Canadians increasingly using food banks: Report

Is the recession over? Well, not according to a recent report that shows that use of food banks is way up. Almost a million Canadians... or roughly three per cent of the population, used food banks in March 2010.

This story is a good example of how PR shapes our view of our world. Recently stories over the recession ending, the end of the government's stimulus spending and increases in home prices would all suggest that things are on the mend and looking good.

Yet obviously they aren't, at least not for everyone. PR gives a voice to trends that are unfolding in our society, and if certain elements don't have a voice, we often can end up getting the wrong picture about what is going on out there. This particular story has definitely shaded my view of the recovery.

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A Look Back on 2017 / A Look Forward to 2018

Hard to believe it's been two years (and six books) since I started publishing. Thought I'd take a moment to look back on the journey, some of the highlights and what's in store for the future. Eyes Wide Open I had no idea what this publishing path would be like - I went in blind with nothing more than an interest in telling a story. It turned out to be way harder than I could have imagined. You'd think writing a book wouldn't be that difficult, but it is. It's not so much the book that readers see that's hard to produce, it's the ideas and writing that get left on the cutting room floor. But beyond the actual stories, learning Photoshop to do my own covers, understanding how to market my books, learning how to create print versions, and a dozen other things really opened my eyes to how much effort is required to get a book to market. Along the way I’ve had my moments where I questioned my sanity to put myself through the process. But...

Pew Research says Press Credibility In Decline

According to Pew Research negative opinions about the press are at an all time high. Definitely check out the source article because they have a ton of infographics that are worth looking at. The main graph related to the research is the one below: As you can see, the public no longer views the media as unbiased or fully accurate. There are dozens of variables that play in to this phenomena, but I think the biggest one is that the public has traditionally viewed the media as doing the people's work. Which is to say, they are kind of like the FBI, but they work for the people not the government. They are suppose to root out what is going on and inform the people so that society can hold politicians and corporations accountable (note the reoccuring theme of accountability that I talk about often in this blog, because it's a causal variable behind much of the issues in the world today). Over the past 15 or so years, the press has lost it's credibility with the p...

6/49 to raise ticket prices to $3 - bad PR move

If you haven't heard 6/49 (Canada's national lottery) is raising its ticket prices in September from $2 a ticket to $3. It was only back in 2004 that they raised the price from $1 to $2. So in a mere nine years, the price of a lotto ticket in Canada has jumped 300%. This comes on the back of a recent story about how salaries for OLG (Ontario Lottery Gaming) executives have risen by 50 per cent in the past two years. So what exactly is going on? It doesn't take a genius to realize that the government views the lottery as a means of generating more revenue. Approximately 30-40 percent of revenues from the lottery feed back into provincial governments (the rest is spent on prizes and operational costs). I don't know the exact math they did, but it's pretty easy to ballpark the rationale used here. It would go like this: We have 100 customers, each paying 2 dollars a ticket, generating 200 dollars of revenue. We increase the price from 2 to 3 dollars a t...

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