"Plain ground beef tastes boring"......this is on a par with those disgusting adverts which imply you can stuff yourself with ice cream ad nauseam, because they've removed the fat content: Someone had to die to provide these ingredients! I'm constantly being told "You're right, it's not morally correct to kill animals for a gustatory whim, but I love meat"..if the stuff doesn't even taste that interesting, why go on killing to get it? Give these wretched people a medal and tell them to hop on the vegetarian bandwagon, then they can have all-"filler" tacos, no-one will get hurt, and the consumers will get a taste sensation! Duh!
just trivia but the raw story article is about what fauxnews did in 2010...it doesn't mention the 2008 election
'...the five received about $55 million in free advertising over the course of more than 85 hours of appearances in 2010."
Thank you Derek for this further explanation of what went on Oct. 16 at the Assembly.
A self-characterized Flash Mob of about 20 delegates set upon me at 2:45 p.m. on Oct. 16 right in the middle of my interview with Art Stevens, leader of the Committee for a Democratic PRSA, which had just lost its bid to bring some democracy to the Society—i.e., allow non-Accredited members (81% of the members) to run for office for the first time since the mid-1970s.
This was a discourteous and rude attack. It doesn’t matter if it was deliberately planned or not. DeVries says he didn’t know who Stevens was. He should have found out.
He should have politely asked permission to have a moment with me instead of interrupting two people who were speaking.
He and the “mob” could have waited until I was finished.
Stevens gave me good quotes including saying the APR rule had to “come down just like the Berlin Wall came down.”
On top of this rudeness was cowardice since all 20 of the “mobsters” walked rapidly away while refusing to say anything.
I chased after one who said I was the victim of a “Flash Mob,” a phrase I had never heard before. Then she continued on her way.
Friends told me I was being compared to John Nash as portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind,” who was given pens by Princeton faculty members after he won a Nobel prize.
I mistakenly thought I was being honored because the “mobsters” all fled. Later I learned of the De Vries blog in which he said the pen-gifting to me actually meant that I was a “nut” like Nash who was a schizophrenic. The “Mob” told the rest of the conference to give me pens should they meet me in a hall.
This was to be conference-wide harassment of me.
Also cowardly was the verbal attack on me in front of the Washington Hilton by a delegate screaming obscenities at me and then running away when I asked a doorman to call the cops.
Derek, you say the Society has grown. It has 21,000 members today which is a gain of a little over 100 each year since 1998 when it had 19,600 members. That’s not growth. The U.S. Labor Bureau reports 240,000 “PR specialists” as of 2008.
The O’Dwyer Co., with its five excellent informational products, is a competitor to the PR Society when it shouldn’t be. The tax-free Society, under its charter and federal and state laws, is not supposed to be in competition with what any private business can do. It is the Society that thinks it’s our competitor.
It should let O’Dwyer staffers join and have full access to all member records which were created with tax-free money. The membership list belongs to the public. Society members bombard the press by every known means and it should be open season on them also.
The Society owes the O’Dwyer Co. many thousands of dollars because it sold more than 50,000 copies of O’Dwyer articles without our permission. The three-year limit on launching a lawsuit on this has expired but the moral debt remains.
The Society could start repaying this and also informing its members of our informational products by providing the O’Dwyer Co. free ad space in all its publications and on its website. It is depriving its members of knowledge they should have.
The group’s logic escapes me. I’m credentialed for the Assembly but not for the conference where an attempt was made to charge me $1,275, the rate for PR people. That’s totally contradictory.
I appreciate your quaint assertion that only traditional media counts – and only "significant" (defined, how, I wonder) traditional media counts at that. But the 60s are over, Edward R. Murrow has passed, daily newspapers are closing and trust in traditional authorities and institutions is waning (not to ruin your morning).
I’m uncertain as to why a letter to the editor of The Economist that did not appear in print would offend any public relations professional’s sensibilities. That letter was posted on economist.com the same day the article was published and soon after featured on Ragan's PRDaily and commpro.biz. It also generated a high volume of traffic on Twitter, and it made for one of the most heavily read entries in our blog’s history.
Do you honestly continue to believe that social media like blogs and Twitter are inconsequential today?
I'm also unsure as to why you ignored the PRSA letter published in The Sunday New York Times Magazine (surely that was noteworthy?), or any of the other placements in our newsroom that, say, a VP of public relations might find significant.
In closing, faceless sir (or ma’am), I’m pleased to say that PRSA's 2011 Chair, Rosanna Fiske, has two in-person interviews this very morning (Jan. 28), with The Economist and with the Financial Times. It’s part of our ongoing engagement with those publications, so I guess they’ve heard of our sorry organization after all.
I completely agree with your comments on media fanning the flames of division. But I think we have an obligation individually to get past that, too. I share your concerns about money and suspect you are generally right about money--except that in my experience most big moneyed interests tend to lean a bit rightward (lower taxes and less regulation being the main attractions). But aside from the moneyed interests and disproportionate power there is a real division between the 2 parties. And partisans of all economic groups must rise above their team-mob mentality to listen to the opposing views. This is not easy. Of course media not only exacerbates but also models the kind of behavior--yelling, interrupting, name-calling and the rest of it--that prevents listening and learning and presupposed disrespect. Maybe people like me have given over to thoroughly to the idea of compromise and the middle way. But the way of extremism has proven woefully impractical. And we have a lot to get done.
"Plain ground beef tastes boring"......this is on a par with those disgusting adverts which imply you can stuff yourself with ice cream ad nauseam, because they've removed the fat content: Someone had to die to provide these ingredients! I'm constantly being told "You're right, it's not morally correct to kill animals for a gustatory whim, but I love meat"..if the stuff doesn't even taste that interesting, why go on killing to get it? Give these wretched people a medal and tell them to hop on the vegetarian bandwagon, then they can have all-"filler" tacos, no-one will get hurt, and the consumers will get a taste sensation! Duh!
Thank you Derek for this further explanation of what went on Oct. 16 at the Assembly.
A self-characterized Flash Mob of about 20 delegates set upon me at 2:45 p.m. on Oct. 16 right in the middle of my interview with Art Stevens, leader of the Committee for a Democratic PRSA, which had just lost its bid to bring some democracy to the Society—i.e., allow non-Accredited members (81% of the members) to run for office for the first time since the mid-1970s.
This was a discourteous and rude attack. It doesn’t matter if it was deliberately planned or not. DeVries says he didn’t know who Stevens was. He should have found out.
He should have politely asked permission to have a moment with me instead of interrupting two people who were speaking.
He and the “mob” could have waited until I was finished.
Stevens gave me good quotes including saying the APR rule had to “come down just like the Berlin Wall came down.”
On top of this rudeness was cowardice since all 20 of the “mobsters” walked rapidly away while refusing to say anything.
I chased after one who said I was the victim of a “Flash Mob,” a phrase I had never heard before. Then she continued on her way.
Friends told me I was being compared to John Nash as portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind,” who was given pens by Princeton faculty members after he won a Nobel prize.
I mistakenly thought I was being honored because the “mobsters” all fled. Later I learned of the De Vries blog in which he said the pen-gifting to me actually meant that I was a “nut” like Nash who was a schizophrenic. The “Mob” told the rest of the conference to give me pens should they meet me in a hall.
This was to be conference-wide harassment of me.
Also cowardly was the verbal attack on me in front of the Washington Hilton by a delegate screaming obscenities at me and then running away when I asked a doorman to call the cops.
Derek, you say the Society has grown. It has 21,000 members today which is a gain of a little over 100 each year since 1998 when it had 19,600 members. That’s not growth. The U.S. Labor Bureau reports 240,000 “PR specialists” as of 2008.
The O’Dwyer Co., with its five excellent informational products, is a competitor to the PR Society when it shouldn’t be. The tax-free Society, under its charter and federal and state laws, is not supposed to be in competition with what any private business can do. It is the Society that thinks it’s our competitor.
It should let O’Dwyer staffers join and have full access to all member records which were created with tax-free money. The membership list belongs to the public. Society members bombard the press by every known means and it should be open season on them also.
The Society owes the O’Dwyer Co. many thousands of dollars because it sold more than 50,000 copies of O’Dwyer articles without our permission. The three-year limit on launching a lawsuit on this has expired but the moral debt remains.
The Society could start repaying this and also informing its members of our informational products by providing the O’Dwyer Co. free ad space in all its publications and on its website. It is depriving its members of knowledge they should have.
The group’s logic escapes me. I’m credentialed for the Assembly but not for the conference where an attempt was made to charge me $1,275, the rate for PR people. That’s totally contradictory.
Dear Mr./Ms. “Anonymous”:
I appreciate your quaint assertion that only traditional media counts – and only "significant" (defined, how, I wonder) traditional media counts at that. But the 60s are over, Edward R. Murrow has passed, daily newspapers are closing and trust in traditional authorities and institutions is waning (not to ruin your morning).
I’m uncertain as to why a letter to the editor of The Economist that did not appear in print would offend any public relations professional’s sensibilities. That letter was posted on economist.com the same day the article was published and soon after featured on Ragan's PRDaily and commpro.biz. It also generated a high volume of traffic on Twitter, and it made for one of the most heavily read entries in our blog’s history.
Do you honestly continue to believe that social media like blogs and Twitter are inconsequential today?
I'm also unsure as to why you ignored the PRSA letter published in The Sunday New York Times Magazine (surely that was noteworthy?), or any of the other placements in our newsroom that, say, a VP of public relations might find significant.
In closing, faceless sir (or ma’am), I’m pleased to say that PRSA's 2011 Chair, Rosanna Fiske, has two in-person interviews this very morning (Jan. 28), with The Economist and with the Financial Times. It’s part of our ongoing engagement with those publications, so I guess they’ve heard of our sorry organization after all.
Cheekily yours,
Arthur Yann
Arthur Yann is VP of public relations for PRSA
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