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.
************************
Pope Leo Takes Aim At Big Tech In Sweeping Encyclical On AI – Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” clocks in at roughly 43,000 words and focuses on Big Tech and the AI it’s building. The world leader calls to “disarm” AI from military and economic interests, frames the moment as a new industrial revolution (consciously echoing his namesake Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on industrial-era labor), and warns that outsourcing decisions to machines risks weakening human creativity, judgment and even the desire to seek out one another. When the head of 1.4 billion Catholics tells Silicon Valley to pump the brakes, it tends to generate headlines. NPR has the story.
The First Class Of AI Natives Is Graduating. Offices Are Getting Ready. – They’ve never known a world without AI, and now they’re showing up at your office. The Class of 2026, the first true cohort of AI natives, is arriving at a corporate world that’s quietly automating away the grunt work of entry-level jobs even as it scrambles for fresh talent with AI fluency. The question isn’t whether they’ll use it. It’s whether anyone in the office is ready to lead the conversation. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at who blinks first.
Is Museum Wall Text The Next Political Battleground? – The Smithsonian finds itself at the center of a growing political fight over something most museum visitors walk right past: the wall text. After the National Portrait Gallery quietly removed references to Donald Trump’s impeachments and January 6 from his portrait placard in January, the White House threatened to pull funding unless the Institution turned over its wall texts and exhibit plans for review. When historian James Millward set up nearby and started handing visitors printouts of the original wording, security shut the gallery down. For anyone in communications, this raises a genuinely interesting question: who gets to decide what the walls say? The New York Times digs in.
These Tech Bros Are Going To Etiquette School – Slow Ventures, a San Francisco venture capital firm, is offering a four-hour “Finishing School” for tech founders. The curriculum runs from proper handshakes, public speaking and a fashion show to the correct way to handle caviar. The firm’s co-founder Sam Lessin’s pitch to the room: “Tech is no longer playful and cute. It’s taking people’s jobs.” Hundreds applied for the 50 free seats. Whether this is genuine self-improvement or the world’s most expensive reputation management is, frankly, up for debate. The Wall Street Journal explains.
The $255 Beach Shade Dividing America’s Coastal Towns – This summer’s most polarizing object on American beaches isn’t loud music or open containers, it’s the Shibumi, a $255 polyester sail strung on an aluminum arch that catches the breeze like a clothesline (and that DIYers cheerfully reproduce online for sixty bucks). Myrtle Beach has banned everything but traditional umbrellas, with the mayor warning that “the beach was being consumed by tents and canopies.” In Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, it’s a community staple. As status symbols go, this one is particularly exposed. The Wall Street Journal has the full story.
************************
Feed Your Head:
At Chelsea Flower Show, A Gnome Controversy And Some ‘Good British Madness’
Warren Buffett Once Revealed The No. 1 Sign Someone Is Destined For Success
************************
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.