NEW PERSPECTIVES

Q&A with Jasleen Singh: CPRS Toronto’s New Communications Co-Chair

By Samiha Fariha

 

As we settle into a new season at CPRS Toronto, we are excited to introduce Jasleen Singh as the new Communications Co-Chair. With experience across sports, gaming, entertainment, and hospitality, Jasleen brings a diverse perspective to communications, along with an interest in storytelling, creative ideas, and building connections. He currently works as a freelance PR and communications consultant, partnering with restaurants, hospitality businesses, and emerging brands.

Jasleen’s connection with CPRS Toronto dates back to his days as a PR student, when attending CPRS events gave him opportunities to meet and learn from professionals across the industry. Now, he is looking forward to becoming more involved in the community, sharing fresh ideas, and creating opportunities for members to connect and learn from one another.

We caught up with Jasleen to learn more about his journey in communications, what inspired him to take on this role, and the ideas he is most excited to explore. From people-focused storytelling to the changing role of AI in public relations, here is what he had to share.

What motivated you to put your name forward for this role?

My connection with CPRS Toronto goes back to when I was a PR student. I attended several CPRS events, which gave me opportunities to meet and learn from professionals across the industry.

What motivated me to put my name forward was the opportunity to become more involved in the PR community and contribute to an organization I have learned from over the years. For me, it is also a great way to stay connected with what is happening in the industry, understand how it is evolving and the pace at which things are changing.

I also saw the role as an opportunity to bring fresh ideas, challenge myself creatively, and continue learning from and building connections with people across Toronto’s PR community.

Can you share a bit about your career journey in communications and how it has led you to this point?

My journey into communications actually started while I was recovering from a sports injury. I couldn’t stay away from the field, so I started creating sports content, interviewing players, and managing social media. From there, I began volunteering with professional sports clubs, events, and local businesses.

I kept experimenting, learning, and building my network, which eventually led to some exciting opportunities across different industries. More recently, I have been working with restaurants and emerging brands as a freelance PR and communications consultant.

My goal is to keep building diverse experience and eventually work in an agency environment, where I can work across different clients and industries. Every experience so far has taught me something new about audiences, storytelling, relationships, and adaptability.

What excites you most about supporting CPRS Toronto’s communications and helping shape how the organization connects with its members?

What excites me most is the opportunity to make our communications feel even more connected to the people who make up Toronto’s PR community.

There are so many interesting professionals, students, agencies, campaigns, and ideas within the CPRS Toronto network. I have personally learned a lot from these conversations and built meaningful connections through them. I would love to help create those same opportunities for others.

You shared some thoughtful ideas during the selection process. Without giving too much away, what areas or opportunities are you most eager to explore in this role?

I am interested in creating more people-focused and interactive content. There is a great opportunity to showcase the personalities and stories behind Toronto’s PR community through member features, event content, and industry conversations.

I am also interested in exploring communications trends, career development, AI, and campaign strategy. Ultimately, I want us to create content that members genuinely want to read, engage with, and participate in.

How do you see strong communications playing a role in member engagement, retention, and community-building within professional associations like CPRS?

Strong communication can help turn an organization into a community where people feel connected and involved.

It starts with understanding what members find valuable and giving them reasons to stay involved, whether that is learning something, finding an opportunity, meeting someone new, or attending an event.

It should also be a two-way conversation. Listening to members, asking questions, and celebrating their work can create a stronger sense of community and belonging.

Are there any communications or marketing trends you are particularly interested in bringing into CPRS Toronto’s work?

I am particularly interested in the shift toward more authentic storytelling and creative content. Audiences connect more with content that feels human rather than overly polished or corporate.

I am also interested in how AI is changing PR. There are important conversations happening around creativity, efficiency, ethics, and authenticity, and I think CPRS Toronto can be a great place for professionals to explore these changes together.

What skills or perspectives do you hope to bring to the Communications portfolio as Co-Chair?

I hope to bring creativity, curiosity, and a willingness to experiment.

Working across different industries has taught me that there is no single approach that works for every audience. I enjoy trying new ideas, learning from what works and what doesn’t, and adapting along the way.

I hope to bring that mindset to CPRS Toronto while listening to our members and finding new ways to connect with them.

Outside of work and volunteering, what’s something members might be surprised to learn about you?

Sports have been part of my life for much longer than communications. I started competing at a young age in soccer, roller hockey, and badminton, including at provincial and national levels.

I am still an avid sports fan, but I also have a strong connection with animals and nature. One of my long-term goals is to use my time and communications experience to support wildlife welfare and conservation.

Final thoughts

I am grateful for the opportunity to join CPRS Toronto as Communications Co-Chair. I am looking forward to meeting more people across Toronto’s PR community, bringing fresh ideas to our communications, and learning from the people around me.

Samiha Fariha is the Communications Chair on CPRS Toronto’s Board. She is a Senior Associate at Golin Ketchum, a global public relations agency, and a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, where she teaches media relations in the Public Relations certificate program.

 

 

As public relations continues to intersect with politics, business and public opinion, communicators are increasingly expected to anticipate issues, build trust and understand the communities they serve. For November’s In Conversation With blog series, we connected with Howard Brown, president and founder of Brown & Cohen Communications & Public Affairs, the longest-serving Canadian partner in PROI Worldwide.

With extensive experience collaborating with 300 organizations, Howard brings a perspective shaped by public relations, government relations, marketing and an early career in journalism. We spoke with Howard about the evolving relationship between PR and journalism, the importance of proactive issues management, how public opinion influences decision-making and why curiosity, creativity and strong relationships remain essential to the profession.

How has your role as a PR practitioner evolved in recent years?

I think today, you cannot separate business from politics or public opinion. A decision made in a boardroom can quickly become a matter of public debate. We’re inundated with information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting a better understanding of what’s happening.

That’s why I think the relationship between public relations and journalism is more important than ever. Newsrooms are leaner, the news cycle never stops, and journalists need people they can rely on for accurate information. It’s not enough to simply put information out there. You have to understand the story, recognize what makes it newsworthy and offer journalists something that genuinely advances their reporting.

And that understanding becomes even more important when you’re dealing with government. Roughly 40% of the marketplace depends on public-sector funding, so understanding how governments make decisions is enormously important. I’ve learned over the years that having the right people in the room isn’t always enough. You can have an excellent proposal, but governments have to consider more than the merits of an idea. You need public opinion with you, and you can’t afford to wait for the parade to form.

What major shifts have you seen in the PR profession, and how are they shaping your work today?

The shift I think about most is the pace at which a local issue becomes a public conversation. Something that once played out over a week now plays out in an afternoon, and the organizations that come through it well are the ones that did their thinking early. That shifts the real work upstream, to well before a story reaches the media. That means taking a proactive approach: getting the facts straight, anticipating where an issue might lead and preparing to answer difficult questions before they’re asked.

The second shift is the way in which people research organizations. Audiences are better informed and more discerning, and they want to know where an organization’s information comes from. Someone weighing a partnership, a purchase or a policy decision will look at everything published about that organization over the years, and increasingly they do it through AI tools that summarize it for them. What has been said about a client, and by whom, carries weight long after the news cycle moves on, so the test for every message is whether it will stand up years from now.

Looking ahead, what trends or changes do you think will define the role of PR practitioners in the future?

With more information at their fingertips than ever before, people are increasingly engaged in the issues that affect their lives. For PR practitioners, that makes our ability to understand what people are thinking, and why, all the more valuable.

That starts in our own communities. Look at our recent municipal elections: people were paying attention to what was happening around them, and we need to be doing the same. Do you know who your city councillor is? Your MPP? Your MP? More importantly, do you know what people in your community are concerned about? In my experience working with government, I’ve learned that even a very good idea does not get far without public support.

Looking ahead, the future of PR belongs to the people who stay curious. They follow the politics, pay attention to what people are talking about, and aren’t afraid to have an opinion.

What is your biggest piece of advice for PR practitioners moving forward?

Throughout my career, from my involvement in politics to building an agency that became Canada’s only representative in PROI Worldwide, I’ve learned that some of the most valuable relationships are with people who see things differently.

I have said since day one, our business is about bringing people and ideas together. But you can’t build relationships only when you need them. You have to invest in them long before there’s an issue on the table.

And I think that lesson extends to business leaders. We need to encourage leaders to get out from behind their desks, explain their decisions and hear what people have to say. Public trust begins with those conversations.

About CPRS Toronto’s In Conversation With blog series

Once a month, the In Conversation With series spotlights voices from across the communications field, featuring leaders and rising professionals who share their perspectives on industry trends, the future of the profession, and their own career journeys. These conversations aim to inspire, inform, and highlight the diverse experiences shaping the future of public relations.

If you would like to share your story or nominate a colleague, please contact us at communications@cprstoronto.com.

AI Slop & Small Businesses: Why Small Businesses Embrace AI Slop and What It Means To Their Bottom Line?

By Sanjeev Wignarajah

AI is a tool, not a replacement.

AI is here and it has changed the way we work and consume content, even if it’s off-putting as the film industry takes a hard stance on the use of Generative AI. We see Generative AI Slop that small businesses use the minute we scroll on Instagram or TikTok. The same can be said for vendors at the CNE with Generated AI imagery. It does raise ethical concerns and raises questions on why small businesses use AI.

Why AI?

AI can be used for administrative purposes from payroll to taxes, saving hundreds of hours of work. Unfortunately, the same can be used to generate images of advertised products. I get it. Small businesses have a lot on their plate. They have to pay rent, insurance, supplies, etc. Yet they couldn’t afford to hire a marketing team to make their brand visually appealing. That’s where Generative AI comes into play. It saves them money.

Concerns and backlash

When a small business uses Generative AI images, it puts a distrust between customers and businesses as it comes across as inauthentic and disingenuous. Whether it’s a social media post or entering the establishment with AI imagery shown inside. How would a small business win back the trust of loyal customers? If they chose cost-saving measures over authenticity. The ball is in their court.

The Bottom Line

Although AI can be useful as a tool to save hundreds of hours of administrative work. It cannot be used to create content, whether it’s food marketing or jumping on a social media trend to stay relevant in a creative way. There are so many content creators who are willing to work with small businesses not just for portfolio purposes, but for the spirit of human collaboration, ingenuity, and spirit. That and recognition.

To quote Martin Scorsese, “The most personal is the most creative.”

Sanjeev Wignarajah is a freelance writer and photographer working with select clients and publications. He has a background in journalism and public relations from Centennial College.

When the Brand Is Missing: Lessons from Non-Partisan Elections

By Mike Medeiros

 

Ontarians head to the polls next week to elect mayors, councillors, and school board trustees. But when voters look at the ballot, one familiar guide to a candidate’s political identity will be missing: the political party.

While elections without political parties are relatively uncommon around the world, Canada offers several examples. At the territorial level, candidates in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories run without party labels. Non-partisan elections are also the norm at the municipal level across the country, where candidates generally run without formal party affiliations.

There are a few exceptions. Municipal political parties operate in Quebec and British Columbia, whereas Alberta allowed, for the first time in 2025, political parties to participate in municipal elections in Calgary and Edmonton.

The absence of political parties matters because they serve important functions. They recruit political leaders, organize political competition, and bring different interests together under broader political programmes. They also help voters decide whom to support.

For voters, a recognizable party label is a useful shortcut. It communicates the candidate’s political identity and likely policy preferences. Voters do not need to examine candidates’ positions in detail; they can rely on their existing understanding of a party to make an informed, if imperfect, judgement.

Psychologists call this a heuristic: a mental shortcut that helps people make decisions without processing every available piece of information.

Without party labels, voters lose an important cue. They must work harder to understand who candidates are, what they stand for, and how they might govern.

Candidates face a similar challenge. They must communicate their identity and political outlook without relying on an established party brand. The challenge is not simply to communicate a message. It is to convey the information that a party label would otherwise provide.

So How Do Voters Decide?

Voters can use voter advice applications, such as Vote Compass for the municipal elections in Ontario, to see which candidates’ positions most closely align with their own.

But research on non-partisan elections suggests that voters also rely on other cues.

Name recognition is one of the most important. In low-information elections, familiar names have an advantage. Voters may recognize candidates from previous campaigns, local news, or community activities. When they know little about the candidates, familiarity itself can become a reason to vote for someone.

Incumbency can therefore provide an advantage. Existing officeholders are more likely to be recognized, as well as have a public record on which voters can base their decisions. Without party labels to distinguish candidates, experience and familiarity can become important cues.

Endorsements are another important signal. Support from a respected community organization, union, or newspaper can indicate a candidate’s values and priorities. Such endorsements lend credibility to a candidate, especially when voters have little other information to guide their choice.

Ideology also matters. Removing party labels does not make voters apolitical. They continue to draw on broader ideological preferences, using signals beyond party labels to guide their choices. Candidates’ positions on housing, development, taxation, and public services can all help voters infer where they stand.

Non-partisan elections do not eliminate political divisions; they change how candidates signal their political views and how voters interpret them.

What Does This Mean for Communication Professionals?

The absence of party labels makes political communication more challenging, but it also highlights some basic principles of effective communication.

Be, or Become, Known

Voters are unlikely to choose a candidate they have never heard of. Candidates need to build visibility well before election day through traditional and social media, community events, public meetings, and direct engagement.

Also, voters should be able to connect a candidate’s name with a recognizable identity and clear priorities. Repetition matters, but so does consistency. This is particularly important for challengers, who lack the built-in recognition that comes with incumbency.

Define Yourself Clearly

Without a party label, candidates must explain not only what they propose to do, but also what they believe and what distinguishes them from their opponents.

Ideological descriptions such as “progressive” or “pro-business” can provide shorthand, as can clear positions on local issues. Candidates can draw on their professional backgrounds, community involvement, and personal experiences to communicate what they represent.

Candidates can also position themselves in relation to well-known political figures. In Ontario, for example, Doug Ford often serves as an ideological reference point, helping voters interpret a local candidate’s political positions.

Visual branding, colours, and slogans can also make a message more recognizable. But they are useful only when they reinforce a substantive identity. A memorable slogan cannot replace a clear explanation of what a candidate wants to achieve.

Build Coalitions and Use Endorsements

Without formal party organizations, community networks become especially important for building recognition and credibility. Candidates seek support from neighbourhood associations, unions, civic organizations, and other groups whose members may trust their judgement.

These relationships do more than provide volunteers or access to new audiences. They can signal credibility. An endorsement tells voters that someone they recognize or trust considers the candidate worthy of support.

However, not all endorsements carry equal weight. Their value depends on the organization’s reputation, its relationship with the community, and whether voters share its priorities.

Make The Issues Tangible

Municipal responsibilities can be technical and poorly understood. Candidates need to connect policy positions to everyday experiences: housing affordability, traffic, transit, recreation, public safety, and the quality of local services.

Concrete explanations help voters understand what is at stake and distinguish between competing proposals. They also allow candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of local problems rather than relying on broad political identities.

Lessons Beyond Politics

These lessons extend well beyond elections. Organizations without a powerful, widely recognized brand face a similar challenge: they must communicate who they are, what they stand for, and why people should trust them.

A familiar brand reduces the information people need to make a decision. Without it, reputation, consistent messaging, endorsements, and visible relationships become more important. People rely on signals from others, previous experience, and the clarity of the message itself.

Non-partisan elections remind us that communication is not just about delivering information. It is also about helping people interpret it. Candidates may have detailed platforms, sound policy proposals, and strong qualifications; but those qualities matter only if voters can recognize and understand them.

Political parties normally do some of this work. They provide an established identity, a recognizable set of values, and a ready-made connection with voters.

Without that support, candidates must build these connections themselves. They need to become known, explain what they stand for, and establish why they deserve voters’ trust.

The broader lesson is straightforward: when an established brand cannot do the work of communicating identity and credibility, those perceptions must be built deliberately through consistent messages, recognizable priorities, and visible evidence of trustworthiness.

Mike Medeiros is a political scientist and communications specialist with expertise in political psychology, public communication, and audience behaviour. He holds a PhD in Political Science and recently completed the Strategic Public Relations program at the University of Toronto.

Presidents Message

 

What is old is new again.

Sorry, I went to a lovely wedding recently and this was top of mind.

I was last president of CPRS Toronto 24 years ago. And I am excited and honoured to have been asked back to CPRS Toronto, Canada’s oldest society, celebrating 78 years.

CPRS Toronto is still going strong with a most impressive board of directors, a diverse group of very talented practitioners.

While technology has changed immensely, and we are in the most major technological shift of our human experience, many things have not. PR is very much the fifth estate, trying to keep it all together, in the middle of an increasingly disparate modern experience in a global village that is recognizing our city and country as at its apex.

We are planning to increase professional development immensely this year, calling upon the expertise of many of our PR family in this amazing city to help us. Please reach out to enable this mission.

We are in very exciting times. With many challenges, but if we work together we will prosper. I have always referred to CPRS as my professional family. I am delighted to back on our board and to be fully part of the family again for an exciting year.

Sincerely,

Mark Hunter LaVigne, MA, APR, FCPRS, LM

President, CPRS Toronto

Your audience is bored. That’s a PR problem.

 What entertainment can teach communicators about writing people actually want to read

 By Matthew Celestial

I have spent a lot of my career trying to convince people to watch things: films, television shows, animated series, games, characters you have never met and stories you did not know existed until someone decided they were worth putting in front of you. It is one of the things I have always loved about working in entertainment: you can spend months building a campaign, perfecting the messaging and arguing over precisely how something should be introduced to the world, but eventually it reaches an audience that was not in any of those meetings and has no obligation to care about how hard you worked on it.

They either pay attention or they don’t.

Entertainment teaches you that lesson quickly, and sometimes brutally. Nobody owes you the next episode. Nobody has to finish the trailer. Nobody is required to understand why your film matters, fall in love with your character or read the interview you worked incredibly hard to place. There is always another show, another creator, another notification, another story and, increasingly, an entire internet waiting one thumb movement away.

Which is why I have been thinking about something happening in professional communications.

Our writing is getting flat.

Not necessarily bad. In fact, much of it is technically very good. It is grammatically correct. “Strategically aligned.” Appropriately punctuated. The key messages are there, the executive quote has been approved really quickly and everyone who needed to see it has seen it.

Open LinkedIn on almost any morning and you will find organizations thrilled to announce something, executives excited to share something else and companies proud to partner with another company that is, presumably, equally proud to partner with them.

“The Great Flattening”

 Naturally, it would be convenient to blame artificial intelligence for all of this. However, corporate  writing has always been interchangeable even before we started integrating ChatGPT within our communications plans.

There have always been forces pulling professional language toward the middle. Legal needs to review it. Marketing has terminology it wants included. Leadership has preferences. Someone wants another key message in the second paragraph. Someone else thinks a sentence sounds too strong. The writer changes it, sends it back, changes it again and, after enough rounds of revisions, the final version arrives at that magical place where nobody is particularly offended by it.

Nobody is particularly moved by it either.

Generative AI didn’t create that instinct, but it has made the conversation much more interesting because we can now produce an astonishing amount of perfectly acceptable language almost instantly. A reasonably good prompt can produce a respectable news release, executive quote, newsletter introduction, LinkedIn post or corporate statement before most of us have finished making coffee.

For communicators, that should be both exciting and slightly terrifying.

Because if competent writing becomes abundant, competence alone becomes less valuable. The differentiators start becoming the things that are considerably harder to manufacture at scale: a surprising observation, a distinctive voice, cultural literacy, humour, judgment, specificity, curiosity, reporting, taste and the ability to recognize when something technically works but simply isn’t interesting. Above all, there is the increasingly rare quality of actually having something to say.

DOES ANYONE CARE?

One of the reasons I have loved working across animation, film, television and games is that entertainment operates under an unusually unforgiving condition: the audience can leave whenever it wants.

Think about how much information a trailer is expected to communicate in a matter of minutes. It has to introduce a world, establish tone, give us characters worth following, create an emotional response and leave enough unanswered that we want more. A poster might get a few seconds of someone’s attention. A show’s premise needs to survive being reduced to a sentence.

Behind all of those decisions is essentially the same question:

Why would anyone care?

It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious, but it is a ruthless editorial test. What’s the hook? Who is this actually for? What haven’t they seen before? Where is the tension? What should they feel? What might they remember tomorrow? Why would they tell someone else about it? These aren’t exclusively entertainment questions. They’re questions communications professionals must face.

ATTENTION IS FADING

This is where I think communications has to become much more realistic about the environment in which our work actually exists.

We might categorize a CEO announcement as executive communications, a news release as media relations, an annual report as corporate communications and a LinkedIn post as social content, but the person encountering those things does not organize their attention according to our communications plans.

Their LinkedIn feed contains your carefully approved executive statement beside someone’s promotion, a creator’s video, an advertisement, a former colleague’s career announcement and a post they profoundly disagree with. Their phone contains your newsletter beside Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, Reddit, sports highlights, breaking news, text messages and the group chat they would almost certainly rather be reading.  That is the actual competitive environment.

Your annual report is probably not competing with another annual report for someone’s attention.

That doesn’t mean the annual report should suddenly have a cliffhanger, or that every CEO needs to become a content creator, or that a serious piece of public-interest communication should be rewritten like the season finale of Succession. There are moments when communications should be deliberately straightforward, restrained and even boring. But we should be much more respectful of what we are asking from people when we ask them to pay attention.

When you think about it, attention is not the final outcome of communication. Typically, it is the admission price. Before somebody can understand our message, trust our organization, reconsider an issue, remember a fact or take action, something considerably more basic has to happen first. They have to keep reading.

WE NEED TO BORROW THE WRITERS’ ROOM TEST

I don’t think communicators need to turn every communications department into a writers’ room, but I do think we could borrow some of its instincts. The next time something is almost ready to leave your desk, forget for a moment how difficult it was to get approved and read the opening again.

Would you keep watching? Does the first paragraph genuinely earn the second, or does it spend 150 words clearing its throat before getting to the interesting part? Then ask the question entertainment people are almost annoyingly obsessed with: what’s the hook?

Not the key message, not the organizational objective and not the thing leadership most wants included. What is the idea that makes another human being lean forward rather than move on?

A hook does not have to be sensational. It can be a surprising fact, a useful insight, an unresolved problem, a contradiction, a human story or simply a genuinely important piece of information presented clearly. What matters is that there is a reason for someone to continue.

Then ask who you are actually talking to.

“Stakeholders” is not a person. Neither is “the general public.”

What does this particular reader already know? What are they doing when they encounter this? What might they misunderstand? What do they care about that has absolutely nothing to do with your organization?

Entertainment companies can become almost obsessive about audiences because their survival depends on understanding them. Communications professionals should probably be just as obsessive.

And then there is the test I have increasingly come to love: Could anyone else have written this?

Take the company name out of the announcement and replace it with its closest competitor. Change the executive’s name. Leave everything else untouched. Does it still work?

If the answer is yes, you may not have a writing problem so much as a specificity problem.

Words like innovative, transformative, authentic, purpose-driven and industry-leading are not inherently meaningless, but they become close to meaningless when everyone can plausibly use them. Specificity is harder. Specificity requires knowing what is actually different, finding the detail that proves it and trusting the audience enough to let that detail do some of the work.

Finally, ask the question that the entertainment industry ultimately lives or dies by: Will anyone talk about this afterwards? 

Not necessarily online. Not necessarily publicly. But is there a fact, an idea, a sentence or a story worth carrying into another conversation? Because being read is good, yes. However, we want to be remembered considerably.

WRITING ISN’T THE DECORATION AT THE END OF THE STRATEGY

There is a tendency in communications to treat writing as the final layer of the work. The strategy happens first. Objectives are established, stakeholders are mapped, messages are developed, risks are considered and approvals begin moving through the organization. Somewhere toward the end, a writer is handed all of this and asked to make it sound good.

But writing isn’t the wrapping paper around communications strategy. Writing is part of the strategy.

The strongest key message in the world has limited value if nobody reaches the paragraph containing it, just as the most carefully developed organizational narrative cannot do much if it sounds indistinguishable from the narrative of every other organization in the category.

And this is where I think generative AI ultimately makes the future of writing much more interesting rather than less.

For years, one of the practical challenges facing communications teams was production: How do we make enough content? How do we feed all of these channels? How do we write another version of this? How do we turn this announcement into five other things?

Technology is rapidly making that problem easier. The challenge is that we have to ask ourselves if our content is worth someone’s attention. We, now, must become editorial directors of our own work.

MAYBE WE NEED TO ENTERTAIN A LITTLE MORE 

I can already imagine the objection to all of this: public relations isn’t entertainment. It isn’t.

A crisis statement is not a screenplay. A public-health advisory does not need a plot twist. An employee who needs information about their benefits should not have to make it through three acts to find it. Sometimes the best writing is simply clear.

But I think entertainment understands something about communication that becomes more valuable with every additional thing fighting for our attention: you cannot force an audience to care. But you can give them a reason to.

I’ve spent years around people trying to make audiences care about characters that don’t actually exist. When you think about it, that is a fairly extraordinary communications challenge. Somehow, a collection of drawings, pixels, performances or words can become meaningful enough that someone quotes a character twenty years later, buys something with their face on it, makes art inspired by them, travels to a convention to celebrate them or introduces that same story to their children.

That kind of connection isn’t created because somebody found the perfect synonym for innovative. It comes from specificity, character, emotion, surprise and craft. An understanding of the audience and, perhaps most importantly, respect for the fact that their attention has to be earned.

Public relations does not need to become entertainment, and every organization certainly does not need to start behaving like a media company. But our profession could borrow some of entertainment’s respect for the person sitting on the other side of the screen.

They can scroll past. They can close the tab. They can delete the email. They can stop watching. They can stop reading. And in a world where producing more words has never been easier, perhaps our job isn’t simply to produce more of them. Maybe, just maybe, it is to give people a reason to stay.

So before we ask whether the next piece of communication is approved, optimized, aligned and on-brand, I think there is one more question worth asking.

Would I keep reading? 

Matthew Celestial is a Toronto-based writer and communications professional covering media, culture, entertainment and the ideas shaping how we communicate. He has spent more than a decade working across animation, film, technology and consumer brands, and is Managing Partner at Rhetor.

 

 

Communications professionals should read more romance novels 

Why becoming a better writer might require reading outside public relations 

By Matthew Celestial

I think communications professionals should read fewer books about public relations.

I don’t mean we should stop learning our craft. There are books about public relations, journalism, marketing, business and leadership that have fundamentally shaped how I think about my work, and there is enormous value in understanding the theory and practice behind what we do.

But I have started to wonder what happens when the only writing we consume is written by people who sound like us, for people who work like us, about the same problems we spend all day thinking about. Eventually, perhaps unsurprisingly, we start sounding like one another.

Some of the writing I find myself studying most closely these days has almost nothing to do with public relations. I love romance novels. I love romantic comedies. Give me two people who clearly belong together, 110 minutes of increasingly ridiculous reasons they cannot admit it, a beautifully timed misunderstanding and an airport scene that would almost certainly result in an arrest under normal circumstances, and I am there.

I’ve watched enough romantic comedies to know the architecture. I know there will probably be a meet-cute. I know somebody will say the wrong thing. I know there will be a moment when everything seems hopeless. I know somebody is going to realize something approximately 15 minutes before the credits roll. And still, when it is done well, I keep watching.

With all of the romcoms I was diving into this summer, I realized I wasn’t just consuming them but rather studying the communication.

Romance has an interesting challenge as a genre because the audience frequently enters the story with a pretty good idea of where it is going. That should make it boring. It doesn’t though.

A reader can pick up a romance novel knowing that some version of happily-ever-after is probably waiting at the end and still stay awake far later than intended because they need to know what happens on the next page. That tells us something important about writing.

Knowing where a story is going does not necessarily make it predictable. Not caring how it gets there does. Now, what does this have to do with the communications profession?

Communicators work with predictable destinations all the time.

The company is pleased with its quarterly results. The organization believes its new initiative will create meaningful change. The executive is optimistic about the future. The partnership brings together two organizations with complementary strengths. We often know the ending before we start writing.

Our job is to make the journey there worth someone’s attention.

Romance writers do this through character, conflict, anticipation, specificity and emotional stakes. They understand that two people simply meeting, discovering they like each other and living happily ever after would make for a remarkably short book. Something has to happen.

Professional communications obviously isn’t fiction, and we should never manufacture conflict or drama where none exists. But sometimes, in our determination to present organizations at their most polished, we remove the very things that make their stories interesting.

The obstacle. The difficult decision. The thing that didn’t work. The unexpected result. The person who changed their mind. The reason this mattered in the first place. We leave the conclusion and remove the journey. Then we wonder why nobody keeps reading.

Good characters aren’t described. They’re revealed. One of the things fiction has made me much more conscious of is how often professional writing tells readers what to think instead of giving them enough information to reach the conclusion themselves.

Consider the way we introduce executives.

They are visionary, dynamic, accomplished, innovative, passionate, they have an impressive track record and are committed to driving transformational growth. Perhaps all of those things are true. But compare that with the way a novelist introduces a character.

A good writer might tell us what someone orders for breakfast, what they notice when they enter a room, the joke they make when they’re uncomfortable, the photograph they keep on their desk or the thing they do when they think nobody is watching.

We understand the person through details.

This is something entertainment understands particularly well. Characters become memorable because they are specific. They have contradictions, habits, flaws, desires, histories and ways of speaking that belong to them.

The same principle can make nonfiction and professional communications dramatically more interesting. Instead of telling me that an entrepreneur is resilient, tell me about the moment they almost closed the company. Instead of telling me that an organization is innovative, show me what it built that nobody else was willing to try. Instead of telling me an executive cares deeply about an issue, show me why.

Specificity is evidence. And evidence is usually more interesting than an adjective. Professional writing could use a little more tension

I should clarify what I mean here before somebody adds a love triangle to the annual report.

When writers talk about tension, they aren’t necessarily talking about conflict between people. Tension is often simply the distance between what someone wants and what currently exists. Romcoms are extraordinarily good at this. We know these people like each other. They know these people like each other. Everybody else in the fictional universe appears to know these people like each other. And yet. That and yet can sustain hundreds of pages.

Communications has its own versions of and yet.

We want cities to be more sustainable, and yet changing infrastructure is expensive and complicated. We have access to more communications technology than at any point in history, and yet trust remains difficult to build. An organization has an ambitious goal, and yet something stands between where it is and where it wants to be.

That space is often where the story lives.

Corporate writing has a tendency to resolve tension as quickly as possible because unresolved questions can make organizations uncomfortable. We prefer certainty. We prefer solutions. We prefer announcing that the challenge has already been addressed.

But sometimes the honest question is considerably more compelling than the polished answer.

Voice matters more when everyone can write.

There is another reason I have been thinking about fiction lately.

Generative AI can now produce technically competent professional writing in seconds, which means simply being able to construct a grammatically correct paragraph is becoming less distinctive. Voice becomes more interesting.

Pick up novels by several great writers and you will notice how differently they see the world. Sentence length changes. Rhythm changes. Humour changes. The details they notice change. Even when two writers are exploring similar themes, you can often feel the presence of a particular person behind the words.

Professional writing tends to work in the opposite direction.

We are often trained to disappear. Sometimes that is entirely appropriate. The communications professional isn’t supposed to become the story, and writing on behalf of an organization requires discipline.

But organizational voice doesn’t have to mean the absence of voice. An executive should sound like that executive. A university should not sound like a bank. A children’s organization should not sound like an accounting firm. Two companies competing in the same category should still have different ways of seeing the world.

If every organization feeds roughly the same information into roughly the same tools and asks for “professional, engaging copy,” sameness becomes almost inevitable. The advantage belongs to whoever knows what they actually sound like. Read for rhythm, not just information.

Romantic comedies taught me another lesson that I didn’t initially think of as a writing lesson at all: timing.

A great joke delivered two seconds too late doesn’t work. Neither does a confession that arrives before we care about the characters making it. Stories have rhythm. Scenes have rhythm. Conversations have rhythm.

Writing does too.

Sometimes a sentence needs room to wander, gathering detail and momentum as it moves toward an idea the reader hasn’t quite reached yet. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the sentence should stop.

Professional writing can become strangely monotonous when every sentence has roughly the same construction, every paragraph roughly the same length and every idea receives exactly the amount of explanation expected of it.

Read great fiction aloud and you can hear the difference.

Long sentence. Short one. A pause. Something unexpected. Then movement again.

This is one of the reasons I think becoming a better writer requires reading beyond the kinds of things we are expected to produce professionally. You start noticing not just what writers are saying, but how they are controlling your attention while saying it.

Once you notice rhythm, it becomes difficult not to hear it everywhere. Read something that has nothing to do with your job. Perhaps the broader lesson isn’t really about romance novels at all.

It is about creative cross-training.

If you write speeches, read comedy and pay attention to timing. If you work in crisis communications, read thrillers and notice how information is revealed. If you write executive communications, read a memoir and study how people develop a recognizable voice. If you work in branding, read poetry and look at what happens when every word has to earn its place.

If you pitch journalists, read journalism, not just the headlines, but the structure, the ledes, the transitions and the details reporters choose to include. If you communicate with communities, read novels written by people whose lives look nothing like yours. And yes, if you want to understand tension, character, anticipation and emotional payoff, read a romance novel.

The objective isn’t to imitate these genres. Please do not end your next CEO memo with a kiss in the rain. The point is to expose yourself to writers solving different problems.

Because eventually those techniques start following you back to work. You notice that the opening isn’t doing enough. You recognize when you’ve described someone instead of showing us who they are. You hear when three consecutive sentences have exactly the same rhythm. You realize that the interesting part of the story is buried in paragraph eight. You become less satisfied with language simply because it is correct.

You start wanting it to be good. I still want the happy conclusion. There is probably another reason I love romantic comedies and romance novels, and it has nothing to do with professional development.

I like hope.

I like watching people find each other. I like ridiculous misunderstandings and grand gestures and dialogue that is somehow much cleverer than anything anybody says in real life. I like knowing, particularly when the world feels complicated, that for the next couple of hours somebody has constructed a universe in which things might work out.

I don’t think writers need to apologize for loving the things they love.

In fact, I increasingly think the opposite. Our taste shapes our writing. The movies we watch, novels we underline, magazines we keep, jokes we repeat, songs we play again and conversations we remember all teach us something about language, whether we realize it or not.

The trick is learning to pay attention.

So yes, read the communications books. Read the industry reports. Study the frameworks. Understand the research. Know your audience, your objectives and your key messages.

But every once in a while, close the business book. Pick up something that has absolutely nothing to do with your job. Read the sentences slowly. Notice what makes you laugh. Notice when you become impatient. Notice the line you reread because you wish you had written it. Notice when you suddenly care deeply about a person who does not exist.

Then ask yourself how the writer did that.

For me, sometimes that means a romance novel. And if two fictional people taking 350 pages to realize they’re in love can teach me to write one better paragraph, I consider that a pretty good professional development expense.

Matthew Celestial is a Toronto-based writer and communications professional covering media, culture, entertainment and the ideas shaping how we communicate. He has spent more than a decade working across animation, film, technology and consumer brands, and is Managing Partner at Rhetor and the founder of Statement Worldwide and Matte Equation.

When and How to Go Negative

 By Mike Medeiros

There always seems to be an election campaign going on somewhere. Sweden and the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt both held highly publicized elections earlier this month. In Canada, campaigns are currently underway for the Quebec provincial election and municipal elections across Ontario. Brazil is also in the middle of its 2026 election campaign, while the United States is heading towards its November midterm elections. In the latter two cases, campaigns can get quite nasty.

Not all election campaigns are negative. But political attacks are a familiar feature of modern campaigning, and they can be some of the most memorable messages voters encounter.

But are they effective?

To answer that question, I spoke with Alessandro Nai, an Associate Professor of Political Communication and Journalism at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam. Nai is an expert on negative communication and negative campaigning.

For communication professionals, negative communication can be tempting when criticizing a competitor, responding to an attack, or simply trying to attract attention. But when does going negative actually make sense, and what are the risks? 

Does Going Negative Work?

There is a widespread belief that negative communication works. According to Nai, this belief is particularly entrenched among campaign consultants, who often see attacking an opponent as a necessary part of campaigning.

However, the reality is more complicated.

Negative messages can be effective at capturing attention, particularly when they are aggressive or provocative. They can also mobilize segments of the population that are already highly polarized or respond positively to aggressive messaging.

But attention is not the same thing as persuasion.

A negative message can hurt the target while also hurting the person delivering it. This is known as the backlash effect. While an attack may reduce support for an opponent, it can also reduce support for the attacker.

This makes it difficult to say that negative communication simply “works.” Its effectiveness depends on what we mean by success. Is the objective to attract attention, damage a competitor, mobilize existing supporters, change people’s minds, or generate media coverage?

A message that generates significant attention may look successful through media coverage, social media engagement, or impressions. But if that attention comes at the expense of the organisation’s reputation, the result may be less positive than the initial metrics suggest.

Not all publicity is necessarily good publicity!

When Should You Go Negative?

If negative communication can produce both benefits and costs, when should a communicator actually use it?

For Nai, the first consideration should be the image of the person or organisation delivering the message.

People do not evaluate a message in isolation. They evaluate it in relation to what they already believe about the communicator. An aggressive attack from someone known for being confrontational may therefore be received differently from the same attack coming from someone with a reputation for being positive and conciliatory.

This is related to what researchers call expectancy violation. We have expectations about how certain people are supposed to behave. When they behave differently, we notice it and may react negatively.

Nai points to gender as one example. Research suggests that women who engage in negative campaigning can sometimes face greater backlash because voters may hold stereotypes that women should behave in a kinder or more cooperative manner.

Similarly, a candidate with an aggressive public persona may be given more latitude when attacking an opponent because the behaviour is consistent with what voters already expect.

The same principle can apply outside politics.

Before going negative, communicators should therefore ask: Does this message fit our existing image?

If it does not, that does not necessarily mean the message should not be used. An organisation may deliberately want to change how it is perceived. But that choice comes with costs and needs to be made consciously.

The second question a communicator should ask is: What exactly are we trying to achieve?

A communicator might want to weaken a competitor, energize supporters, attract media attention, or change the public conversation. These are very different objectives.

Attacking a competitor may energize existing supporters, but it may also alienate people who are undecided or less committed.

Generating media attention may also be relatively easy through an aggressive message, but once journalists and commentators pick up the story, the organisation loses some control over the narrative.

Context matters too. There is a difference between initiating an attack and responding to one. According to Nai, audiences tend to be more forgiving when a communicator responds to an attack because a response is expected. But by responding, the communicator may also allow the opponent to determine the subject of the debate.

When Does Going Negative Go Too Far?

Perhaps the biggest danger is assuming that there is a universal formula for when negative communication becomes too negative.

Nai cautions against treating negative communication as inherently bad. Criticism can serve an important purpose. Negative campaigning can, for example, expose wrongdoing. More broadly, criticism allows organisations and individuals to challenge claims and hold competitors accountable.

The problem comes when negativity becomes an objective in itself.

Nai suggests that negative communication becomes particularly problematic when it is primarily an exercise in violating social norms or being aggressive simply for the sake of attracting attention.

The difficulty is that these norms are not universal. What one person considers impolite, another may consider perfectly acceptable. Those norms can also change over time.

Another important consideration is who receives the message.

Nai’s research suggests that people respond differently to negative and uncivil communication depending on their political alignment and individual characteristics. People who are closely aligned with the communicator are more likely to forgive attacks, even when they might otherwise find them distasteful.

Personality also matters. Individuals who are more aggressive or have a greater need for chaos are more likely to view attacks as acceptable or entertaining.

For communication professionals, this means there is no single audience response to a negative message. A message designed to energize one audience may alienate another.

That is particularly important in today’s fragmented media environment, where organisations communicate simultaneously with loyal supporters, critics, journalists, employees, and the general public.

Negative Communication Is a Strategic Choice

So, should communicators go negative?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Negative communication can attract attention and serve a legitimate strategic purpose; but it can also produce backlash, damage the communicator’s image, and give others control over the conversation.

For communication professionals, going negative should therefore be a strategic choice, not simply a reaction to the pressure to be noticed.

Before going negative, communicators should consider the communicator, the audience, the objective, and the context. Does the message fit the organisation’s existing image? Is the goal to weaken a competitor, mobilize supporters, generate attention, or shape the public debate? Who will receive the message, and how might they interpret it? Is the organisation initiating the attack or responding to one?

There is also another question worth asking: What happens if the message works?

An attack that successfully attracts attention can take on a life of its own. Journalists may pick it up. Supporters may amplify it. Critics may respond. The organisation may then find itself defending the tone or substance of its own message rather than communicating the issue it originally wanted to discuss.

Negative communication can be rewarding. In some situations, it may even be expected. But the fact that an attack gets noticed does not necessarily mean that it has succeeded.

For communication professionals, the challenge therefore is not simply knowing when to go negative. It is knowing why they are doing it, who they are speaking to, and what they are willing to risk in the process. 

Mike Medeiros is a political scientist and communications specialist with expertise in political psychology, public communication, and audience behaviour. He holds a PhD in Political Science and recently completed the Strategic Public Relations program at the University of Toronto.