US press critic and writer Jay Rosen takes a hefty swipe at PR bloggers, with a blanket accusation that they have ignored a pay-for-promotion case in the US that has significant ethical implications for the public relations profession: Bloggers are supposed to be a little more curious than most. They are supposed to apply a […]
Category: Ethics
Taking a stand on ethics
This morning, I left a lengthy comment on Jay Rosen’s blog in his Bloggers Are Missing in Action… post on ethics in PR that generated lots of blog posts and comments on posts yesterday (go to Rosen’s post to see the many comments there, and see my post yesterday for a recap on what this […]
Upholding PR standards starts with the small things
"Will you join with me and other PR bloggers in a grassroots blogging campaign to help raise the perception of the public relations industry?" asked Steven Phenix of The Alliant Group in Austin, Texas, in an email yesterday. Happy to, I replied. PR’s been getting a lot of, well, bad PR lately, as illustrated by […]
McDonalds deceives with fake blog
What do you make of this? Kevin Dugan writes about a website and faux blog from McDonalds as part of their advertising in yesterday’s Superbowl: […] Anyway, I dutifully visited the site and was intrigued initially to see it also had a blog. Then I realized it is a fake blog. Even the post comments […]
Content plagiarism – is extra exposure worth going along with it?
Constantin Basturea writes that excerpts of postings from PR blogs are republished, with new permalinks, on a website with pages featuring Google ads and asks, Do their authors know about and approve this practice? The website in question is called PR Blog Watch, part of a website called 101 Public Relations. Constantin’s post lists 18 […]
Nike breaks new ground in communication transparency
Communicating on corporate responsibility doesn’t get more transparent than this. The Financial Times reports: Today Nike breaks a three-year silence on social reporting as it publishes its 2004 corporate responsibility report. This is Nike’s first report since a 2002 California supreme court ruling that the company could be sued by Mark Kasky, a labour rights […]
Blueprint ethics code for the profession
One thing I’ve frequently commented about in this blog is ethics in the communication profession. Or, rather, about the lack of an authoritative and cohesive voice that speaks on ethics on behalf of the profession. I’ve taken my own stand, so to speak, in castigating our professional associations – notably, IABC and PRSA – for […]
Just because you could doesn’t mean you should
Are character blogs – a topic that’s producing lots of discussion at the moment – worthwhile or not? It seems to me that a polarization of strongly-held views is emerging on something that isn’t really worth spending that much time on unless everyone is talking about the same thing. For instance, the link above is […]
Knowing right from wrong is intuitive
Last month, 119 applicants to Harvard Business School followed a link on a Business Week message board to access a website containing confidential information about their admittance, a Financial Times report says. Harvard decided this constituted hacking and Kim Clark, the dean of the business school, decided the applicants would all now be rejected. This […]
The days are numbered for ‘gatekeeper’ journalism
Journalism is the rightful guardian of disclosure of news and information, and what should be disclosed and what shouldn’t, and has a duty and a right to maintain that position. That’s my interpretation of a very interesting discussion point in John Humphreys’ opening address at the Communication Directors Forum conference on Wednesday evening. The conference […]
Corporate responsibility reporting enters the mainstream
International accounting firm KPMG has published the results of its latest survey on corporate responsibility reporting. The survey report shows continuing support for corporate responsibility and open communication by the leaders of many of the world’s most successful and biggest companies: Corporate responsibility (CR) reporting in industrialized countries has clearly entered the mainstream, with Japan […]
A new call for ethics in PR
PR Week reports on a call to action by the newly-appointed president of the International Communications Consultancy Organization, Fleishman-Hillard executive V-P John Saunders: Following on from an impassioned speech at last week’s Prague global summit, where his presidency was announced, he told PRWeek: ‘This is no longer the golden age of PR. We will need […]
Sony’s rootkit woes tip of the reputation iceberg
Mainstream music publisher Sony BMG is getting hammered left, right and center as fall-out continues over Sony’s rootkit debacle. The rootkit in question was a spyware-like application encoded onto certain copy-protected music CDs that Sony sold in the US and which did some “ET phone home” type of activities from your computer without you knowing […]
FT: ‘Tolerate some libel for the greater good’
There has been much written in recent weeks concerning the character assassination of John Seigenthaler over his biography in Wikipedia, prompting much discussion over the trustworthiness of an open information resource like Wikipedia which anybody can edit. The character assassin was outed and Wikipedia is now implementing tighter controls over who can edit material. The […]