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Every edition, we’ll share the articles, essays, and industry reads that have been living in our heads lately

PRGM has always been built around one idea: that PR and communications professionals deserve better resources, sharper analysis, and a community that takes the work seriously. The Inner Circle is how we plan on delivering on that fully!

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The Inner Circle is $8/month. And this edition is a good place to see exactly what that gets you.

On March 19, ABC canceled an already-filmed season of The Bachelorette three days before its premiere. The decision came after TMZ published video footage of a 2023 altercation involving the season's lead, Taylor Frankie Paul, footage that confirmed what the public record had already documented: an arrest, an aggravated assault guilty plea, and a pattern of conflict that had played out on camera across two seasons. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the shelved season will cost ABC $30 million or more in production, licensing, and advertising losses, with The Los Angeles Times reporting the figure could reach $70 million if the season never airs.

The industry covered it as a crisis comms story, but the second layer is that it is also a risk communications story.

What Was Already Known

The 2023 arrest was not a secret. It was public record and aired in the first episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. It generated fan backlash at the time of Paul's casting announcement in September 2025. According to The Hollywood Reporter's reporting on the cancellation, executives knew of her charges when they made the casting decision. What they say they had not seen was the video itself. That video, when it surfaced five days before the premiere, became the tipping point for them. Not the guilty plea, not the ongoing domestic violence investigation that had already paused production on another Disney-owned property weeks earlier: the footage.

Which raises the question we want to sit with: why does video change the calculus in ways that documented, public legal history does not?

The Gap Communications Should Be Closing

Organizations routinely treat public record as a category of risk separate from visceral, visual evidence. A charge on paper is something a legal team manages. A video is something an audience experiences. These are not the same thing, and communications professionals understand that better than almost anyone else in the building. The charge lives in a database. The video lives in the body. The failure here was not in the crisis response. It was in the gap between those two things never being translated for the people making the decision.

That translation is a communications function. The upstream job, the one that rarely gets resourced or positioned correctly inside organizations, is not writing the statement after the footage drops. It is sitting in the room where the decision is being made and saying: the arrest is public, the guilty plea is on record, the incident aired on our own platform. The question is not whether this becomes a story. The question is what that story looks like when it surfaces, and what our response is when it does. In most organizations, by the time something becomes a crisis, the window for that conversation has already closed.

Cinnabon cut ties before any network statement was issued. That sequence, sponsor action preceding organizational response, is increasingly the pattern in brand crises, and it signals something important. Advertiser relationships move on their own timeline, independent of whatever internal communications process is underway. If stakeholder dependencies are not mapped as part of risk planning, organizations routinely find themselves reacting to decisions others have already made for them.

What This Actually Is

This is not something unique to what ABC is experiencing right now. Most PR & Communications professionals reading this have been in a version of it. A client moves forward with a partnership involving someone whose past is complicated but public. A brand announces a hire. An organization enters a market. The communications team learns about it in the same meeting where it is presented as final. The crisis that follows is not bad luck. It is the downstream cost of a gap that a different internal conversation could have closed.

The footage changed nothing about what was already true. It only changed how undeniable that truth became. Our job as communicators is to make that undeniability visible before it arrives, not to manage it after.

Every April 1, brands get one collective permission slip to be weird, and we are always here for it. This year's field was crowded: hundreds of posts, fake launches, and forced collabs flooded every feed by 9am. Our favorites were the ones that made us pause before we checked the date. Not because they were outrageous, but because they were specific, built from something the brand already owned and executed well enough to feel like they could actually exist. If 100 other brands could have posted the same idea, it wasn't really a joke. It was just noise. Here are some of our favorites!

The most logical extension of what Yelp already does. Of course they'd want you to smell the restaurant before you book.

A laundry detergent brand dropping a scent named after the most emotionally loaded item of clothing in existence.

Lids sells hats. Their whole business depends on team loyalty. Leaning into the exact behavior their most committed customers would consider a betrayal is the kind of self-awareness that earns the joke.

The joke works because Play-Doh's scent is genuinely one of the most recognizable in the world , and leaning into that while selling us absolutely nothing is both absurd and kind of genius. "Now it's time to use your imagination... even harder."

Shot in Dyson's signature aesthetic, styled like a real product launch. Dyson's community is already obsessed with their hair tools, extending that same energy to pets is the most logical next step imaginable, and the execution was committed enough that people genuinely wanted it to be real.

Community Corner returns next week. Until then — who in your world is doing work we should know about? Nominate them at [email protected].

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