Your PR Architect

To:  Michael Ferro, Chairman       Tribune Publishing, a.k.a., tronc cc: Blog Readers Subject: Invitation: How to Communicate Dear Mike: I invite you and your communications team to drop by my office at the university.  My schedule's Chicago Tribune Building, By Stuart Seeger [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons flexible 'til late August. But act fast. Because as your company transforms to some digital communications-moneymaking internet punchline, your recent news release tells me Tribune Publishing has lost its grasp of how to communicate in English. Your June 2 news release,  Tribune Publishing Announces Corporate Rebranding, Changes Name to Tronc,  sets a new low in incomprehensible jargon. Experienced PR people write releases that readers will understand. The writer who pumped out this horrid excuse for a press release has no grasp of this.  It's perfectly fine to r...

Your house is part of a community. A museum is a place you visit to see art and artifacts. That was my reaction last week when the leadership of George Eastman House announced a rebranding of its facility and website, rechristening itself the George Eastman Museum . The announcement said "museum" helped differentiate the place for European visitors, for whom "house" meant "institute." Eastman's house? Viewed from East Avenue, it's a stunning mansion built by the founder of Eastman Kodak Company, who died in 1932. A more-modern museum, film archive, and research department is attached to the back of the original mansion.  Drawing Room, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. (c) DKassnoff, 2010. I'm debating whether the name change means more than a PR move. "House," to me, meant more than "museum." It says that George lived there -- made his big decisions about business, life, and death. (At an advanced age an...