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Res Publica — Public Relations Business NewsLetter By Michael Tanner There's an idiom for when you're asked to make something bad look presentable anyway: you can't put lipstick on a pig. Every ...

By Michael Tanner (So Long, and Thanks for All the Phish) Somewhere in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on Earth, right after "mostly harmless," there'd be a line about LinkedIn: a prof...

Every so often someone asks, in one way or another, what it takes to get on Land the Mic — or to get covered, period, by anything Dice Media Group produces. The honest answer is boring, and that's...

By Michael Tanner "Holy cow! God, that is a big burger." That's Chris Kempczinski, CEO and chairman of McDonald's, biting into the new Big Arch on Instagram. For who, exactly? Not a construction...

By Michael Tanner On Monday, the FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon — not over warehouses or Prime, but over advertising. The allegation: Amazon quietly changed its ad auction rules b...

By Michael Tanner Is it Halloween, or Groundhog Day? Inside Target's comms shop, it's hard to tell. In late August 2026, Target pulled its "Kids' Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Co...

Why the tech industry's copyright fight is a ticking time bomb for corporate governance and public relations. If you want to understand the pure absurdity of the current AI copyright fight, forge...

This week the industry lost Dolly Parton, dead at 80 after a brief battle with cancer, her family said. If there's one thing worth carrying forward from her catalog into this series, it's this: sh...

There's a facility in North Las Vegas called VGT3. Amazon buys rare, out-of-print books through commercial channels, cuts the spines off, scans the pages, and discards what's left. The company tha...

Standing at an open mic, about to go live, I hear the station manager lean in with the same note he always gives: Keep it safe. Nothing that will upset anybody. A boring show is a show that stays ...

Everyone is chasing the same AI tool right now. Almost nobody is chasing the thing that actually determines whether that AI recommends you: earned media. AI was supposed to make public relations...

"Boss, ONE MILLION VIEWS — guaranteed — or we don't pay!" Two accountants pitched it like a slam dunk. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber, high-fiving each other over their brilliant plan. The CEO sa...