By Anthony S. Mangeri for Domestic Preparedness The role of the emergency management systems is to bring calm to chaos. The role of the public information officer (PIO) is to disseminate information that is credible, accurate, and reliable. It is a critical component of the initial response to meet the informational needs of residents – […]
By Seth Chalmer for Stanford Social Information Review “Should we put out a statement?” If you’re a nonprofit communications professional, you’ve heard that question many times, often the day after some major news event. Since the October 7 massacres in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, many nonprofits have struggled to decide whether and how […]
By Steve Smith for PRWeek Early in my career, one of my most dreaded assignments — aside from telephone call-downs — was requesting a correction from a journalist on a story that I secured for a client. For many PR pros, this is an intimidating ask of a journalist’s time. Many PR pros would probably […]
By Denise-Marie Ordway for The Journalist’s Resource Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don’t quite understand — or they ignore — the data’s margin of error. Data collected from a sample of the population will never perfectly represent the population […]
By Arthur Solomon for PRNews During my long career in public relations, I’ve always ignored many of the basic tenets of PR that are taught in communications schools, written in books and practiced at agencies. Many of these traditional methods can hamper, not help, PR employees from receiving positive results. I came to that conclusion […]
By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications Whether in-person or virtual, the kids are still in school. For the moment, however, this will be a class for the adults – and class is now in session on how to handle a social media crisis. On a Labor Day Sunday some time ago, the leadership team at a school that […]
Introduction by Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications Ensuring the safety of students is a collective responsibility, with school board members and superintendents playing a crucial role. In today’s world, where school safety is increasingly at stake, it is imperative that these leaders receive adequate crisis management training and share lessons learned to effectively address the challenges […]
Hennes Communications has been named among the top crisis PR firms in the U.S. by Chambers and Partners, the leading independent professional legal research company in the world. Hennes Communications is one of only 18 communication consulting firms included in the list for 2024. Bruce Hennes, chief executive officer, also received an individual ranking by […]
From Tom Weidlich at PRCG | Haggerty… Former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi has a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review this week highlighting the trend (he has numbers) of companies and others not even responding to reporters’ calls for comment. His examples concern crises. Farhi did Nexis searches and found that mentions of the phrase “did not […]
By Henry Cooke for PRNews One of the best things about going to live conferences and other events is meeting the media who attend them. In my past career as a political reporter in New Zealand, I spent untold hours standing around bored at such events wishing someone in the pertinent industry would offer an […]