I graduate in ONE week and then I move to the great state of Hawaii! This year has been such an adventure. I have loved every minute of my senior year (the school part of course).

I am going to post a video from graduation, fun huh!

But here is a picture from our dept awards ceremony

Here are all the PR student who recieved awards at the ceremony with our PR prof

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)

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

You can listen here on the PTI Podcast
The Red Sox section starts at 08:11

In a nutshell the Red Sox are not going to raise ticket prices for next season (they have for the last 14). The club pres says they are showing compassion for their fans.

The question the hosts ask is: is this real relief or a calculated PR move?

The best line from the segment-

“If you get good public relations out of this why is that a crime in America, why does anybody automatically assume that good public relations means something is wrong with you and you need to go to jail.”

Excellent line Mr. Kornheiser. I can’t convince some of the students I know that PR is a worthwhile major and that we are not “spin doctors”. This astute observation about our field came from a sports reporter and Monday Night Football host.

Now, if we could just convince the rest of America (or at least a few more Cameron students) that PR really is a good thing

Good news for me, I was published in our college newspaper, The Cameron Collegian. First time for me. I am a News Writing student so we don’t always get our stories in. We also have to do a convergent assignment for this class, so look for an article on Greek Life to be posted here soon.

I was cruzing the web, avoiding studying for a test, and I came across this: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=132322

According to this article, soon we may be able to order from Pizza Hut through our Facebook page.

I can adapt and read all my news on the computer. I was OK with following the PRSSA conference through twitter on my phone. But, I think this might officially be too much of a good thing.

Here is a local case study I did a few years ago.

Get your own – Open publication

It caught my attention for a couple of reasons
1. The Grunig and Hunt definition is the one we learn in the Prinicples of PR class at CU
2. I am taking a marketing class this semester and the book refers to PR as publicity, that is starting to annoy me

So, I read through most of Professor Sledzik’s blog and I loved it all.

In the Principles of PR class the book includes an entire chapter on Integrated Marketing Communication and how it relates to PR

In the Marketing class the book has the words public relations in one place, about half-way through the book. The section says that publicity can be handled by the advertising manager or whoever handles public relations. Then defines PR as communication with noncustomers, including labor, public interest groups, stockholders, and the government.
This disturbs me in so many ways. The class is not a requirement for PR majors but it is one of the “encouraged” electives. However, the class is required for almost all Business majors, even those specializing in accounting(?). After this class a bunch of accountants will be running around thinking that PR can be handled by the advertising manager.

So, you can see why I am really liking the posts I read tonight, and I realize that I am not by myself in thinking that PR is it’s own separate slice of the communications world.

Side note: the marketing book is Basic Marketing by Perreault, et al 16th ed

www.commoncraft.com
They have a ton of “videos in plain english” that explain social media concepts that some of us (ME) are having problems grasping.

This is the video on wikis in plain english

This video has helped me and I only found it about 5 mins ago. I was really struggling with using a wiki for one of my classes this semester.
They also have great videos about social media, RSS feeds and Twitter!

Check it out!