Latest News Articles

Blount County’s Long Community Nightmare is Over
It should never be this difficult or expensive to dismiss an utterly toxic individual who’s arguably driving a desperately needed community healthcare resource into the ground.

Pellissippi State: High Schools Fuel Diverse PR / Comms Workforce Pipeline
A new program in East Tennessee is helping diverse high school students gain career pathways into PR, media, and communications careers. Industry partners are welcomed to join!

Grappling for AI Relevancy, BEPS is Blasé to PRSA’s Tech and Financial Violations
PRSA’s AI white paper is awash in “do as we say, not as we do” hypocrisies, neglecting disclosure of many recent PRSA violations of member trust.

Remembering Hickory Construction’s Chuck Alexander
In 15 years of operating my PR firm in Blount County, one of my favorite clients was Hickory Construction… and alongside Hickory’s Pinnell Family, two of my favorite pillars of the Blount County / Greater Knoxville community have always been Hickory Co-founder Chuck Alexander and his wife Donna. In hearing the news of Chuck’s passing,…

Are the PRSA Foundation’s Race-Based Scholarships Unconstitutional?
The PRSA Foundation faces potential legal and PR problems with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision on race-based academic preferences.

Tech-Hub Snub: Biden’s Tennessee Pass Raises Qs of Awards Methodology
Were taxpayer-funded Biden Administration Tech Hub awards based on pure proposal merit… or a Decision ’24 strategy?

What a Difference a Year Makes in Blount Memorial Land
“It’s been 13 months since I first called publicly for more than zero women to serve on my community’s hospital board.” – @marybethwest

PRSA-NY to Jewish Community: #SorryNotSorry, We’re No Longer Sorry
In a self-made PR crisis of moral reversal, PRSA New York apologizes with an anti-Israel statement days after its pro-Israel statement.

World Mental Health Day 2023 (10 Oct) Deserves Urgent PR Industry Attention
October 10, 2023 will mark World Mental Health Day, and if there is any industry more ripe for taking notice and – more importantly – taking action toward better outcomes, it’s the public relations (PR) sector. Two years ago, executive leaderships of the two largest PR member associations in the U.K. – which historically have…

New PR Ethics Code Research Reveals Rampantly Outdated & Undated Codes
If a public relations (PR) ethics code hasn’t been meaningfully updated since before the dawn of social media and is widely locked in a myopic, media-relations-centric time-warp, then it’s missing massive chunks of essential treatment of contemporary issues.

PRSA Assembly Preview: PR Society Finances Get Curious-er and Curious-er
Amid millions in financial losses for years, PRSA National Board leadership and executive staff have not complied with New York State Not-for-Profit Corporation Law on disclosures to Assembly delegates.

Carole Anne Coleman was Beautiful, Inside and Out
“What I found weren’t answers, though… just evidence-upon-evidence that Carole Anne wanted to project goodness and kindness onto the world…”

The #PRethics of Being Asked to Destroy Evidence
Destroying data at a management team’s command can have massive ethics and legal consequences for the unwitting PR practitioner.

In “Ethics” Parlance, When is the Word “Code” an Utter Misnomer?
This #PRethics Month (Sept. 2023), the PR industry is challenged to consider a simple question: When is an ethics “code” not a “code” at all?… But rather, a “list of nice things to consider”? Public relations is a line of work in which words matter. In fact, if this industry is known at all, it’s…

Is It Just So Terribly Difficult to Follow the Bylaws?
Thinking back some decades ago, my husband – ever the long-suffering college football fan – used to tell the story of exiting his home-team’s massive campus stadium late one rainy night, alongside droves of other angry fans after a particularly soul-crushing defeat for their team. He immediately encountered a very inebriated, middle-aged fellow-sufferer with a…

September is #PRethics Month
This September during #PRethics Month 2023, I’m proud to introduce a full white paper of global public relations association ethics code analysis, which I commissioned last year through the Institute of Business Ethics in London. The research is the first-of-its-kind in modern public relations practice to assess points of differentiation and points of parity across…

Welcome to marybethwest.com — 4.0!
For 20 years, I’ve owned the marybethwest.com URL. During my 15 years (2003-2018) as a public relations agency owner, this dot-com served as the online home to my firm in Tennessee… with several iterations. Since selling my agency in 2018, I decided to take a break from the upkeep of a personal website – relying…