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...

August 2014--The Gazette devotes a whole page to three Op/Eds from MMU.   Read for Sept. 23, 2024: Several years ago, before “Black lives matter” was a #BLM movement, there already was anxiety in this country over the pattern of local law enforcement being more violent in their interactions with minority, especially Black, communities. Hang on. This is not going to be a liberal rant about systemic racism or white privilege, although I agree that both are real. But, in CO 280 that year (maybe 2012 or so), I required students to maintain a personal blog. Earlier that fall, a Black man had made headlines by being shot by police, and that triggered an emotional reaction from one of my students, a Black woman. So she wrote a blog post about it. In that post, she described how anxious she was about her younger brother and her fear that he could end up being shot due to some interaction with police. She described how he had been stopped for speeding, and was shaken and afraid during that...