Today’s Chicago Sun-Times has a nice profile of Bacon’s Information Inc.,which is based there. The article says Bacon’s helps “a swollen army of 350,000 PR professionals inhabiting more than 7,000 consulting agencies and more than 20,000 corporate, government and institutional departments” keep track of “over 160,000 publications, broadcasters and blogs.” Kind of makes one feel special, doesn’t it?

A friend rented Sweet Smell of Success after reading an earlier blog entry and suggested I recommend other great films that tackle the worlds of journalism and public relations.

Here are my Top 10, with my favorite ranked first.

1. Citizen Kane
2. All the President’s Men
3. Broadcast News
4. Sweet Smell of Success
5. Network
6. His Girl Friday
7. The Insider
8. Teacher’s Pet
9. The Paper
10. Wag the Dog

As for the worst? I’ll go with I Love Trouble.

As I compiled this list, I got a little depressed that I couldn’t think of a single good film that made us PR types look anything other than despicable. Time and again, PR and advertising folks are depicted as two-faced, unethical hotshots who will do anything for a client. Lawyers get this kind of treatment in the movies as well — but they get almost equal time as the good guy.

Maybe PoweR Girls is good for the industry’s reputation after all.:)

Last week, a woman in San Jose found part of a human finger in her bowl of Wendy’s chili. The Web jokesters are already on the case — Adrants cites a spoof that says the incident is part of a new promotional campaign offering customers “a bit of (founder) Dave (Thomas) in every bite.”

The reality is that a crisis of some kind happens to all companies from time to time. Whether the crisis becomes a PR nightmare or a minor bump in the road is generally determined not by the incident itself, but by the company’s response to it. A company that handles a crisis with openness and honesty can actually build a stronger relationship with its customers than it had before.

I think it’s too early to tell in the Wendy’s case, but the San Jose Mercury News (registration required) has a nice article on this topic. The article cites some well-known crisis management cases of the recent past, “handled well or poorly.” Here’s an excerpt from the article; I’ve added links for those who’d like to learn more about each of these incidents:

Even a marketing campaign can create a PR crisis. Blockbuster, based in Dallas, had a crisis on its hands recently when it launched its “End of Late Fees” program — which had too much fine print attached for many of its customers, as well as the attorney general of New Jersey, who filed suit over the campaign. More than 30 other states subsequently began their own investigations.

It sounds like a mess….but so did “New Coke” until it led to the creation of “Classic Coke,” and even more shelf space and profits for Coca-Cola. So it’s not too late for Blockbuster to turn this one around.

Bruce Lowry of Novell told The Economist that he can imagine blogs “completely replacing press releases within 10 years.” It’s a bold thought; does it hold water?

No doubt, the Web has tranformed public relations and changed the nature of the press release. Releases now have to be written with the assumption that everyone will read them. So a company’s messages must be consistent — which, frankly, hasn’t always been the case in the past.

For example, before the late 90s, I can point to many examples where CEOs spoke to their Wall Street investors (through news releases as well as conference calls) in a very different way than they spoke to employees and customers. A layoff, for example, is often a positive for a company’s stock price, while it’s obviously anything but positive for employees. And investors love to hear that a company’s products are earning higher margins than those of the competition; but a customer might see or hear the same message and think, “I’m getting ripped off!”

The Internet era has had the effect of forcing companies to integrate their messages more tightly, so they’re saying the same thing to everybody. This is a good thing. But is the next step to move away from press releases altogether and on to blogs?

I can’t imagine it anytime soon. I think more and more companies will add blogs as a new channel of communication. Some early corporate-affiliated blogs, like those of Robert Scoble (Microsoft) and Jonathan Schwartz (Sun), are excellent; they have the frankness and intimacy that a good blog requires. But I’m afraid many corporations will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into this new arena. Most large corporations are accustomed to top-down leadership and tight control of messages, and blogging runs counter to this.

Time will tell. Whatever happens, I look forward to being part of it.

Someone e-mailed me this morning to ask if Dallas had any other blogs like mine. My blog has a particular focus on the evolving relationship between journalism and public relations, which I haven’t seen elsewhere. But Dallas does have some nice blogs.

My favorite Dallas blogs are probably those of journalist Virginia Postrel (though I often disagree with her opinions) and D Magazine (though I’m not a fan of its sometimes gratuitous bashing of Belo, a great media company — and my former employer.)

Speaking of Belo, I applaud Keven Ann Willey for launching a blog by the editorial page team at The Dallas Morning News. She wanted the public to see how the soup’s made — to see the real people and real debate that go into deciding what positions to take on various issues. As she put it:

The entries on the blog represent the individual views of board members, for example, not necessarily the board’s collaborative view. But it’s those individual views that are so important to shaping the collaborative view that you read on the editorial page of the newspaper each day.

I read Mark Cuban’s blog, too. For those of you who don’t know, Cuban also backs IceRocket, an upstart search engine based in Dallas that includes a blog search function. It’s only a matter of time before Google, Yahoo and MSN offer the same.