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    organizations | institutes | universities | critical thinking | effective reading

    see also communication skills page on AWC Gateway to the Internet -- includes speaking, writing, storytelling, listening, interviewing, building rapport, and more
    see also thinking skills page on AWC Gateway to the Internet -- includes strategic thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and more

    PACE back to top

    • Public Affairs Leadership courses
    • Public Affairs for Visual Media seminars
    • Special projects with ANG/TEC
    • Career Development Course (CDC) writers
    • Visual Media Lab
    • Advising PME research projects

    DINFOS back to top

    • Defense Information School (DINFOS) - "The Center of Excellence for Visual Information and Public Affairs"

      • DINFOS Course Catalog

      • Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photography Workshop - 2010 was the 18th annual workshop
        • "The DOD Worldwide Military Photography Workshop provides advanced instruction on how to communicate more effectively using the visual media of photography and photojournalism."

      • DINFOS Unit 01-004: Roles and Responsibilities of the Public Affairs Officer - each item below is expanded in this document
        • Three primary PA functions
          1. Public Information (Media Relations)
          2. Command Information (Internal Information)
          3. Community Relations
        • Two primary PA responsibilities
          1. To use public affairs to support command strategy
          2. To use public information to attack an adversary’s strategy
        • Five PA fundamentals
          1. Tell the Truth.
          2. Provide Timely Information.
          3. Practice Security at the Source.
          4. Provide Consistent Information at All Levels.
          5. Tell the DOD Story.
        • Four PA capabilities
          1. Providing Trusted Counsel to Leaders.
          2. Enhancing Morale and Readiness.
          3. Fostering Public Trust and Support.
          4. Using Global Influence and Deterrence.
        • Four target audiences
          1. American Public.
          2. International.
          3. Internal.
          4. Adversary Forces.

    Mentoring back to top

    • AF Policy Directive 36-34 Air Force Mentoring Program "Mentoring is a fundamental responsibility of all Air Force supervisors. They must know their people, accept personal responsibility for them, and be accountable for their professional development."
    • AF Instruction 36-3401 Air Force Mentoring "This instruction implements Air Force Policy Directive (AFPD) 36-34, Air Force Mentoring Program. It provides guidance on how to carry out Air Force Mentoring, which was established to bring about a cultural change in the way we view professional development."

    • additional mentoring resources at the AWC Gateway to the Internet

    Federal & Agencies back to top

    DoD & Services [see also PACE and DINFOS above] back to top

    • Navy Public Affairs Resources Website, including the Public Affairs Toolbox

    • DoD Joint Course in Communication, Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma

    • CSAF Professional Reading Program

    • Navy Public Affairs Professional Development on Facebook

    • U.S. Army Self-Development Handbook
      • There are three types of self-development:
        • Structured Self-Development: Required learning that continues throughout your career and that is closely linked to and synchronized with classroom and on-the-job learning.
        • Guided Self-Development: Recommended but optional learning that will help keep you prepared for changing technical, functional, and leadership responsibilities throughout your career.
        • Personal Self-Development: Self-initiated learning where you define the objective, pace, and process.
      • The contents of this handbook will help you perform all three types of self-development. If you are pursuing personal self-development, this handbook offers exercises and information you can use to determine your self-development direction and start immediately working toward it. If you already have a direction for your self-development, the handbook will help you achieve progress in that direction.

    Future of Public Affairs back to top

    • 30 Days through Afghanistan, by Raimondi and Gallahan
      • The Mission [completed March 15, 2010] - Travel Afghanistan for thirty days, to share the stories, meet the people and experience, first hand, the counter insurgency.

    • CyberJournalist.net
      • The site offers tips, news and commentary about the future of media, social media, mobile trends, innovation in media, online journalism and digital storytelling. CyberJournalist.net highlights examples of innovative digital media work with the aim of recognizing those who do great work and helping those who don’t.

    • The Future of News, a series of interviews on YouTube

    • 40 Important Lectures for Journalism Students - including "Al-Jazeera and the New Arab Media"

    • Strategic Communication and Public Affairs: Training Today for the Future, by Winchester, ACSC, May 2008
      • Public Affairs and Strategic Communication are becoming increasingly more important in today’s information-centric world. Air Force officials have given lip-service to the primacy of these skill sets, but have not reinforced those words with significant action toward training or equipping today’s public affairs officers to be strategic communicators.

    • The Strategic Context: The Need for a Revolution in Army Public Affairs, by Yonts, U.S. Army War College, May 2004
      • This paper examines the issue of whether Army Public Affairs has reformed to successfully meet the complexities of the future strategic environment. It assesses the principles of doctrine, organization, training, leadership and education, and material. Further, the paper provides thoughts on how Army Public Affairs can preserve its relevance as an essential member of the Joint Team.
      • While Field Manual 46 -1 lays out the traditional doctrinal procedures and capabilities to conduct information operations, the pace of change and evolving GIE [Global Information Environment], dictates that the Army Public Affairs must expand this view and seek unorthodox doctrinal approaches in support of information operations.

    • Back to the Future in Public Affairs, by Oliver, from the March 2003 Marine Corps Gazette
      • Worse is the highbrow insistence by some that the PAO exists only to inform; that he should never engage in tawdry offshoots that reek of "influencing," "marketing," "publicity" or "selling. " Baloney. If the public affairs officer is not aggressively promoting his command, his community and his Corps from the time he gets up in the morning, then somebody needs to check his pulse.

    • 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist - from a post at the Social Media news site Mashable
      • Entrepreneurial and Business Savvy
      • Programmer
      • Open-minded Experimenter
      • Multimedia Storyteller
      • The Social Journalist and Community Builder
      • Blogger and Curator
      • Multi-skilled
      • Fundamental Journalism Skills

    Research and Commentary back to top

    • Soldiers and Scribblers Revisited: Working with the Media, by Richard Halloran, originally published in Army War College's Parameters - EXCELLENT

    • U.S. Air Force Public Affairs Officers: a Qualitative Study of Education and Training, by Ticer, thesis at U. of FL, 2006

    • U.S. Army Public Affairs Knowledges and Skills Required to Perform Domestic Support Operations, by Meyer, thesis at Marshall University, Nov 1993

    • Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web, a talk from TED.com - if TED site is blocked, you may be able to watch it on YouTube or one of the other sites
      • "At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?"
      • talks about statistics of the web (number of links, percent of global electricity used) and evolving character of the web (never failed as a system, everything is becoming connected to everything)

    • Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles", a talk from TED.com - if TED site is blocked, you may be able to watch it on YouTube or one of the other sites
      • "As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy."

    • Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation, a talk from TED.com - if TED site is blocked, you may be able to watch it on YouTube or one of the other sites
      • Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.
      • "As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance."
      • But once the task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance."
      • [His proposed new motivational] "operating system ... revolves around three elements:"
        • autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives
        • mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that matters
        • purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
      • He also mentions ROWE - Results Only Work Environment

    • Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action, a talk from TED.com - if TED site is blocked, you may be able to watch it on YouTube or one of the other sites
      • "All organizations and careers function on 3 levels. What you do, How you do it and Why you do it. The problem is, most don’t even know that Why exists." -- from his website

    • Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better, a talk from TED.com - if TED site is blocked, you may be able to watch it on YouTube or one of the other sites
      • "Tony Robbins discusses the "invisible forces" that motivate everyone's actions."

    • Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success, a talk from TED.com - if TED site is blocked, you may be able to watch it on YouTube or one of the other sites
      • "Why do people succeed? Is it because they're smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success."

    • Journalists: Gatekeepers or Gate-openers? A Reinterpretation of the Westley-MacLean Model Based on MacLean's Unpublished Papers, draft of paper by Manca, Benedictine University
      • Traditionally, the Westley-MacLean model is understood as proposing that journalists act as gatekeepers in the mass communication process and, because of their privileged role, they ought to report the news objectively and check their own political convictions at the door as they enter the newsroom. They ought to be impartial referees as competing advocates of this or that cause struggle to promote their particular interpretations or spins to the public. In this paper, however, I would like to suggest that, for one of the coauthors, the purpose of journalism goes beyond impartial refereeing and newspeople ought to become active players in the political process--not as one-sided spokespersons for this or that cause, but as involved facilitators of the information flow within the society. In short, they ought to become gate-openers.

    • Persuasive Speech: The Way We, Um, Talk Sways Our Listeners, Science Daily, 16 May 2011
      • "Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki, a research investigator at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR).
      • ... They found that males with higher-pitched voices had worse success than their deep-voiced colleagues. But they did not find any clear-cut evidence that pitch mattered for female interviewers.
      • The last speech characteristic the researchers examined for the study was the use of pauses. Here they found that interviewers who engaged in frequent short pauses were more successful than those who were perfectly fluent.
      • ... If interviewers made no pauses at all, they had the lowest success rates getting people to agree to do the survey. We think that's because they sound too scripted.

    • The Unexpected Influence Of An Uncertain Expert, by Martin, Inside Influence Report, 11 May 2011
      • ... But in an information saturated world where so many claim to be experts, what does the latest persuasion research tell us about which expert we should pay particular attention to? And how could such insights help when attempting to persuade others?
      • ... A series of new studies conducted by Stanford Business School’s Zak Tormala and Uma Karmarkar and published recently in the Journal of Consumer Research suggest that rather than the most confident sounding expert being the most persuasive it is often the recommendations and advice from experts that are themselves uncertain, that will be more compelling.
      • Their series of studies found that an experts’ influence over others increases when that expert expresses minor doubts about their advice and opinions. They found that this effect was particularly acute when an expert’s advice concerned subjects or situations where there was no one single clear or obvious answer.
      • ... In explaining these counter intuitive findings the researchers point out that because people generally expect experts to be certain of their opinions, when that expert signals potential uncertainties about their message people become more intrigued and drawn in to what they are saying. In effect the incongruity between the source’s expertise and their level of uncertainty makes his or her message appear more intriguing. As a result, assuming that the arguments in a message are reasonably strong, this drawing in of an audience leads to more effective persuasion.
      • ... And when it comes to persuading others about the merits and benefits of the products and proposals we have to offer, assuming our case is a strong one, it would seem sensible that rather than hide or cover up minor drawbacks and weaknesses in our case, we instead embrace them in the knowledge that they can actually make us more persuasive.

    Journals back to top

    Media Watch and Criticism back to top

    Professional Organizations back to top

    Institutes & Centers back to top

    • Poynter Institute
    • Poynter's News University
      • "Poynter's News University is one of the world's most innovative online journalism and media training programs ever created. From multimedia techniques to writing and reporting, we've got more than 150 free and low-cost courses. As the e-learning project of The Poynter Institute, NewsU extends Poynter’s mission as a school for journalists, future journalists, teachers of journalism and anyone interested in the craft and values of journalism.

    • American Press Institute (API)
      • "Founded by newspaper publishers in 1946, the American Press Institute is the oldest and largest center devoted solely to training and professional development for the news industry and journalism educators."

    • Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR)
      • "Founded in 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting is the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative news organization, producing multimedia reporting that has impact and is relevant to people's lives. Building on our long track record of award-winning print, broadcast and web reporting, CIR is now seeking to help lead the way in transforming journalism for the 21st century."

    • The Annenberg Public Policy Center, at the University of Pennsylvania
      • "Scholars at the Policy Center have offered guidance to journalists covering difficult stories, including terrorist threats, suicide and mental health. The Center's discussions of key public policy issues have brought together industry representatives, advocates, government officials and the scholarly community."

    • Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard University
      • "a Harvard University research center dedicated to exploring and illuminating the intersection of press, politics and public policy in theory and practice"

    • The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
      • "The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent, non-partisan public opinion research organization that studies attitudes toward politics, the press and public policy issues. In this role it serves as a valuable information resource for political leaders, journalists, scholars and citizens."

    • Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism
      • "Our goal is to help both the journalists who produce the news and the citizens who consume it develop a better understanding of what the press is delivering, how the media are changing, and what forces are shaping those changes. We have emphasized empirical research in the belief that quantifying what is occurring in the press, rather than merely offering criticism, is a better approach to understanding."

    University Programs back to top

    Critical Thinking back to top

    Effective Reading back to top

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updated/reviewed 8 May 2013
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