“I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.”
– DR. MAYA ANGELOU
The five biggest corporate PR disasters of 2018
It's been a year of public relations blunders - and here are some of the worst of them.
Book Titles Can’t Be Copyrighted, And Whew, That Can Lead To Challenges
When bestselling YA author Tomi Adeyemi, author of The Children of Blood and Bone, tweeted a challenge to Nora Roberts (NORA. ROBERTS.) over that author’s new Of Blood and Bone (which debuted at #2 on the bestseller list), things got tense on social media. But – let us repeat – book titles cannot be copyrighted. – The New York Times
93-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Talks About His Dancing In The “Mary Poppins” Sequel
“The minute I heard I was going to do a little number, that sold me,” Van Dyke tells PEOPLE in the latest issue out Friday. “And I thought I could contribute by just being a little bit of a reminder of the original. And I think it turned out well. I got to jump up on a desk and do a dance number. It surprised everybody, but nobody was as surprised as I was.” –People
The Best Free Movie Streaming Service You’ve Never Heard Of
“When the classic-movie streaming service FilmStruck shuttered last month,
it caused a palpable panic among cineastes. Overstuffed with
exceptional big-studio films and arthouse gems, the service represented a
viable alternative to the big streamers, many of which offer relatively
meager film catalogs. And FilmStruck’s demise was especially troubling
when you realize just how many movies, from Oscar-winners to low-budget
oddities, are completely missing from streaming services altogether. What are America’s raging Cocoon-heads supposed to do?” Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary folks, meet Kanopy. — Wired
WhoWhatWhy: “Nothing brings out the grinch in some like the early debut of seasonal music when the season hasn’t even started. Reactions can of course go the other way — people weep with joy at memories attached to a song from their past. Whatever the reaction, music is powerful. Now, a small company in Massachusetts is trying to harness that power to help people with traumatic brain injuries talk again. And scientists say music is actually rewiring patients’ brains. It is well documented that those with Alzheimer’s disease can benefit from hearing and singing songs they remember from earlier in life — but research into music’s ability to create new pathways in the brain to combat impairment of language abilities (aphasia), hemineglect, and loss of movement is relatively new.
New Knowledge: “For years, Russia has leveraged social media to wage a propaganda war with operations that initially targeted their own citizens and sphere of influence. In 2014, they broadened those operations to include the United States and ran a multi-year campaign to manipulate and influence Americans, exploiting social and political divisions. The scale was massive — reaching 126 million people on Facebook, posting 10.4 million tweets on Twitter, uploading 1,000+ videos to YouTube, and reaching over 20 million users on Instagram.Information about the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) activities has trickled out over the past three years, as researchers and journalists have combed the web, uncovering accounts and discovering memes. Finally, in late 2017, ahead of a series of Congressional hearings, Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet each turned over a data set containing text, images, videos, and other content that they attributed to the IRA. The analysis that follows is New Knowledge’s independent investigation of this data set as provided to the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
New Knowledge: “For years, Russia has leveraged social media to wage a propaganda war with operations that initially targeted their own citizens and sphere of influence. In 2014, they broadened those operations to include the United States and ran a multi-year campaign to manipulate and influence Americans, exploiting social and political divisions. The scale was massive — reaching 126 million people on Facebook, posting 10.4 million tweets on Twitter, uploading 1,000+ videos to YouTube, and reaching over 20 million users on Instagram.Information about the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) activities has trickled out over the past three years, as researchers and journalists have combed the web, uncovering accounts and discovering memes. Finally, in late 2017, ahead of a series of Congressional hearings, Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet each turned over a data set containing text, images, videos, and other content that they attributed to the IRA. The analysis that follows is New Knowledge’s independent investigation of this data set as provided to the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.