Talking To Jack Flack

Our buddy Hamilton Nolan at PR Week has an interview up with Paul Pendergass, aka Jack Flack, who writes Portfolio‘s “Business Spin” column. When asked what advice he would give the PR industry, Pendergass responded:

I think in general, flacks need to have more conviction in what they do. And I think they need to be able to express that conviction internally, and advocate that there is a new day of scrutiny coming, when the integrity of your story is going to be essential, and the ability to tell it not just honestly, but in a compelling way, is going to be important. They have to be the outside ears of the organization in terms of sensitizing it to how the world is seeing it, and to the outside world they have to be the advocate that explains what this organization is going to accomplish. It’s not a new role, but given the intensity of the media environment now, it’s just going to get more intense. It puts a lot of pressure on them to be able to do most of those things well.

We have to admit to being regular readers of Paul’s column. He puts out some hard hitting stuff without overdoing it on the blog snark. Ok, well not all the time. You can email Paul, or “Jack,” here: jack_flack at condenast dot com