Writing for Public Relations

Screen shot of a Disney.com page--clicking on "news" leads you to this, a web page full of PR content. Read for Nov. 18, 2024: This blog post has a click-bait heading, one you should probably avoid because that structure is trite and cliché, although being able to do it as a joke may mean that you do understand the web a bit. When I am writing about “web writing” and “new media,” the concept bears some explanation. After all, almost any media today is disseminated via the web, whether it’s by posing a version of it on your organization’s web site, or sending a file via email. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Englishman who wrote the original HTML and decided to make it available as free shareware, thus changing the world. Create a whole new information infrastructure that rewires the world (and be British) and King Charles might knight you (although he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II), too. Berners-Lee created HTML about 1994 or so, is shown here in 2014 in Wikimedia Commons image by...

 Diana Nyad speaks of swimming from Cuba to Florida--famous swimmer does the "impossible." Read for Nov. 11, 2024: Arguably, formal public communication as we know it, in our culture, dates back to the time of the ancient Greeks. (There are older traditions than that, especially oral storytelling, but I’m writing specifically about formal rhetorical traditions that are relevant to Public Relations and to this week’s writing). The Greeks, in Athens in particular, began to use proto-democratic forms of government, and that made public discourse, the oral exchange of ideas, important to them. And today, in a sometimes post-literate world, the ability of a person to speak on behalf of an organization is still a key to getting important messages to key publics. Dr. Todd Olson, president of Mount Mercy University, speaks Aug. 15, 2023 at an all-employee start-of-year training day. And social media, where video can spread both poignant and unfortunate remarks globally in the blink o...

Source: Adsoftheworld.com Read for Nov. 4, 2024. The text chapter this week is on Public Service Advertising and Announcements, but to me, what we’re into this week is writing advertising copy . Ads: They are all around. We see them all the time, and tend to think, as individuals, we are somehow immune to them. We’re not. Corporations would not pour billions of dollars for more than 150 years into an enterprise if ads hadn’t proven effective over time. Many iconic movements and products owe their success, at least partly, to successful advertising. Consider, for example, the Volkswagen Beetle. It was a product of Nazi Germany—literally encouraged by Adolph Hitler who wanted a German company to design a “people’s car.” Following the war, as the western world recovered and grew prosperous, the VW Beetle slowly became a global sensation. Including in the second-most important country (the first was the USSR, the third was the UK) in defeating Nazi Germany. How did a German company sellin...