Nicole’s PRspective

What is going on the PR profession when Gov. Blagojevich’s spokesperson comes out and says “It’s business as usual”

Business as usual, does the usual in Illinois include being arrested by the FBI and having everyone from the President-elect to my mom calling for you resignation. If this is usual I don’t want to see a bad day.

But more than that by willingly telling the press that everything is fine, we’re going to leave our heads buried in the sand – Ms. Quinn is damaging the profession. Right now she is a high-profile PR person, by ignoring her ethical duties to acknowledge the situation and answer to it, she is damaging her credibility. Much in the way Scott McClellan damaged his credibility with President Bush. When high-profile people in any profession damage themselves they damage the profession. This is especially true in a profession like public relations that already has questions surrounding it.

Should you have to sacrifice your job to keep your ethics? [if everything about him is true he would have fired her] Are your moral standards more important? I know mine are, but then again he would have come back to work on Wednesday to find my resignation on his desk. But if she had done that we would be talking about someone else right now. Maybe it’s time to reexamine the PRSA Code of Ethics and figure out where that line really is (or isn’t).

But who knows maybe she can write a best-selling tell all that really tells very little. (Though I did like McClellan’s book)

 
 I found a cool new toy. Right now I am loving Twitter, if you are not twittering yet give it a try. You can follow me @nicroames – I finally got the hang of it and it’s great.

Last night I happened upon the hashtag #journchat – it is a twitter conversation among PR people, journalists, bloggers and the students of each. It was completly amazing.

Here is a really bad screen shot showing how popular the #journchat was, at peak over 200 people!

If you follow #journchat next week I recommend using Tweet Deck
(I use) or Tweet Grid.

See everyone next Monday, 7-10 pm Central time on Twitter!!

Here is another really bad screen shot of my Tweet Deck, I need
to work on this big time.

From twitter-blog

In a journalism class this week we watched the movie Shattered Glass.

This movie is the true story of journalist Stephen Glass and his fall from grace while working at The New Republic magazine.

What an excellent movie on the power of choices and ethics in the mass communication field. I vaguely remembered hearing about the reporter when the story first broke back in 1998, but I had no idea it had been this bad.

While the class discussion revolved around how horrible the Glass character was, it finally hit me why he was able to fool his co-workers for so long. They trusted him. They trusted him to do his job and do it right. Maybe that trust was misplaced, maybe it went on for to long, but if a journalist can’t trust another journalist what’s the point.

Read the story of Stephen Glass for yourself on Wikipedia – I found a lot of the article links from other journalists about the scandal enlightening.

 Here is the movie trailer