Timely TV News Interview Advice (from Another Time)
[by Howard Fencl] On Halloween, I will travel to Columbus to attend a TV newsroom reunion for WBNS-TV reporters, producers, videographers, engineers and news managers. It promises to be a horrifying, creaky affair – no costumes, just the unwelcome mask of old age necessitating name tags with our headshots from the 1980s in the event we […]
Writing for Right Now: “Iterative Journalism”
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] It’s called “iterative journalism.” For journalists, it’s a profound change. With profound implications for anyone caught up in a news story. Put most simply, it means this: Stories are published online as they’re reported, in pieces. Once basic facts are known, the story goes online . Calls are still made […]
The Ultimate Media Interview Checklist
A large, broadcast-quality camera is aimed at you. Lights blind your vision. And a perfectly made up and coiffed reporter is holding a mic under your face. You try hard to look cool, but you can feel the sweat dripping down your back. Your breaths are shallow. You can barely remember what you wanted to say, […]
CEO Says “5,000% Price Hike On Daraprim Drug Not Excessive”
[by Howard Fencl, Hennes Communications] Rarely do we see such a bracing, breathtaking display of contradictory messages and corporate spin as in the case of Turing Pharmaceutical’s 5,000 percent price hike of the toxoplasmosis drug, Daraprim. Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease that can kill people with compromised immune systems. Daraprim, once $13.50 per pill, was […]
“The Evil that Slithered Up Behind Them”
The unconscionable slaying of a young TV reporter and her videographer live on the air during their morning reporting assignment in Roanoke this week once again opens the seemingly unresolvable debate about gun violence in America. But we must not forget the humanity of the victims — a reporter and a videographer at the very […]
Why Hollywood Loves Lawyers
Thane Rosenbaum, a distinguished fellow and director of the Forum on Law, Culture & Society at New York University School of Law, writes: Academy Award-winning actress and Harvard heartthrob Natalie Portman announces that she has signed on to do a biopic on the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and law lovers everywhere […]
Lessons from Ferguson: Are You Listening?
[By Thom Fladung, former managing editor, The Plain Dealer] A year after Ferguson, the lessons continue to reverberate. Is anyone listening? At the recent National Association of Black Journalists convention in Minneapolis, a panel of journalists spoke about the lessons they learned in Ferguson, Missouri, covering the shooting of Michael Brown, its aftermath, and how […]
News Junkies & the Social Media Fix
[by Howard Fencl, APR] In the world of TV news, the most rabid members of the viewing public have long been known as “news junkies.” In the pre-web, pre-social media era, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, they were the letter writers, the habitual phone callers; or in extreme (and scary) cases, they were the […]
How Jeni’s Ice Cream Faced a Bet-the-Store Crisis
[By Nora Jacobs, APR] When news of the Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream recall first broke in April, we lauded the company’s communication response . (If you missed that post, you can access it here.) We watched reports of the crisis in the following weeks and could only imagine what was going on within the company […]
Brian Williams Goes to MSNBC – Punishment or Opportunity?
For our money, we think Mary Long, writing for Digital Media Ghost, was 100% on-target when she wrote: “NBC could’ve easily fired its anchor, as credibility is inarguably key to the role, and he’s already admitted guilt. The cost to fire him wouldn’t be insignificant, of course, but it would be much less than the […]