Tag: pr-disaster

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ Leave a comment
  • A postal carrier who stole, filled out and submitted 19 mail ballots as part of a rogue plan to test the security of Colorado‘s signature verification process was sentenced to five years in jail. The scheme was identified when election officials contacted alleged voters whose signatures did not match and learned they had not submitted ballots.
  • University of Colorado Regent Wanda James and her colleagues are using The Denver Post‘s editorial page to fight over a board investigation that could lead to her censure.
  • The U.S. Navy stripped former San Francisco Mayor Harvey Milk‘s name from one of its vessels. Milk was a U.S. Navy veteran and the first openly gay man to be elected to office in California. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth justified the decision by saying, “People want to be proud of the ship they are sailing in.”
  • Jake Rosencranz, a University of Denver alum who worked in Denver at the Behm Consulting Group, was struck by lightning and killed while on his honeymoon in Florida.
  • Two U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team players – Weston McKennie and Tim Weah – who play professionally with Juventus in Italy have caused an uproar by alleging that the country’s food is boring and lacks variety.
  • What appeared to be an off-the-cuff comment in a press conference from Denver Nuggets Vice Chairman Josh Kroenke about the potential to trade MVP Nicola Jokić serves as a reminder of how careful and prepared executives need to be when speaking to the media. The throwaway comment completely overshadowed the intention of the press conference, which was to introduce the team’s new co-GMs.
  • Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez‘s wedding this weekend had to be relocated to a more secure venue after residents of Venice, Italy, threatened to crash it. If you are still looking for a gift for the couple, $2,000 is the largest gift card Amazon offers.
  • Elon Musk fired Tesla‘s head of North American and European operations following a prolonged sales slump, as if that guy was the problem.
  • Brad Pitt‘s Los Angeles home was ransacked and robbed while he was away promoting a new movie.
  • Microsoft has updated its infamous “blue screen of death” to a new-and-improved black version. Maybe the engineers instead could have focused on eliminating the bugs that cause it in the first place?
  • President Donald Trump‘s new cell phone venture, Trump Mobile, quickly pulled the coverage map from its website when critics noticed that it included the “Gulf of Mexico” rather than the “Gulf of America.”
  • Gov. Jared Polis‘ desire to build a legacy project in the form of a $30 million bridge to connect the state capitol to Lincoln Park has hit a snag in the form of 9News’ Kyle Clark. The most influential media figure in town has been on a crusade to kill the project, even spending a six-minute block of his “Next with Kyle Clark” show on a commentary criticizing every aspect of the plan.

Who won the week?

  • PRSA Colorado announced the winner of its 2025 awards:
    • Doug Hock, longtime oil-and-gas communications executive, won the Lifetime Achievement award.
    • Jennifer Quermann, senior director of Communications and Marketing at the Butterfly Pavilion, won the PR Person of the Year award.
    • Walker Shumock-Bailey, marketing coordinator at A Little Help, won the Rookie of the Year award.
    • Jake Kasowski, managing supervisor at FleishmanHillard, won the Chapter Service award.
    • Jason Evans, communications manager at FlatironDragados, won the Mentor of the Year award.
    • Rosalind “Bee” Harris, publisher of the Denver Urban Spectrum, won the Outstanding Business Leader award.
    • Tina Griego, senior editor at the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, won the Media Professional of the Year award.
  • Reporter Nicky Andrews announced she is leaving the Boulder Daily Camera/Longmont Times-Call. No word yet on where she will land.
  • Metro State, a longtime commuter campus, has unveiled plans to build its first on-campus residence hall, a $118 million project that will house 550 students.

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ Leave a comment

Who won the week?

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ 1 Comment
  • Boulder‘s Comprise PR, formerly MAPR and Metzger before that, has shut down following a bankruptcy filing. Owner Doyle Albee had hoped to reorganize and survive the filing, but he said that former employees who poached clients had made that impossible. Albee and most of the remaining employees are moving to California-based Hawke Media, which touts its “10 years of marketing domination.”
  • The crash of an Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London killed at least 269 people. It is India’s worst aviation disaster in decades.  
  • Journalist Terry Moran is out at ABC News after he tweeted that top White House aide Stephen Miller is a “world-class hater” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.” Because truth is an absolute defense against defamation claims, ABC News doesn’t need to worry about a lawsuit, but they nonetheless wanted to stay on President Donald Trump‘s good side.
  • Conservatives weren’t happy several years ago when major brands declined to advertise on Twitter/X for political reasons, so much so that the FTC is trying to include a prohibition on that as a formal requirement for approving a merger between marketing conglomerates Omnicom and Interpublic Group.
  • Miami-Dade police are searching for oft-troubled former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown on a charge of attempted murder. Brown was allegedly involved in a shooting during a celebrity boxing event in Miami last month.
  • Former Denver Public Schools board member Auon’tai Anderson continues to harbor delusions of grandeur. Two years ago, he was censured for flirting with a 16-year-old student and he then declined to run for re-election after polls found that he had the support of only 9% of respondents. So, of course, this week, Anderson teased a possible run to rejoin the board, perhaps in 2027.
  • University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders is dealing with an unspecified health issue that has caused him to miss the team’s annual summer football camps. There is no announced timeframe for his return.
  • FIFA introduced dynamic pricing for tickets to this summer’s inaugural Club World Cup that will take place in the U.S., and it is not going well. Tickets for the opening match between Inter Miami (featuring soccer superstar Lionel Messi) and Egyptian team Al-Ahly are going for as little as $4.
  • The Dyson bandits – two brothers who stole nearly $30,000 worth Dyson vacuum cleaners and other items from Denver-area Targets and resold them – have been sentenced to a combined 10 years in prison.
  • The Denver City Council has authorized another $400,000 in settlement payments to protesters injured by police during the George Floyd protests in 2020. The latest payment means that Denver has now paid nearly $20 million in settlements to protesters injured that summer.
  • If you had actress Olivia Munn and children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel in a blood feud, well, you are more prescient than I am. It’s gotten so bad that People magazine had to remove an online article about them because of the violent threats it triggered.
  • City engineers have warned city council members that two bridges in Denver may soon be off limits to ambulances and other heavy vehicles due to deteriorating conditions. What’s worse is the two bridges are located within blocks of Denver Health.
  • If you are from the Pacific Northwest, there’s at least a decent chance you are a serial killer.

Who won the week?

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ 2 Comments
  • The Denver Post is shuttering its hyper-local YourHub section effective this week. The paper claims the move “is part of our effort to focus our resources on other areas of news coverage.” What it didn’t mention is that it has also laid off a deputy sports editor, a part-time photo editor and a part-time breaking news reporter. Corey Hutchins‘ “Inside the News in Colorado” newsletter has those details.
  • Bridges generally are designed to get people from point A to point B as efficiently as possible, but a bridge proposed for Civic Center Park wanders a bit aimlessly, perhaps in a subconscious nod to the drunk people who would no doubt be among its biggest users. The CEO of Historic Denver was more succinct, saying the bridge is “completely unnecessary” and “does nothing right.”
  • A Christian school in Tennessee banned a senior from graduation after she announced online that she is gay.
  • NPR, Colorado Public Radio and two other Colorado radio stations have sued the Trump administration arguing that an executive order cutting millions in public funding violates their free speech and relies on an authority that he does not have.
  • Starbucks baristas in South Korea have stopped calling out customers’ names for completed drink orders after customers were using political insults as part of their “names.”
  • An employee in the Washington Capital‘s corporate sales department may have accidentally shared star player Alex Ovechkin‘s plans to play one final year before retiring.
  • Two Secret Service agents were caught on video brawling outside the home of former President Barack Obama. Both have been suspended pending an investigation.
  • Speaking of brawling, a group of parents attending a kindergarten graduation in Arkansas fought in full view of kids in the school’s hallway.
  • President Donald Trump loves handing out insulting nicknames, but he isn’t very happy to be on the receiving end of one. When asked about the nickname TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out – that has been used to describe his tariff policy, President Trump was … less than pleased. One political analyst believes that the TACO insult may have legs.
  • Analysts are blaming repeated missed quarterly earnings and overall bad publicity for Vail Resorts‘ decision to dump its CEO Kirsten Lynch and replace her with former CEO Rob Katz.
  • A judge has ordered Twitter/X to pay $8 million for breaking its office lease in Boulder in 2022.
  • Southwest Airlines this week officially ended one of its most-beloved perks – free checked bags.
  • Former gymnast Mary Lou Retton, the darling of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, was arrested for DUI.

Who won the week?

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ 1 Comment
  • A Colorado Rockies fan is suing the team after he was hit in the eye with a foul ball. In his suit, he alleges that the team is so bad that it encourages fans not to pay attention to what is happening on the field. He almost certainly isn’t going to win the suit, nor should he, but the absolute shade he throws at the inept Rockies makes it one of my favorite lawsuits of all time.
  • Speaking of the Colorado Rockies, their 8-42 record after the first 50 games is the worst in MLB history.
  • A Lufthansa flight from Germany to Spain flew about 10 minutes without a pilot at the controls after the pilot left the cockpit to use the restroom and the co-pilot lost consciousness. Newark air traffic controllers were like, what’s the big deal?
  • The U.S. Supreme Court was unable to achieve the required six-judge quorum required to hear a case in a lawsuit against a publisher who has book deals with four of the justices. The inability to hear the case left standing a lower-court ruling for the publisher, so maybe those book deals were a really good investment.
  • The news division at CBS continues to reel after several high-profile resignations. This time it was the division’s CEO Wendy McMahon, whose resignation was blamed on CBS’s and parent company Paramount‘s willingness to capitulate to Trump administration demands. A month ago the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned for the same reason.
  • The Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer published syndicated content that they were unaware was created by generative artificial intelligence. The material included “unidentifiable quotes from fake experts and imaginary book titles.“
  • Denver is laying off employees, instituting a hiring freeze and requiring employees to take unpaid furloughs to address a $50 million budget shortfall this year that is forecast to grow to $200 million next year
  • Slip-and-fall law firms Frank Azar & Associates and Bachus & Schanker are locked in a legal battle, with Azar accusing his rival firm of illegally using Google keyword ads to trick litigants trying to find Azar’s firm. Fun fact: Azar has turned to the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister to represent it.
  • Salt-N-Pepa are suing Universal Music Group for the rights to their master recordings from the 1980s, including their hit “Push It.”
  • Walmart is cutting approximately 1,500 high-paying corporate positions.
  • If you are a North Korean ship builder, now would be a good time to make run for the China border. The country’s newest warship capsized during its high-profile launch ceremony. Kim Jong Un called the incident a “catastrophic failure” and a “criminal act,” and promised to punish those responsible.
  • Speaking of naval mishaps, two sailors died when the mast of a Mexican naval ship navigating the East River in New York City struck the Brooklyn Bridge.

Who won the week?

  • Margaret Fogarty and Leigh Picchetti have launched Corkboard Communications, “a collective of marketing communications veterans with expertise in brand, public relations and digital engagement.”
  • Christine Perkett and Michelle Baum have launched The Nova Method, a marketing communications and PR firm “purpose-built to move brands beyond surface-level visibility to measurable audience engagement.” 
  • Linhart PR won a PRSA Bronze Anvil for its campaign for client National Cattleman’s Beef Association, and Denver Water won a Bronze Anvil for its “Splashstreet Boys: I Water that Way” video.
  • Jaden Knowles has joined 9NEWS as weekend morning meteorologist.
  • Barefoot PR is hiring for three positions: two PR associates and a web development contributor.
  • The Denver Nuggets removed the “interim” title from head coach David Adelman. Taking over the team with just three games left in the regular season, Adelman guided the Nuggets to one playoff series win against the L.A. Clippers before losing to the Oklahoma City Thunder in seven games. Fun fact: Adelman’s record is 3-0 in the regular season and 7-7 in the postseason, making him the only coach to have more playoff wins than regular season wins.