Unlike most Americans, I didn’t have a television on Sept. 11, 2001. So, unlike most Americans, I learned about the 9/11 attacks via another medium: an e-mail alerts from the New York Times. When I checked my e-mail that morning, this missive from the newspaper was my first inkling of the terrible events that […]
Category Archives: Public Relations
In story-telling, a key principle is showing, not telling. In other words, rather than say someone was nervous, you would want to convey, via telling details, behaviors that illustrated the nervousness. When it comes to offering a glimpse at my business value, I like to take the same approach: show it, don’t just talk about […]
In this blog-eat-blog world, increasingly I am guiding various clients as they develop an ongoing web presence. Among them is Scheck & Siress, a highly respected orthotic and prosthetic company for which I’m working as a senior associate of Plunkett & Associates, a leading Chicago strategic communications company. To see some recent work I’ve […]
This afternoon, as was my hope yesterday, I finished the news release on the Five Seasons Sports Club in Burr Ridge hosting the Athletes For Life mobile Cardiac Screening Facility, starting Sept. 16-17, taking a day off, and wrapping up on Sept. 19-20. In all, I contacted about 15 media outlets, encompassing newspapers, regional […]
The past few days I have been working on a news release about Athletes For Life, and that organization’s efforts, among other initiatives, to provide, at no charge, early detection of heart problems. There are some major names associated with the group, starting with co-founder and former pro football star Willie Gault (pictured, with Marlene […]
Today there is a nice human-interest profile on Keeli Mickus (pictured with son, Hank) in the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest. In addition to reporter Terry Dean’s story, on its web site the Wednesday Journal prominently displayed three videos that I shot during an appointment that Keeli, a patient of Scheck & […]
William Faulkner, overly fond of overly long sentences, or Ernest Hemingway: which novelist would thrive in today’s Twitter-y 140-character-or-less, attention-span-challenged world? Hemingway. No doubt. Mr. Brevity himself. Besides having a realistic view of how much time your audience will devote to any given subject-word-predicate combination, “writing tight” helps aid comprehension. (At 23 words, that last […]
Some thoughts spring to mind on the heels of the Democratic National Convention, where bloggers played an increasingly influential role. In 2000, when I began working a four-year stretch as a freelance reporter for Time magazine’s Chicago bureau, I was amused by the speed with which sources returned my calls. If I had called those […]
One of my favorite people, Gloria Onischuk, was featured in today’s Oak Leaves. With a story bearing the headline, “Local B & B’s doors open to filmmakers,” reporter Patrick Butler did a solid piece on Gloria’s work over the years with Chicago-area film crews, commercial crews and other visual arts projects. I’m so happy for […]