Public Relations & Social Media Insight

On June 6, 2011, Scott Pelley took over as anchor of the CBS Evening News, his tenure following Katie Couric’s five-year run. The once-dominant newscast had fallen to third place behind NBC and ABCduring the end of Dan Rather’s reign, and Couric’s stint saw the broadcast fall to record ratings lows. While still No. 3 among the Big Three, the CBS Evening News With Scott Pelley has seen significant growth since the Texan took over after a long run at sibling 60 Minutes.

In the past year, the 6:30 PM broadcast has added 490,000 viewers, the largest annual increase for the network’s evening news in 15 years and the best among the broadcast news rivals since 2002. Overall, the CBS Evening News is up 12% in viewers since Pelley’s debut. Just before his second anniversary in the anchor chair, Deadline spoke with Pelley about the relevance of cable news and why so many mistakes are getting on the air....

The fictional tale about war correspondents will make you laugh till the person next to you on the subway thinks you have problems. It is also, according to writer Alexander Nazaryan, an all-too-real parody of the glory days of print journalism....In only a few years, a child will ask a parent about newspapers: What was their purpose? What did people do with them, and why?

The parent, a little flummoxed, will explain that, long before biosensitive data aggregators simply uploaded information into the neurons of our frontal cortexes, people actually read the news by holding a piece of paper in front of their noses and scanning columns of text with their eyes. There were many such newspapers, to be read in the morning, over breakfast, and in the evening, over scotch. The newspapers competed with each other by sending actual people out into the actual world to report what had taken place, was going to take place — or, even, was alleged to have taken place but didn't. On days when there was little so-called news to report, the newspapers filled their pages with stories about, say, puppies who could recite Macbeth or people who wore jeggings to work. Also, there were crosswords.

Of course, this fictional parent could give his/her fictional child Evelyn Waugh's Scoop — a fictional 1938 tale of British foreign correspondents reporting on a civil war in the fictional East African country of Ishmaelia. Fictional, yes, but to a journalist like myself, most everything about the novel is too real. Waugh was a master at mixing humor and pathos, as evidenced by his two most ambitious novels: A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. Scoop, on the other hand, is all laughter, of the sort that will make the person next to you on the subway think you have problems...

....As a business resource, Slideshare stands pretty much head and shoulders above most other content platforms.From presentations to educational content and more, you can find information and curated media on pretty much any topic you have an interest in.As a research solution, Slideshare offers analysis from some of the smartest minds on the web across all verticals. These include standard presentations, videos, multimedia and more....

... Sales lift, impact, and retention are just a few of the key measurements for any return-on-objective (ROO) program. (Note: I like to use ROO instead of ROI [return on investment] because it focuses content marketers on the real objectives.)

Sometimes ROO can be determined with one metric, while other times four or five are needed to show an impact on your organization’s business goals.ROO measurements come in all shapes and sizes, and usually include multiple items to give you the complete answer to your question. The important aspect to remember is you aren’t measuring just for the sake of measurement.

The tools and tactics below are used to directly determine what a project’s objectives should be. If you keep that in mind, you’ll get your ROO. Here are a few measurement initiatives to get you started...

After confirming his company had been the victim of a massive cyberattack, Heartland Payment Systems General Counsel Charles Kallenbach was hyperventilating....

...But going public with a breach is a delicate matter. According to a 2013 study by the Ponemon Institute, a data privacy research institute, overly quick notifications following a breach are one of the biggest cost-multipliers. In the U.S., a premature notification added as much as $37 per record to the overall cost of the breach, the study found. When a breach involves hundreds of thousands of records, that adds up.

The tremendous scrutiny associated with data breach notifications makes getting the message right critical, said Leigh Nakanishi, senior privacy and security strategist at Edelman.

“We’re seeing many more companies being transparent when they have a breach,” Nakanishi said. “Transparency is good, but it has to be done carefully.”...

...The starting point to understanding the how mainstream media fails to accurately report the news is the consolidation of media ownership in the United States. In 1983 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. In 2002 that number had decreased to 10 companies (McChesney & Nichols, 2002). By 2004 that number had decreased to only five companies. As Nichols and McChesney state, All in all, these [few] firms control the overwhelming percentage of movies, TV shows, cable systems, cable channels, TV stations, radio stations, books, magazines, newspapers, billboards, music and TV networks that constitute the media culture that occupies one half of the average American’s life.

It is an extraordinary degree of economic and social power located in very few hands (Nichols & McChesney, It's the Media Stupid, 2000, p. 28).Five companies control the bulk of information disseminated to the American public via mainstream media. How can one have a diverse discussion of ideas if a handful of people or, in the case of the media, a handful of corporations controls the information that the public receives via mainstream media? The answer is that one cannot. Corporations have one interest in mind: Profit above all else. Financial gain is their only reason for existence. Informing the public is not the corporate media’s principal function, making money is....