PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

Nancy White:

[I]t is chic to glorify conversation the way we used to glorify “community.”

Paul Valery:

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”

[source]

Winston Churchill:

“There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.”

[source]

“Lookups for ‘integrity’ have steadily increased over the past few years, and this year it is clearly the most looked-up word,” said John M. Morse, president and publisher of Merriam-Webster. “We’re not sure how to account for the increase in interest in this particular word, except that people do often look up the meanings of words that have special significance to current events and issues. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to think that recent political and social developments have made the word integrity particularly appropriate to issues that people are talking about.” [source | top 10 words for 2005]

Greg Yardley:

As individual publishing for friends and family grows, how will the standard public relations folks, etc. react? Imagine a scenario where negative publicity spreads through friends and family networks behind a firewall, souring an entire community on a product, but the post never appears in a publicly-accessible place.

Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. That purpose is to provide people people with information they need to understand the world. The first challenge is finding the information that people need to live their lifes. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant, and engaging.

Engagement really falls under journalist’s commitment to the citizenry. As one reporter interviewed by the team of our academic research partners put it, “If you are the kind of person who, once you have found something, find that you are not satisfied about knowing it until you figure out a way to tell somebody else, then you’re a journalist.”

Part of a journalist’s responsibility, in other words, is not just providing information, but providing it in such a way that people will be inclined to listen.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, 2001, p. 149.

Note (Oct. 3, 2005): The original entry included only the quote that’s now in bold. The comments helped me realize that it might be useful to add some context :) The way I read the quote (and the reason for posting it here) is that journalism is based, in part, on the desire to share with other people what you know.

H.L. Mencken used to answer letters from his critics with a pre-printed post card that read, “You have the right to your wrong opinion.�

(source)