Originally, this website supported the public relations courses I taught at Northern Kentucky University. Since I've retired it's become a supplemental textbook for scores of schools and a handy reference for public relations practitioners, especially those preparing for professional accreditation or certification.

The cornerstone of the site are my Online Readings in Public Relations, roughly a hundred textbook-style articles, tipsheets, and fill-in-the-blank templates for dozens of public relations topics and projects.

This site is maintained by: Professor Emeritus Michael Turney, Ph.D., ABC

Schools & organizations using this website

Yours to make:
decisions, decisions, decisions!

Are you ready for the daily challenge of making public relations decisions or do you need to better hone your decision-making skills?

Either way, you may benefit from Decisive, the fourth New York Times best-seller written by Chip & Dan Heath. They're brothers and long-time management consultants and business school professors.

Although they're not public relations experts, their book is critical for PR practitioners because so much of our profession involves making "organization-changing" (even "life-changing") decisions.

While Decisive won't tell you what decision(s) you should make, it does offer a process you can use to help all the decisions you make be the best possible choices. And that will make you feel more reliable and more confident in your decisions.

Honestly, I can't predict how much, or if, Decisive will help you. But, I can say that I sure wish this book had been available when I was a young professional instead of being published after I retired.

Read more in Recent Reads

 
Online Readings in
Public Relations

Strategic & tactical
PR planning
 

 
Recent reads
in public relations

Public relations
during a crisis
 

 
How-to tips
for public relations

Covid-19 should now be
part of all PR plans.
 

 
Ethics in public relations
 

Ready or not, a crisis could hit your organization.
This is what the Institute for Crisis Management (ICM)
recently reported about last year's crises.

I just couldn't resist. The conjunction of the Olympics being in Paris and the ICM just issuing its 2023 Crisis Report made me do it. Take a look at the article I wrote years ago about crisis communication being the Olympics of public relations.

I'm not going to recap everything worth knowing in the latest ICM Crisis Report. First, because there's too much. Second, because you owe it to yourself to read and interpret it for yourself, the way serious public relations practitioners do every year. I'll just highlight a few points.

The 2023 report begins: "Crisis news story statistics continued their post-pandemic shuffle with ... a decrease of about nine percent, ... a retreat towards pre-pandemic story numbers." And, "Sudden versus smoldering crisis stories migrated back toward the 2020 levels with a nearly 50/50 split," a comment that suggests we got better than usual at anticipating crises last year, or we were very lucky.

More that 26% of the crisis news involved CATASTROPHES, a surprising jump of over 5%. This was a bit of a surprise since "ICM had expected this number to continue its downward trend as COVID retreated, but ... natural disasters occurred across the globe."

There were 399 NATURAL DISASTERS that killed 86,5000 people and impacted another 93 million with economic losses of $250 billion, "higher than the averages reported over the previous 20 years." Looking only at the U.S., "28 separate weather and climate events cost at least $1 billion each, the highest number of billion-dollar disasters ever recorded in the U.S."

"CLASS ACTION stories skyrocketed by nearly fifty percent to 11% of stories tracked." And, more than one-third of them involved settlements of "more than $25 million, the highest percentage since 2012."

Even though CYBER CRIME more than doubled to over 7%, "This figure is still well below the pre-pandemic activity we saw in 2018 and 2019." However, the magnitude of some of the attacks is scary. One attack on cell service provider T-Mobile affected 37 million customers.

There's much more in the full report, including this bit of frustration in its wrap-up: "The results have been so topsy-turvy over the past four years that ICM hesitates to make any predictions of what 2024 will bring." But, please read it. It's downloadable and it's free.