Articles on PR for People

Neighborhood Activists Pressure the City of Seattle

From Seattle 

Neighborhood Activists Pressure the City of Seattle to Do the Right Thing

In a city choked by the heavy artillery of cranes and construction crews, two Seattle residents are taking a stand in their own Queen Anne neighborhood. Jack and Louise Locke are the voice of reason during the great Seattle construction boom. They want to stop the rezoning of a single family...


Booty Pop

Second in a series of articles educating the public about the media.

Today’s media outlets are under tremendous pressure to get eyeballs.  They are desperate to make money. Slashing the size of newsrooms and publishing canned content is only part of the story. The Media will do anything to get attention.  They will even shake their booty.

Briefly consider...


Feeding the Beast

First in a series of articles educating the public about the media. 

Imagine a world without newspapers. Every day another media outlet cuts their print counterpart to go strictly digital. And every media outlet reports a steady decline in revenue. Yet it’s hard to imagine a world without newspapers. There would be fewer materials to stuff broken windows and insulate walls....


Destiny –without an e​

I grew up as a working class kid in Yonkers, New York. My parents sent me to Catholic schools, where I learned equal doses of discipline and terror. I spent my third and fourth grade in public school where all of my friends were Jewish. My teacher, Mrs. Chachkes, came from a Jewish merchant family that lived in south Yonkers and sold furniture.  She wore her blonde hair parted on the side in a soft wave that had the tendency to fall forward...


The Five P’s of Publicity for Your Good Works

If you want get the word out about your good works, there are a number of tactics you can implement that are time-efficient and won’t break the bank. To run an effective PR campaign, you need to create a strategy that encompasses the five P’s: Positioning, Platform, People, Promotion and Perseverance.

Positioning. You need to precisely identify what’s unique about your good works....

George Lois Packs a Punch

When legendary ad man George Lois speaks, it is no small thing. His performance is a one-man-show offering us a guided tour through the golden age of popular culture. Hailed as the Golden Greek when he first came on the scene, over the years he’s been honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the Society of Publication Designers (SPD),...


The "F" Word

University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island 1978 - It had started to snow and that winter we had already experienced two of the worst storms in New England history. I trundled myself into a white Volkswagen beetle with three women whom I did not know. I had signed up to travel in a carpool. We debated whether we should drive to Connecticut. The beetle was old, dented, had a throaty muffler and a tail pipe...


Rapper DQ the don Derkquon Battle | Rapping Yonkers’ Pride

From Yonkers

by Patricia Vaccarino

I  interviewed Yonkers Rapper DQ the don, whose given name is Derkquon Battle. His song called Yonkers slumtown caught my attention. I grew up in Yonkers about ten minutes away from where Derkquon lives in the Schlobohm Housing Projects—or "Slow Bomb" projects. While today our worlds are different, I like to know what...


Election 2016 | The P.R. Strategy of Middle School Twerps

From a P.R. perspective, our three major Presidential hopefuls are like the twerps we’ve known in Middle School. Remember how bad everyone felt about their bodies when the birth of a new pimple could ruin your day? Here we are adults, all grown up, and agitated over who will be the next leader of our great country. Under the lens of P.R., let’s take a look at our twerps, their greatest strengths, their greatest flaws and ultimately decide...


George Lois and Muhammad Ali | On Race and Courage

George Lois recently walked me through the process that led to his idea of putting Muhammad Ali in the pose of a martyr on the cover of Esquire Magazine.

Muhammad Ali on the Cover of Esquire Magazine in 1968 sparked a heated controversy. The Esquire cover depicted the famous boxer being pierced by six arrows. How Muhammad Ali came to grace the cover was a deliberate stroke of genius created by legendary ad man...