✅ Monday briefing: Media scrutiny, neurodiversity, blogging slog, agile communication, YouTube caption options, accessibility toolkit, and more…
Media, industry, research and insight, tools, and social media and platforms
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support.
Media
👮 MEDIA SCRUTINY: A Harvard Business School study of misbehaviour among publicly traded companies shows the critical role that newspapers play as a watchdog. It makes a correlation between the closure of newspapers and the rise of corporate crime. Spotted David Gallagher.
Industry
🤔 NEURODIVERSITY IN PR: A PRovoke long read explores neurodiversity from autism to dyslexia in public relations. Neurodiversity is one of the least-discussed aspects of diversity. PRovoke says that it’s time to end the stigma around people whose brains are wired differently. Source Maja Pawinska Sims.
🤕 MENTAL HEALTH: 90% of public relations practitioners have experienced mental health issues in the past year. More than half didn’t take time off work. Initiatives to support mental health aren’t being utilised because of stigma according to a joint report by the CIPR and PRCA. Source Stephen Waddington.
Research and insight
💻 BLOGGING SLOG: The average blog post is more that 1,000 words long and takes four hours to write. Three quarters of bloggers say that it remains an effective channel, with a fifth reporting that it is highly effective. Andy Crestodina surveys more than 1,000 bloggers each year. Spotted Andrew Smith.
👍 REMOTE WORK: The future for public relations may see a long term shift to remote work. A survey of agency CEOs found that 54% now expect more than half of roles to be filled by remote workers. The majority (83%) expect a decentralisation of the industry away from London. Spotted Andrew Smith.
👎 REMOTE WORK: A Microsoft study of 60,000 employees reported in Nature suggests that remote working has the potential to reduce collaboration. It finds that while working hours increased, real-time conversations fell significantly. Spotted Alan Morrison.
🏃 AGILE COMMUNICATION: The digital team at DEFRA has published a guide to agile communication management. I’s an iterative approach to project management originally developed in the software industry that helps teams reach faster, more effective outcomes. Spotted Seán Massey.
📊 PERFORMANCE AD FLOP: airbnb slashed its performance advertising spend by $500 billion and saw no measurable fall off in attributable sales. It suggests that organisations should only advertise to those already primed to buy. Spotted Andrew Smith.
Tools
📹 YOUTUBE CAPTION OPTIONS: YouTube has announced updates to its video captioning tool to improve accessibility. It is enabling live captioning to all streamers, caption translation to mobile, and searchable captions in transcripts. Spotted Alan Morrison.
🔧 ACCESSIBILITY TOOLKIT: Alexa Heinrich published a 30-minute guide to accessibility on social media. Her website also contains useful primers on topics including alternative text, colour contrast, captions, hashtags, formatting and plain language. Spotted Karan Chadda and Mags L Halliday.
Social media and platforms
😡 TWITTER POLICY: Twitter has published a policy paper grandly titled Protecting The Open Internet, with regulatory recommendations for policy makers. It’s a manifesto to promote dialogue and mutual understanding on the web that aims to put white space between Facebook and Twitter. Source Stephen Waddington.
🌌 TWITTER TAB: A new Twitter Spaces tab will showcase live audio broadcasts that are in progress. Personalised listings will be based on people and topics that you follow in the app. Spotted Alan Morrison.
👎 LINKEDIN CHINA SHUTDOWN: Microsoft is shutting down LinkedIn in China, claiming that it is finding compliance with the Chinese state increasingly challenging. LinkedIn had been the only major Western social-media platform operating in China. It plans to launch a jobs app as a replacement. Spotted Karan Chadda.
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