The phrase “end of days” came to my mind as I reviewed a number of critical news reports during this past week about the current state of Twitter. The forthcoming demise of Twitter, sooner or later, is the strong thread running through all of this content, assessing the situation and…
For many people, the blue checkmark on Twitter has been synonymous with credibility, influence, and social status. For others, it’s a vanity project with no real value to anyone, a broad sentiment that might grow in the face of changes to the verification programme that are in process. These changes…
Some years ago, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) was a hot topic in PR industry discussion. The discussion focused on an increasingly widely-held view that AVE is a discredited measurement metric for public relations. AVE refers to the practice of estimating the value of PR efforts by calculating the cost of…
On July 11, the Guardian newspaper dropped a bombshell across the media and political landscapes with the first revelations about Uber and its law-breaking activities around the world, on an industrial scale, in the pursuit of profits. News about the Uber Files published by the Guardian and a global array…
As the continuing war that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 passed its 90th day, the tragedy that has befallen Ukraine at the hands of Russia knows no bounds. The Donbas region in the east of Ukraine is but a wasteland with a death toll in the…
In a time where misinformation, disinformation and outright fake news are features of our online landscapes that diminish trust, you’d think that brands (and Volkswagen in particular) would think twice – at least, think carefully – about actively doing anything that can negatively impact their brand reputation and instead do…
The topic of NFTs – non-fungible tokens, to use its full name (one that confounds many people) – occupies a large part of the conversation in the March episode of For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report that Shel and I recorded last weekend. We had a lively discussion,…
Last month, Wikipedia celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the founding of its English-language website, an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. Today, Wikipedia has more than 55 million articles available in over 300 languages, in addition to the original English. It says that 1.7 billion unique visitors come to…
