Hello!
For this blog, we are focusing on news that is somehow related to public relations. In doing this post, it really made me stop and think because you soon realize most news is related to public relations. Whether it be a crisis, an announcement, or even just a fluff tabloid piece, they affect the image of the person, company, or place the news is about. Even the Public Relations Society of America discusses the wide range of scenarios that fall into PR in their article All About PR. For this post, I decided to talk about some of the news stories I had heard about recently that were more unique or that related to topics I was personally interested in.
One of the more unique news events that I have been hearing a lot about is the recent Miss USA pageant. There have been a lot of accusations of cheating and rigging the pageant to have a certain contestant, Miss Texas, be selected as the winner. This has turned into a massive PR nightmare for the Miss USA organization. The president of the organization was reportedly coaching the winner and seen doing her hair prior to the pageant. There are also questions about a brand trip for the winner that Miss Texas took weeks before the pageant. The organization has taken a lot of heat in the press for these accusations. In my opinion their PR team has done very little to debate these allegations or try to salvage their reputation in the press. As far as I could tell the organization itself had made no official statements on the accusations. The winner has made one or two public statements denying the accusations, but they were either temporary story posts or have since been removed. In my opinion this is a bad PR response, and you should never just ignore a huge scandal like this.
Another example of some PR I have personally been following is the release of Taylor Swift’s tenth studio album Midnights. Taylor Swift has a reputation of having a great PR team and strategically building excitement for her album releases. I do think part of her success with PR is having such a massively loyal fanbase that spreads any announcements she makes so rapidly. She has done it again with her release plan for this album. She decided to build anticipation by releasing a track title every few nights until the full list was revealed. This has been a great strategy for keeping people interested in the release in between the announcement of the album and the actual release date. She has yet to announce a lead single, but fans speculate it will come soon, with less than two weeks until the release date of October 21st.
These are two examples of how PR in the news can either be handled in a great way that benefits your brand, or in a bad way that harms your image.
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