Today I drove my car through a fence. No, that isn’t a metaphor. I actually drove my car through a fence. It was while I was sitting in the muddy pasture where my car came to a rest that something dawned on me: I need a break. Public relations specialist was second only to commercial […]

As a public relations professional, you will probably be called upon to do on-camera interviews at some point in your career. For me that day was Tuesday. Typically my supervisor serves at UNT’s spokesperson, but when a request came in on Tuesday, he thought it was as good a time as any for me to […]

Graduation is less than a month away, and as the milestone approaches, I have found myself reassessing my career goals. This past weekend I had the pleasure of having lunch with Julie Hatch, a solo PR practitioner in Fort Worth. Julie is the subject of my final paper, so I won’t go into the details […]

The other day one of my fellow graduate students asked me what skills where needed to work in a job like mine. She said she’d seen postings for positions in my office in the past, but had not applied for any of the jobs because she was not sure she was qualified. My response to […]

  As you may have heard, the University of North Texas was invaded by pterodactyls on Monday. My colleague @LeslieWimmer originally masterminded the idea for a mock-invasion of the campus after seeing the Center for Disease Control’s Zombie Apocalypse preparedness tips last May. The idea percolated for a few months until our supervisor encouraged Leslie […]

The proliferation of the internet and social media has made it easy for news outlets to solicit content. This past Wednesday night Omar Villafranca, a reporter with channel 5 in Dallas, shared a cautionary tale about the importance of fact checking user generation content. Villafranca recalled a stormy day this past spring when NBC DFW […]

Today I had the opportunity to attend PRSA Dallas’ annual Communications Summit. This year’s theme was Digital DFW and the organizers planned some great sessions on how digital communications are changing the media landscape. Here are my top five takeaways from the day: 1. Shama Kabani (@shama) opened the day with a presentation on the Top […]

For the Red Cross a natural disaster is an everyday occurrence and not a reason to break out the crisis communications handbook. Anita Foster, chief communication officer for the North Texas chapter of the American Red Cross, spoke with my JOUR 5350 course on Wednesday about navigating through a true communications crisis. Foster said that […]

This past Wednesday, I tuned into measurement-guru Katie Paine’s “Measure What Matters” webinar hosted by Business Wire. Katie shared a lot of good information on the changing world of public relations measurement, but the part of the webinar that resonated with me most was the importance of defining how public relations can impact a situation. […]

Dear PR students, Please accept this letter of advice from someone who was in your shoes just a few short years ago. As I have discussed in previous blog posts, PR is not all about glamorous event planning or mingling with celebrities, PR is a lot of hard work. It’s better to get to know […]