Don’t be too worried. Before advertising-supported social media, there was RSS. And there still is RSS. In fact, I think it’s a better way to get the news you care about from sources you trust – delivered directly to a newsreader that you can open in your browser when you want. You, not the social networks algorithms, are in control of what you read.

I use Feedly to subscribe to news sources I trust. It’s simple to set up and then just works – reliably and constantly.

So, if you’re wondering how you will access trusted Canadian news sources after Google and Facebook turn off the taps, check out Feedly.

The post Back to the future. Facebook and Google bully tactics make an RSS newsreader relevant again appeared first on ProPR.

Emily Mack from the Department of Metropolitan Development for the City of Indianapolis describes how Indianapolis moved many meetings online. Good insight into the practical steps necessary to stage online meetings, with tips and learnings from Indianapolis’ experience.

The American Planning Association podcast covers topics relating to planning and local government, featuring expert guests with backgrounds in planning, public engagement, government budgeting and related areas. If you are a podcast listener, this is worth subscribing to.

The post Organizing a government meeting online when you can’t meet in person appeared first on ProPR.

Some essential thoughts:

Equating the Unequal

“In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent…”

If it ain’t pizzazzy, it ain’t newsworthy

“the expectation that every major news event should offer drama in the style of a reality TV show. … When that excitement level isn’t met, the media often steps in to provide it. That takes the form of dramatizing the nation’s polarization, compete with laments about ‘divided America.’“

It’s the type of writing that justifies a subscription to the Washington Post.

Source: The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right – The Washington Post

The post Equating the Unequal, Pizzaz and Polarization appeared first on ProPR.

the “illusory truth effect,” a concept by which a lie begins to seem more true the more it’s repeated. A 2017 Wired article explains this as “a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth” and quotes University of Toronto psychologist Lynn Hasher as saying it’s “likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information.”

Source: The Hill can’t stop spreading misinformation about Trump’s impeachment

The post The “Illusory Truth Effect” appeared first on ProPR.

As I read this, I realized for the first time that I’m one of those people. I no longer own a radio! That’s not something I consciously decided on. I simply had drifted over to spending all my time streaming music and listening to podcasts. The on-demand delivery of what I want when I want it has become the norm for me, not the linear format of radio.

And while I never made a conscious decision to stop listening to radio, over time, one by one, all my radios, from clock radio by the bed to kitchen radio, had been replaced by speakers that connect to my iPhone.

And reflecting on it today, I realized that the only time I ever hear a radio is in my Dentist’s office or if the Lyft driver turns a radio on.

This isn’t earth shattering. But it got me thinking about the quiet ways that change occurs. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

The post I just realized I don’t have a radio any more appeared first on ProPR.

This month, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talked about a number of issues relating to social media, privacy and

Inside PR 533: The Best You Can Be

On Inside PR 533, we discussed

• Facebook’s commitment to supporting local journalism. (0:55)
• Using Alexa Flash Briefings for your communications program (5:51)
• our take on Gillette’s The Best Men Can Be video ad theme (15:44)

Inside PR 532: We’ve Got Resolutions

And for our first podcast of the year, Inside PR 532, we talked about our business and communications resolutions for 2019. Why not start off the year with great ambitions!

Linkworthy

If you’re looking for more information on the topics we discussed this month on Inside PR, check out the articles, videos and podcasts at the links below.

• Doing More to Support Local News, Facebook blog
• Facebook is funding more programs catering to local news publishers, Max Willens
• The Alexa Flash Briefing Guide for Communicators, Gini Dietrich
• Podnews.net and the Podnews podcast — a template for Alexa Flash Briefings?
• Feedly News Reader, an indispensable tool for communicators
• The Best Men Can Be, Gillette
• “No going back:” Viral Gillette ad sparks fierce reaction
• The Agency Leader Podcast, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich

The post Go Inside PR – January podcasts appeared first on ProPR.

While speaking yesterday to the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the question of building consensus and listening to people. I believe that every public engagement practitioner will recognize in his remarks the fundamentals of the best practices that we strive for. To hear these sentiments issuing from a national leader is encouraging. It helps me to believe that, amid the daily noise of government, wise and thoughtful leaders are still working to achieve a more equitable, responsive and representative government.

CBC has posted a video of PM Trudeau’s exchange with Neskonlith Chief Judy Wilson.  Starting at around minute 4:15 as Trudeau says,

Can we build consensus? Can we do the right kinds of things? And when we move forward on some of the things that maybe some of you will disagree with, can we move forward in the least worst way?

By listening to you.

By responding to your concerns tangibly and concretely.

By making adjustments so that you understand that it is done in a sense of respect and collective responsibility.

The post Canada’s Prime Minister shows he understands meaningful public engagement appeared first on ProPR.

A lot of people and organizations appear to be making digital an essential good for the public service. My core claim is that the connection between digital and the public good is neither intuitive nor obvious, and I think we’re at a point where this is starting to cause some trouble.

…Digital is an instrumental good. It allows us to be more efficient (stewardship of the public purse) transparent (integrity), engaged (respect for democracy), and responsive to Canadians (respect for people).

…Are public service values commensurate with elevating digital to an essential good? It is not at all clear that they are – and in fact, the answer appears to be ‘no’.

…It’s time for a deeper conversation about digital in the Canadian public service. Why is digital good? Is #GCDigital commensurate with the public good in an essential way, or an instrumental way?

Stuart Forrestell

I believe that digital engagement will help strengthen the bond between citizen and public institution by making the opportunity for public input available to more people. Viewed from that perspective, it clearly can be seen as an instrument by which we can advance the essential good of trust and participation in government decisions.

On the other hand, I think the distinction between instrumental and essential is highly useful and applicable to real world decisions. For example, if it were clearly applied to the use of advertising-driven social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, a perspective that digital is instrumental would cause us to ask questions about the potential benefits and tradeoffs.

If this question were asked, it would drive us to use these networks as a means of information sharing, but to avoid them as a channel for public consultation. I see all too many government institutions (especially at the local level) who want to integrate Facebook pages or live videos or registration into their online consultations. They are so driven to “go digital” that they overlook the potential for the social network to sell the metadata our input yields to advertisers.

That’s not an argument against digital engagement. But it is a reason to consider carefully the best channel for different types of interaction.

The post Digital engagement is a means, not an end appeared first on ProPR.

Inside PR 517 has been posted – and it covers a lot of ground.

On Inside PR 517, we talk about the Sarah Jeong controversy that erupted last week. If you aren’t familiar with this, I have included links to key articles that will provide the background in the Linkworthy section below. Here’s a quick recap. Last week, the New York Times announced that Sarah Jeong would be leaving the Verge to join the NY Times as lead writer on technology. And then a Twitter storm erupted as attention was drawn to tweets authored by Jeong that were derogatory of white people. The Times quickly reaffirmed its decision, pointing to the context in which Jeong wrote those tweets and indicating that they would not be acceptable in future now that she has joined the Times. Coming in the wake of the James Gunn and Les Moonves controversies, could we indeed be seeing the a restoration of the balance between nuance and absolutism? As Martin asks, could we be back to a time in which we can admit to a mistake, own it, show contrition, and move on? We can only hope so.

Also, in this episode, we know that many listeners to this podcast speak about their area of practice to conferences and at professional development events. If you do this even once a year, you’ll be interested in a post that Gini Dietrich wrote on the SpinSucks blog, Six ways to generate leads from a speaking engagement. Martin and I both thought it offered practical advice that we would put to work – and we asked Gini to discuss it with us.

Finally, a couple #IPRMustKnows, things worth noting and acting upon:

• WordPress is one more step closer to the full rollout of Project Gutenberg. This week, WordPress pushed out a maintenance update that included a prompt to all users to turn on the Gutenberg update. Gini did this for SpinSucks – and she raves about how great the new experience is. This may be the final release before WordPress 5.0 is pushed out to all users. And with WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg 5.0 will be turned on by default for all users. So, if you publish on WordPress and you haven’t turned on Gutenberg yet, now is your time to try it out.
• Feedly is, in Joe’s opinion, the best newsreader available for people who want to curate their online information sources via RSS feeds. When Google closed down Google Reader, a substantial part of the Reader community migrated their reading lists to Feedly. That was a time of rocket ship growth for Feedly, which enabled users to access, read and curate their news sources on every device – desktop, tablet and mobile phone. Now the good folks at Feedly have initiated a major rewrite of the Feedly iOS app – and they have invited their community of users to test the app as it is being developed and provide their feedback. The Feedly team have set up a dedicated Slack Workspace for the beta phase, to announce the new features introduced or refined with each week’s release and asking for feedback on these features. And to enable participants in the beta to see that their input is being incorporated in the development team’s work, they’ve gone a step further, setting up a Trello workspace and posting links to it so that the participant community can see the state of work. The Beta program is just about to hit its midpoint. But new users still are joining. So, if you use Feedly and want to make it better, you too can still sign up to participate in the beta. Kudos to Feedly for building their app the right way, co-creating with their community will yield a much better product that meets both mainstream and specialized needs.

Linkworthy

• Try Gutenberg in WordPress 4,9,8
• Feedly invites users into the design and testing phase of its new iOS app, Edwin K
• Six ways to generate leads from a speaking engagement, Gini Dietrich
• Sarah Jeong Joins The Times’s Editorial Board
• New York Times stands by new tech writer Sarah Jeong after racist tweets surface, Brian Flood
• Statements in Response to Criticism of the Hiring of Sarah Jeong to the Editorial Board in Opinion
• Newsrooms must stand up to targeted campaigns of harassment,  T.C. Sottek, Nilay Patel, Helen Havlak, Dieter Bohn, Eleanor Donovan, and Thomas Ricker
• CBS Films Chief Terry Press on Leslie Moonves: “Story Generates as Many Questions as Answers”, Abid Rahman

Subscribe to the Inside PR podcast

We’re trying to be wherever you want us to be. So, you can subscribe to Inside PR on the most popular podcast apps.

• Subscribe to Inside PR on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to Inside PR on Spotify
• Subscribe to Inside PR on Google Play

The post Inside PR 517: Did the NY Times decision on Sarah Jeong mark a turning point? appeared first on ProPR.

• Inside PR 514: Behind the Scenes at LinkedIn Learning. Gini and I interviewed Martin Waxman and his producer from the sound booth at LinkedIn Learning in California where Martin had traveled to record his latest LinkedIn Learning course. 
• Inside PR 515: Good Judgment and an Abandonment of Principles? We look at three fraught issues that broke just before recording: the firing of James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise; the bad timing of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s publishing a letter opposing gunshot-detecting technology in Toronto just hours before a mass shooting in the city; and Burberry being called out for its policy of destroying old stock.
• Inside PR 516: Learning, Reconciliation and Forgiveness. We follow up last week’s episode about James Gunn’s firing with a discussion of Terry Press’ reaction to the allegations against CBS Chairman Les Moonves.

All in all, a busy month. You can catch up with the podcast by clicking on any of the links above.

The post Inside PR in July appeared first on ProPR.