Inside PR
Inside PR 457: Ethical Media Relations
Twitter Moments for all of us. Large publishers' growing dependency on Facebook. Thinking ahead about the implications of AI in our devices and apps. And the ethics of the close-hold embargo. Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley are back with another episode of the Inside PR podcast. #IPRMustKnows Create your Own Twitter Moments Twitter Moments, introduced for media and select users earlier this year, is now available for all users. This is a useful feature for anyone speaking at a conference or participating in an event or discussion that they want to curate and preserve. Bit by bit, Twitter is becoming even more useful. Large publishers are becoming dependent on Facebook. But where is the revenue? A report published by the International News Media Association and reported on by Nieman Lab indicates that 30% of visits to large publishers websites are referred from Facebook. That's huge. But if publishers are becoming ever more dependent on Facebook's network effect, and with Facebook favouring content published natively on it, the big question continues to be, is traffic paying off in revenue? Getting out front on AI The increasing introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into apps, social networks and internet-connected devices raise a broad range of ethical, legal and policy issues. And where that happens, government is likely to act. So, it should come as no surprise that large businesses are banding together in a number of organizations to address these issues in order in advance of legislation and regulation. Of course, we can only hope that the voice of civil society will be heard alongside that of business. A media relations issue to ponder: Close-hold embargoes Charles Seife, writing in Scientific American, introduced us to a practice we had never encountered: A close-hold embargo. And it gives us the opportunity to ponder the line between transparency and manipulation and the ethical questions that public relations practitioners must confront when negotiating terms of access with news media.