Exploring "A Brand New World" radio doc

It’s a brand new world. Brand being the key word. Coke, Starbucks, Nike—they all want to sell you something. They always have. But today, brands are not just products and branding is not limited to marketing. In this feature [CBC Radio] documentary, Ira Basen takes us inside a burgeoning brand culture where people obsess about their personal brands, form “relationships” with brands on social media, look to them as legitimate vehicles of social and political...

Goodbye brand journalism and content marketing…hello DIY corporate media!

Evolving to corporate media It was almost a year ago that I interviewed Ira Basen on The intersection of public relations and journalism in the digital age on PR Conversations, a post that was quite popular and seemingly influential. For example, it was due to this late July 2012 interview that Ira Basen was invited a year later to be a keynote speaker at the CPRS Conversations2013 conference. In my most-recent Conversations Byte on Maximize...

The intersection of public relations and journalism in the digital age

A conversation with CanWest’s newest Fellow appointment, Ira Basen Notice from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at Western University “On behalf of the FIMS appointments committee, I am very pleased to announce that Ira Basen has been appointed our CanWestl Fellow for 2012-2013. Mr. Basen will take up the fellowship during this coming fall [2012] term…. During his tenure as CanWest Fellow, Mr. Basen will be teaching a graduate elective, “The Future...

Occupy Next (CBC Radio documentary)

New CBC Radio documentary: Occupy Next We’re interrupting our regularly scheduled PR Conversations programming to tell you the exciting news that that Ira Basen has another documentary, airing on Sunday, April 1st (no joke) on The Sunday Edition. I asked Ira to tell me what this one was about: “Occupy Next looks first at the rather extraordinary impact the Occupy movement has had on American politics and culture in its first six months. It then...

Truth to Power: A tribute to PR pioneer and critic, Chet Burger

Guest post by Ira Basen I think the hardest thing for anybody in life, certainly anybody in public relations or among management consultants, is to tell truth to power.” — Chet Burger (2008) Chet Burger spent half a century in public relations speaking truth to power. And his death from cancer last March at the age of 90, represented not just the passing of a true PR pioneer, but the silencing of an important voice...

Engineering Search: The story of the algorithm that changed the world

New radio documentary from Ira Basen airs on December 5th This coming Sunday (December 5th), a new, one-hour documentary is set to air on CBC Radio One’s The Sunday Edition. Engineering Search: The story of the algorithm that changed the world, tracks the evolution of search engine optimization, particularly in regards to Google. More details are found below. Update: The online version of Engineering Search now available from a dedicated CBC website page. The producer and...