Institute for Public Relations

This column appeared in PRWeek, July 21, 2008, and is reproduced with permission. Anyone who has spent time lately in college classrooms speaking to students in public relations and communication disciplines has seen first-hand an unmistakable trend. The field is finding it increasingly difficult to attract male students. I have spoken on a half dozen campuses in addition to my own in the last year and the gender ratio I’m seeing is about seventy percent female; some of the classes I taught didn’t have a single male student. To be certain that what I experienced wasn’t a random anomaly I checked with ...

(The following provides insights on USC Annenberg’s fifth Gap Study, available free through a link below.) In 2002 the head of global communications at a Fortune 50 company lamented to us, “I have no real idea of what my budget should be because there are no real benchmarks. That’s true of many other aspects of managing the communications function.” Thus was born the Generally Accepted Practices or GAP Study. We took a close look at the availability of operational data that could help senior communications executives manage their functions. What we found surprised us. While much had been written about the ...