The Flack highlights changes and trends in the news, examples of communications practices, and content we at BYRNE PR thought you might find useful.
We hope you enjoy, and we always welcome your feedback.
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The Taco Bell Outbreak Is A Worst-Case Scenario. Here’s The Crisis Playbook Every Brand Should Follow – When 1,644 people get sick and 94 of them land in the hospital, the instinct is to lawyer up and go quiet. Taco Bell did the opposite. As Inc.’s Michael Tasner writes, the chain pulled the shredded lettuce before regulators confirmed the source, led with customer safety over legal disclaimers, and worked the problem in public. The culprit, Taylor Farms, was the same supplier behind McDonald’s 2024 E. coli scare. Tasner’s takeaway: a crisis rarely destroys a brand. The response does.
How Public Opinion Is Turning Against AI – The backlash is no longer confined to comment sections. On Vox’s The Gray Area, writer Jasmine Sun tells Sean Illing that “AI populism” — the sense that the technology is an elite project imposed on everyone else — is curdling into something darker. Her evidence: a Molotov cocktail and gunfire at Sam Altman’s home, and an Indiana councilman shot at after approving a data center. Could political tensions and a rise in political violence provide a real threat to the progress of AI?
Nike Was The Poster Child For Diversity Efforts. That Made It A Trump Target. – Nike spent years branding itself around inclusion. The New York Times reports Nike’s résumé is now a liability. The company had all but settled an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) probe into claims it discriminated against white workers. Upon Trump’s return, the agency tore up the January 2025 deal and came back demanding pay data, layoff criteria and employee interviews. When Nike balked, the EEOC took the rare step of going to court to enforce a subpoena. The case, seeded by a complaint from Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, could redraw the line on corporate DEI.
This Chicago Spirit Quadrupled Sales With Ads Likening It To Fermented Back Sweat – Malört didn’t get famous by tasting good, it got famous by tasting like regret, gutter water, and your grandma’s closet. Now the Chicago spirit that built an empire on disgust is quadrupling sales with an ad strategy nobody else would dare try: leaning all the way into the awful. Turns out “you’ll hate it” is a hell of a hook. The Wall Street Journal explains.
The Lost Art Of Taking A Long, Boozy Lunch – Somewhere between the sad desk salad and the 2 p.m. Slack ping, we lost the midday meal. In Esquire, Michael Sebastian mounts a defense of the long, boozy lunch as “a small act of rebellion” against a culture bent on optimizing every hour. He traces the ritual from 1979, when editor Lee Eisenberg coined “power lunch” at the Four Seasons, to 2015, when the Times pronounced it dead. His prescription, delivered over lunch at Le Bernardin: order the second glass, and let the afternoon wait.
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Beach Reads:
Five Cups Of Coffee A Day Is Fine For Most Adults, Heart Association Says
Could That Museum Visit Help You Live Longer?
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flack
: one who provides publicity
flack
: to act as a press agent or promoter for something
The word flack was first used as a noun meaning “publicity agent” during the late 1930s. According to one rumor, the word was coined in tribute to a well-known movie publicist of the time, Gene Flack.