The PR industry can learn a lot from journalism’s own ethics code as well as challenges faced in today’s newsrooms.

PRSA’s College of Fellows is in trouble, with one-third of its members M.I.A. But given years of such bad history, who can blame defectors?

With massive bylaw / compliance conflicts, PRSA’s unenforced Code of Ethics hasn’t been updated since Bill Clinton was POTUS.

Philanthropy can be the highest form of communication in coming to terms with sadness, confusion, and even anger, in the face of loss.

The Commission on Public Relations Education (CPRE) reports ethical competency shortfalls of PR graduates / new professionals. But are PR ethics codes partially to blame?

Trust cannot exist without evidence-based ethics. The 2024 European Business Ethics Forum illuminated this fact well in the City of Light.

To advance ethics in strategic communication, it’s critical to reach boardroom and c-suite leaderships well outside the PR industry.

In matters of perceived media bias, have some traditional news sources pushed Americans to the point where they no longer care?

For more than a decade, PRSA claimed to have a legitimate “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) with the U.S. Dept. of Defense. They were lying.

In 2016, PRSA’s Chairman declared the words “I hate math!” as PR anathema. Now, in 2024, PRSA’s new $5 million balance sheet discrepancy underscores its corruption.

It’s 2024, and not everyone is OK. Let’s rethink what “coping” means and what it requires… including for leaders.

With a $300,000 loss at the Diversity Action Alliance, PRSA members deserve to know what their own Foundation “charity” is really doing on DEI.

In light of Fareed Zakaria’s brilliant CNN editorial taking U.S. academia to task, you can’t “PR” anti-Semitism. So let’s not say stuff that suggests one can, or, much less, should.

The North American PR agency sector faces a slew of competing priorities — with budgets unequal to client demands.

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.

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!

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.

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,…

The PRSA Foundation faces potential legal and PR problems with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision on race-based academic preferences.

Were taxpayer-funded Biden Administration Tech Hub awards based on pure proposal merit… or a Decision ’24 strategy?

“It’s been 13 months since I first called publicly for more than zero women to serve on my community’s hospital board.” – @marybethwest

In a self-made PR crisis of moral reversal, PRSA New York apologizes with an anti-Israel statement days after its pro-Israel statement.

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…

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.

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.

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

Destroying data at a management team’s command can have massive ethics and legal consequences for the unwitting PR practitioner.

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…

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…

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…

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…