Your PR Architect

TV news websites often repurpose their on-air scripts as web copy. It's quick and inexpensive. Trouble is, it often makes the reporter and his or her subject sound foolish. Read WHEC-TV's online account of the Mayor Warren/Reggie Hill story's finale:  http://www.whec.com/news/stories/s3296454.shtml?cat=565 Does Amanda, the reporter, sound like Thorndyke, the snarky reporter in "Die Hard?" Honestly, taxpayers aren't clamoring for Mayor Warren's comments on this tired story of a retired state trooper whose niece gave him a retirement job without first telling him: "Obey the traffic laws." (Warren apologized on a local radio station earlier in the week.) Does the mayor's spokesperson sound annoyed and defensive? Of course.  She started out by claiming Warren's uncle wasn't speeding as fast as officers said he was. She got into the weeds very early and likely never had all the facts. A PR strategy that most closely resembles "dodge &

Yesterday, a fellow who makes a living depicting big explosions experienced one of his own. On an international stage. Film director Michael Bay, hired by tech giant Samsung to talk about next-generation ultra HD televisions, got tangled in his TelePrompTer readout, lost his place, and abruptly left the Samsung booth at CES. See it here. Michael Bay (photo by Romina Espinosa at http://www.rominaespinosa.com [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) Bay -- whose works include Armageddon and the Transformers series -- is well-known for his work behind the camera, not in front of it, or before a live audience. So choosing him as your spokesperson at the world's largest consumer electronics orgy seems, on its surface, a gamble. (The tie-in for Samsung was that Bay's next Transformers movie will be previewed on a Samsung UHD-TV .) There's some alchemy involved in choosing a frontman for a trade show like CES. He or she sho