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In this week’s podcast, we cover four different stories that show the evolution of online news and PR, with some lessons for B2B marketers. We first examine the announcement about a new $14 million initiative to combat declining trust in the news media and advance news literacy. It will be called the News Integrity Initiative and be administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in NYC. It will comprise a global coalition of tech leaders, academic institutions, nonprofits and funders, including Facebook, Mozilla, Edelman and Weber Shanwick PR firms, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark. Certainly, something on this level is needed desperately.

A promising story comes from the Washington Post, that covered the situation with a high school student newspaper that brought about the firing of their principal last month. The students, from a small town in Kansas, investigated the principal and found she faked her credentials. Good for them!

Everyone is taking about the United video of a passenger being dragged off a flight. While we can’t be entirely sure of the timeline, what we do note is how long it took United’s CEO Oscar Munoz to finally apologize and offer the passengers on that flight a refund for their trouble. Too bad PRWeek had already named him its “Communicator of the year.”  Timing is everything. Still, we point to this piece for corporate PR pros:  Why “Sorry” Is Still the Hardest Word with some solid lessons on how to gracefully apologize during a crisis.

Finally, there is the mess that YouTube is in with showing ads on racist and other objectionable videos. Advertisers such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Dish Network are pulling their ads rather than take a chance that their brands would be tarnished.  The WSJ and The Verge have covered this story recently and Google is trying to develop new automated methods to at least distinguish objectionable content and give advertisers more control over where their ads appear. Given that 400 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, an automated method is absolutely essential. 

About David Strom

David Strom is a former editor-in-chief of Network Computing and Tom's Hardware who has written two computer networking books and thousands of articles about B2B IT.

About Paul Gillin

Paul Gillin, host of FIR B2B, is a veteran technology journalist and a thought leader in new media. Since 2005, he has advised marketers and business executives on strategies to optimize their use of social media and online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. Full bio