Public Relations

Overview

Public relations (PR) is the strategic communication process that helps organizations build and maintain a positive public image by managing relationships with the media, customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Companies hire PR practitioners to shape their brand reputation, handle crisis communication, improve media relations, and engage with their target audiences effectively. PR professionals also assist in crafting compelling messages, increasing brand awareness, and ensuring consistent and favorable public perception, which can ultimately increase credibility and drive business success.

In other words, public relations practitioners make companies look good (even when they are bad).

Task

Do some internet sleuthing to dig up some dirt on a company/organization or a public figure that made a mistake. How did they screw up? A few examples of public relations crises can be found https://prlab.co/blog/13-pr-nightmares-revealed/ as examples. Your goal is to serve this person/place as its pseudo public relations professional to make it look good amidst the bad.

Paper

• Part I: What is the issue? How does it impact public perception? Why is this situation bad? (minimum 300 words).
• Part II: Write a press release to fix the problem and make the company/person look good (minimum 600 words).
• Part III: Explain how and why your writing will improve the public's perception in response to this crisis (minimum 200 words).

Please be sure to clearly label parts one, two, and three on your paper. Refer to the Assignment Format Guide to make sure you are formatting your paper correctly.

Assignment Format Guide

We will use the American Psychological Association (APA) style for our written assignments in COMM 1130. This page serves as a reference to format your papers in the correct style. Further information and helpful guides can be found on the APA General Format webpage of the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL).

Basic Format:

• Times New Roman, twelve point font
• Double spaced
• One inch margins on all sides
• Page number on the top right header, excluded on the first page
  • In Word, click Insert > Header and Footer > Page Number
  • Note: Make sure the page number font/size match the rest of the paper.
• References are required for most of our assignments in this class. Please refer to the Purdue University OWL Reference List: Authors webpage for proper APA citations.
• On the first page, include your name, date of the assignment deadline, and class/section number (COMM 1130-004) on the upper left corner. I do not require title pages for our assignments in this class.

Canvas Submission:

• Only .PDF, .DOC, and .DOCX file types can be submitted on Canvas.
• If you try to upload any other file type (i.e. .PAGES, .JPG, etc.) Canvas will reject it, so please be sure to plan ahead.
• Per the course syllabus, assignments can only be submitted on Canvas. Please do not email your assignments.

As a tuition-paying student at the University of Utah, you have free access to the Microsoft Office Suite to use for your coursework. I encourage you to use this resource and download Microsoft Word for our assignments. Start downloading Microsoft Word and other Microsoft Office Suite computer/tablet apps on the Office of Software Licensin webpage.