’t produce content that triggers clicks, they’re going to eventually hear words to the effect, “You’re not a fit here.” With this in mind, it’s …more
