Holtz Communications + Technology

There hasn’t been much talk about the Social Media News Release (SMNR) lately. It must be time to stimulate some discussion.

When I was in journalism school (California State University Northridge, 1972-1976), the inverted pyramid was a staple of newswriting classes. The way it was taught to me made perfect sense: If somebody reads only the lede paragraph, they should walk away…

UPDATE: It turns out that the original prank wasn’t a tweet, but rather a phone call to a friend of the singer, who believed the report and passed it along. But Twitter got the blame anyway. GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram posted a detailed account today.

When tweets began flooding Twitter with reports that Michael Jackson had died, I resisted what I’ll admit was a very strong…

We have a tendency to assume that a law of physics applies equally to the media world. In physics, according to Newton’s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

This odd assumption crossed my mind to me as I was reading last night. In the he book I was reading, the author argued that, thanks to the…

Once the Super Bowl—the most-viewed television program of all time—ended, 38.6 million people (about 36% of the Super Bowl audience) stuck around for the premiere of CBS’s new “reality” show, “Undercover Boss.”

In case you’ve just emerged from a coma and aren’t aware of the show, the premise is simple: Company leaders go undercover on the front lines of their companies to discover what it’s really like to do the heavy…

There has been a lot of news about news lately and on the surface, none of it bodes well for the traditional newspaper business, regardless of whether you’re talking about paper newspapers or their online cousins. It does, however, reveal opportunities for people working in PR.

It should come as no surprise that readership of newspapers—both print and online—continues to decline. A Harris poll

I was interviewing for a job about 15 years ago, a PR position with a high-tech startup. It only took the person interviewing me—he was the president or the CEO, if memory serves—to ask about my Rolodex.

For the uninitiated, I wasn’t being asked about the rotary card index loaded with removable cards where I kept contact information. (I still have a paper Rolodex…