While algorithms are busy predicting the next bull market and diagnosing your heart in real-time, crisis communication still fumbles in the dark — reactive, not proactive and increasingly outdated. Why be content to remain bystanders in our own narrative, letting crisis define us, rather than seizing innovative technologies that could redefine the future of strategic messaging?...

Like a cannonball splash, generative AI’s bold public arrival in 2023 has made one thing very clear for the communications industry: The future, once again, is right now.

The smartest PR professionals, communications leaders and brands are already jumping in, immersing themselves in artificial intelligence technology, which — like other innovations that have...

Dancing the New Two-Step

In the golden age of radio and newspapers, the Two-Step Flow Model held sway. Developed in 1948 by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz to help explain voter decision-making, this classic communication model proposed that media messages flowed in two distinct stages. First, messages tended to flow to “opinion leaders,” such as political pundits, influential journalists, or...

“We need talent who can reach across disciplinary silos, and think expansively not limited by current expertise.”

“We need graduates trained and fluent in digital media technologies. But, we also need people with a hunger to acquire the skills to evolve and adapt as quickly as these industries.”

“The interdisciplinary nature of today's digital media requires cross-functional...

It was 1992. I was working at a small advertising and PR firm in Portland, Oregon, focused on B2B and crisis communications. I’d fallen in love with technology and was smitten with the early, pre-browser web, with Usenet and CompuServe, Prodigy. When I got my hands on TCP/IP software for my PC and grabbed a beta copy of the Mosaic browser, my mind was blown. I knew this was going to change the...

This 8 th edition of the Relevance Report will not be relevant for long. But today, it definitely is. Everyone in communications is talking about Artificial Intelligence. This was not the case in 2019, when the USC Center for Public Relations surveyed PR professionals and found only 18% thought that AI would be an important part of their future business. In 2023, in a survey we...

The 8 th edition of the USC Annenberg Relevance Report won’t be relevant for long, predicts Fred Cook, director of the USC Center for Public Relations . But today, it definitely is.

“Everyone in communications is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI),” writes Cook. “This was not the...

The word inclusion has been part of academia and the business world for several years now. But what does inclusion look like for differently-abled individuals? We have many gifts and talents to offer to the world and society. However, society’s ignorance often squelches those gifts and talents. Sure, there are laws prohibiting the discrimination of differently-abled individuals, such as the...