Kim’s PR strategy is actually very similar to that of major blogs: post lots of content on a regular basis and make it as weird and “WTF?” as possible. Most of the very, very few people in North Korea who have Internet access work for Kim’s propaganda department. And while much of the West chuckles at their strange videos and stories about unicorns, this viral content seems to grant a certain legitimacy to an oppressive and genocidal regime. South Korea’s national security director tells The Washington Post that the “headline campaign” is at least partially responsible for a sevenfold increase in news coverage and searches related to North Korea.

Now check out this YouTube page if you enjoy watching insane people do insane things.

The lesson here is really all about creating a story and then newsjacking your own work in order to gain even more attention. Of course, most of the public will be less interested in a product rollout than a mysterious dictatorship’s ongoing attempts to scare everyone’s pants off. Still…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As expected, former VP Xi Jinping officially assumed the presidency after receiving a ridiculous 99.8% of the vote in The People’s Congress. Xi posed as a reformer, and his primary goal is to convince the growing number of Chinese citizens who aren’t happy with their government that his administration is more concerned with improving quality of life than lining its own pockets.

In order to do this, he’s taking some steps right out of the political PR playbook that will look familiar to anyone who has suffered through an American presidential campaign.

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Today the VP’s office issued an official apology for “bullying” (not our word of choice) a student reporter at a press event. In summary: Biden, attorney general Eric Holder and Maryland Senator Ben Cardin called a press conference to announce a new domestic violence prevention initiative. A reporter for Capital Press, who also happens to be a student at the University of Maryland, accidentally sat in a section of the room that was not reserved for media and took photos of Biden as he spoke.

After the event, a member of Biden’s press staff spoke to the reporter and demanded to watch as he deleted the (supposedly) forbidden photos. Scandal!

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What does this mean, exactly?

Fortune calls the project “Trusted Original Content”, and it will involve the magazine’s editorial teams creating Fortune-branded articles and video/other media content for marketers and PR pros to distribute on their own channels. So these pieces will bear the Fortune name and be written by real journalists, but they won’t qualify as native advertising. And brand reps won’t see them until they’re done–according to Adweek, Fortune’s editors will “have the final say”. Capital One will be the first party to participate by soliciting complimentary stories about small business.

Will promoting posts backed by the power of Fortune give a brand greater credibility? Time Inc. thinks so.

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We could all see this coming, of course: print ad revenue at the Post has reached record lows. Sure, we still encounter the occasional impressive Game of Thrones promo printed with ink on honest-to-God paper–but print advertising should probably consider intensive therapy at this point.

You may ask why this is news, because lots of other publications do the very same thing.

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Google was the first big brand to call itself the victim of cyber hackery back in 2010, and since then others have joined the growing chorus: Earlier this month it was Twitter, followed by Facebook, Apple, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times. (Burger King and Jeep had their Twitter feeds hacked this week, but that’s a different thing entirely.)

Some brands, like Bloomberg, continue to issue less-than-believable denials. We understand the desire to avoid saying “Yes, we were hacked by China”–but this kind of stubbornness can make brands look worse, especially when third-party sources confirm the reports.

Should companies go public after being hacked to get ahead of the story? Or should they hide in the shadows and issue no comment until the time is right?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Industry professionals know that dishonesty is the most direct route to bad PR. People don’t like being lied to by other people even if they are oddball strangers on the subway, so the public certainly doesn’t appreciate being lied to by companies, personalities, brands and universities that they support with their hard-earned money–especially those touted as “experts” in their given fields.

With rising tuition costs and a dwindling ability to guarantee graduates employment, colleges and universities are fighting more vehemently than ever to retain the elevated status they have enjoyed in our culture over the centuries. So we were disheartened to read the Washington Post article that included this comment regarding the matter from Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education: “In any highly competitive environment, there is always a temptation to cut corners.”

You don’t say…

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As if to offer further proof that anyone can use PRWeb, some shady individual with an interest in making a quick, illegal buck wrote and released a post announcing that Google had just acquired ICOA, a “neutral host” broadband wi-fi provider, for $400 million. If true, this announcement would have been something of a big deal signifying Google’s desire to move deeper into the competitive world of Internet service providers. Yet no one bothered to fact-check the release (probably because ICOA isn’t a big name), and now much of the Internet has egg on its face.

What was this funny business all about? In a follow-up email, ICOA’s CEO guessed that “a stock promoter with a dubious interest is disseminating wrong, false and misleading info in the PR circles”. Sounds like someone living in the notoriously lawful land of Aruba wanted to spark a short-lived bump in ICOA’s stock price—and according to a Buzzfeed follow-up report, said individual may have earned six digits’ worth of easy profits by briefly pushing the company’s share price up from one penny to five. We’re not terribly familiar with stock trader lingo, but we’re fairly sure this one falls under “fraud.”

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The State Department and the James Beard Foundation would like to change all that, and last Friday they officially named more than 80 big chefs from across the US as members of the first “American Chef Corps.”

The team includes such food-world luminaries as Dan Barber of Blue Hill and April Bloomfield of The Spotted Pig (sorry, we’re partial to New York), and their responsibilities will include preparing distinctly American meals for foreign dignitaries, conducting educational programs for audiences overseas, and inviting top chefs from around the world to cook in their stateside kitchens. Most importantly, they want to remind our overseas friends that American food is, in many cases, quite good. While they won’t get paid for the honor, they do get free uniforms.

This sounds like a fairly interesting idea!

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Seems like everyone is copying the work of others these days–even noted wordsmith Chuck Norris has been caught red-handed. The two men at the center of this hot topic are very different personalities—and both the charges leveled against them and the public’s reaction to their respective PR crises have been very different as well. Fareed Zakaria is a respected journalist and TV news personality while Jonah Lehrer is (or, more accurately, was) a rising writer, speaker, and acknowledged expert in the realms of neurology and human behavior.

What, exactly, did they do?

Zakaria copied a paragraph of a Time article on gun control from an earlier New Yorker piece by historian Jill Lepore. CNN also found that one of his blog posts for CNN.com “contained similar unattributed quotes.” When accused of other acts of sloppy journalism, he lashed out at critics before backing down.

Lehrer’s first crime was plagiarizing himself—observers discovered that he often repeated passages that had appeared in previous columns or books. While this was bad news for Lehrer, it wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. Unfortunately, further investigations uncovered a disturbing history of similar behavior during his time at Wired and other publications. And that wasn’t the worst of it: The final, damning revelation was the fact that Lehrer had straight-up invented nonexistent Bob Dylan quotes for his bestselling book “Imagine”—and when pressed on his offense, he denied it and made more false claims before breaking down and confessing to his own dishonesty.

The saddest part about these stories is that both writers remain very talented, very busy men who obviously bit off more than they could chew. What conclusions can we, as PR and media professionals, draw from their cases?

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But is this incident really a big PR problem for the royal family? The British public seems to turn to them for entertainment in tough times, and the royals occasionally make concerted efforts to showcase their sillier side. So certain, uh, slip-ups might actually make them more relatable, especially in the land that invented tabloids and reality TV. Despite their history, the Brits do sometimes manage to keep it classy: their mags have refrained from publishing the nude photos themselves at the request of the royal family’s PR team. Color us surprised.

But this is really just another day in the life of the crown. Our trivia-minded friends at Mental Floss remind us that the royals have seen far worse: continued…

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But on a deeper psychological level, most consumers perceive food not only according to their specific likes and dislikes, but within the context of an unnatural vacuum created by decades worth of marketing campaigns from food growers, distributors and sellers.

For example, we like our food to be flawless; why else would so many supermarket customers spend time examining melons, tomatoes and onions as if they’re precious stones? Our trained eyes also like big, colorful displays of food lining the aisles, and we don’t see overwhelming portions as sources of waste but ways to get more for our money. So a little excess occurs every now and then; no big deal, right?

Well, consider this quote from a recent article in The Washington Post:

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But does the new individual world champ need a strategic PR adjustment? Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post seems to think so.  Her basic message to Douglas: ignore the noise. In the wake of overwhelming media scrutiny of her every move, her family history, and even her hairstyle, the newly crowned queen of the mat supposedly complained of anxiety and had trouble sleeping; after her less-celebrated performance yesterday, she admitted that she was “kinda tired” and all but confirmed that the endless coverage had affected her in a negative way.

While Jenkins certainly has a point about the very aggressive questioning Douglas received from every corner of the press, we have to wonder: Did Gabby really need a handler to “shut her down and [take] away her electronics”? Would a strict media-free regimen work for a star whose genuine naivety is the key to her charm? Should she be closely advised to avoid discussing sensitive subjects?

Most importantly: Why can’t everyone just let her be herself, celebrate her achievements and stop blatantly attempting to amplify the drama?

Oh wait: We just answered our own question, didn’t we?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Word on the street is Ann Curry is set to receive $10 million to vacate her post at Today. ICYMI, The New York Times published a professional profile of Curry and her time with the show. And over on TVSpy, they’ve conducted an informal poll and determined that Natalie Morales is the preferred replacement (among TVSpy readers).

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The New York Times started a new biweekly video series today, all about street style. The premiere episode profiles Fort Greene, Brooklyn. [h/t]

Separately, the Times has debuted ads to up its thriving digital subscriber numbers. And some of its reporters appear in a video urging the paper to settle a contract dispute with staffers.

Tom Brokaw thinks the White House Correspondents Dinner is too much of a “glittering event.” Fox News’ Ed Henry, who is also the president of the White House Correspondents Association isn’t opposed to change.

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