New PR & Comm Blogs – April 2006

Long time, no see :)

Anyway — here’s the April update for the PR Blogs List; plus: a rant about the lack of PR academic blogs, a farewell to one of the first PR corporate blogs, and a “help wanted” announcement.

Back to the update: the list has currently 464 feeds. If you’re not familiar with it, you can find more info at the bottom of this entry.

There are not so many new (to me) blogs this month – but please don’t read too much into this (“PR blogosphere growth is slowing down, the end of PR blogging is nigh“, etc.).

I’m really happy to add to the list two academic blogs written by professors from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia: so this is mass communication?, authored by Dr. Kaye Trammell, and Teaching PR, authored by Dr. Karen Miller Russell.

I’m a long time subscriber to Kaye’s blog, and I really don’t know why it took me so long to realize that it’s not in the list (duh!). Apologies! Dr. Trammell (bio) got her PhD from University of Florida with a dissertation on celebrity weblogs, and she’s the author of a long list of academic articles on weblogs (search for “Trammell” on this page); the most recent was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Dr. Karen Miller Russell is the winner of the Institute for Public Relations’ Pathfinder Award and the author of –among others– “The Voice of Business: Hill and Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations.” She’s also the author of a must-read study for PR practitioners — “US Public Relations History: Knowledge and Limitations” (it’s not available online, unfortunately, so I’m just pointing you to its dead-tree version).

Why am I so excited about these two blogs? Because I hope their example will encourage other PR academics to join the online conversation. Two years ago I wrote about the need to start a dialogue with the academic world, that’s a largely untapped resource of knowledge, expertise, research skills and capabilities. Fast forward to May 2006: although a weblog is created every single second, the number of PR academic bloggers is (still) incredibly low:

But, hey, this is something that deserves a separate discussion.

Enjoy!

 

Academic blogs

Student blogs

Podcasts

The other new blogs and feeds

URL changes:

Farewell

Hans Kullin wrote that PR-agency JKL has “decided to shut down their corporate blog. JKL launched what probably was both the first Swedish PR blog and corporate blog back in February 2004.” Back in April 2004 I interviewed Billy McCormac, who was the author of JKL Blog’s English section… Fugit irreparabile tempus.

To do (that’s for me, but I’d appreciate any help!):

  • discuss with Robert about adding the blogs hosted on PRblogs.org to the list
  • get help for editing the list of PR blogs authored by women (OPML) — what do you say, Kami? :)
  • add Communintelligence.com’s blogs to the list (if the RSS feeds are public)
  • get recommendations for PR & Comm blogs from Latin America, Europe, Asia, etc.
  • review the list and eliminate the blogs that haven’t been updated in the last year or so (2 or 3 cases, most probably)
  • suggestions? — please leave a comment, or e-mail me.
 

More information about the list

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