Jill Z. McBride

We’ve written at length about the sullied reputations of Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwartzenegger and Charlie Sheen and the path to redemption through proactive public relations. In a USA Today editorial titled “How Good Could Come From Murdoch’s Low Journalism,” columnist DeWayne Wickham suggests that Murdoch’s closing his newspaper and apologizing won’t be enough to salvage his reputation.

Rather, Wickham suggests that Murdoch finance a follow-up to the commission that University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins headed in 1942 to examine the role and duties of the nation’s mass media. (Ironically, Time magazine founder Henry Luce funded the study in an effort to cleanse his own badly stained reputation.)

To make this effort credible, Wickham says that Murdoch should give a distinguished academic leader freedom to empanel a non-partisan (which is to say not rabidly ideological) committee and the funds to carry out its work. Simply stated, its mission should be to...

Fourth of July weekend is traditionally a time of parades, fireworks, cookouts and perhaps a little reflection on what the Founding Fathers intended when they decided to fight for our freedoms including speech and religion.

I guess the folks at Mardell Stores (operator of Hobby Lobby and Hemispheres) weren’t thinking about the “freedom” part of the “freedom of religion message” when they chose 4th of July weekend to run this full-page advertisement in newspapers across the country. Under a quote from Thomas Jefferson the ad goes on to quote Psalm 33:12 “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” and then provides a web site to download a free Bible for your phone and offers “IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW JESUS AS LORD AND SAVIOR, CALL NEED HIM MINISTRY AT 1-888-NEED-HIM.”

I know that Mardel Stores, like Chick-Fil-A is one of a growing group of retail establishments that touts its Christian values via its advertising, but as a public relations and marketing professional...

Memo to Burson-Marsteller:

All press coverage is not good press coverage, even when you are a PR agency.

According to a story in the May 10th Money section of USA Today titled “PR Firms’s Google Attack” Burson-Marsteller, a top-five PR firm, started a “whisper campaign“ aimed at getting newspapers (including USA Today) to run stories about how an obscure Gmail feature, Social Circle, infringes on peoples’ privacy and violates FTC rules. But Google said that Social Circle lets customers make social connections using public and private connections across Google products without skirting privacy.

The campaign was spearheaded by Burson-Marsteller’s Jim Goldman, a former CNBC tech correspondent, and former political columnist John Mercurio on behalf of an unnamed client. Goldman pitched the Social Circle issue as a huge privacy breach to Google users and an important story for consumers, said USA Today, and Mercurio even offered to ghostwrite an oped column on the...

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might think that we’re a bit obsessed with Starbucks. Or perhaps with coffee in general. Well it’s winter and it’s cold and we like our yummy warm beverages — there’s nothing wrong with that.

Now Starbucks has made it even easier to get our caffeine fix. And to send them to our friends. Not only can you pay with your iPhone but today Starbucks is launching an electronic gift card program called Starbucks Card eGifts. There are two ways to participate:

1) Go to the Starbucks Web site and enter which e-mail address to send the funds to. Choose one of the adorable e-card designs, add a personal message and voila. Nothing too complicated — you can specify whether to send a predetermined amount ($5, $10, $15, or $20), or you can send however much you like.

2) Facebook users are able to connect their account to the eGifts program, and doing so will open up a few different opportunities. You can, of course, more easily...