Curriculum

Master of Arts in Public Relations with a Concentration in Reputation and Crisis Management

Hofstra University’s online graduate public relations program with an concentration in Reputation and Crisis Management prepares students to address a host of new and heightened challenges such as fake news, Twitter attacks, culture wars, filter bubbles, hackings, the expectation that businesses should articulate political stances, and employee and endorser backlash for such stances.

In this program, students learn about the “golden hour” of crisis response. It is a term borrowed from emergency medicine. As Program Director Dr. Kara Alaimo explained in The New York Times, just as a patient who is having a heart attack is much more likely to survive if he or she gets to the hospital in the first hour, organizations must mount appropriate responses to crises on social media within the first hour of such incidents in order to protect their reputations.

Unfortunately, however, at any given time a remarkable number of organizations are in the news for reputation problems that have largely been self-inflicted because its public relations practitioners did not follow basic principles of crisis communication. Read, for example, Dr. Alaimo’s commentary for Bloomberg Opinion on the worst corporate PR decisions of 2018 and 2019.

One possible challenge for which every public relations practitioner now needs to be prepared is fake news. As Dr. Alaimo explained in this opinion piece for Bloomberg, it is critical to articulate an organization’s values in advance of such an event, be prepared with possible responses in advance, and consider using employees to help correct false narratives.

Another challenge for corporations is the increased expectation that businesses will articulate political stances. In this opinion piece for Bloomberg, Dr. Alaimo explained when it does and doesn’t make sense for chief executives to engage in such activism. Of course, the decisions of many corporations to take political stances has in recent years resulted in an unprecedented level of backlash from their own employees and endorsers. In this piece for Harvard Business Review, Dr. Alaimo explained how to publicly address such critics.

Public relations practitioners are also increasingly engaged in social media controversies. In these opinion pieces for Bloomberg, Dr. Alaimo explained how to be prepared for social media attacks by high-profile individuals and also how to engage in harmless, humorous “Twitter wars” as a positive way of garnering attention.

After an organization experiences a crisis, the way to restore its reputation is to articulate and publicly fulfill promises, as Dr. Alaimo explained in this opinion piece for Bloomberg.