PR Insider: Recent Episodes

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To describe 2020 as unexpected would be an understatement. But to be best prepared for the year ahead, we invited global affairs analyst Michael Bociurkiw on our podcast for a 360-degree view on the state of the world in 2021.

Bociurkiw's commentary has been featured in BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, and more. He has a truly global perspective having reported from Canada, US, and Asia. Most recently, he covered the defining US elections.

He is the best person to talk about what lies ahead because he has worked as a communications expert with numerous relief organisations including the WHO and UNICEF and has worked on promoting immunisation for polio.

Listen to the conversation for a balanced perspective – the good and the ugly. He sounds an alarm on important social issues such as autocratic governments exploiting the pandemic to become even stronger and China's worrisome over-expanding influence across the world. He is concerned about the future of journalism and about travel becoming a privileged activity limited to those who can afford private jets.

But he is hopeful. From people getting the downtime to reflect, corporates starting to care about their carbon footprint to boost in local travel and growth of local media – he sees the silver lining. Listen to the conversation that covered a lot of ground.

Episode highlights:
0:50 - How Biden will approach China
8:30 - How 2021 will be a crucial year for climate change
14:14 - How shifts in travel will be permanent
21:03 - The impact of people's exodus from the cities to the suburbs
25:02 - The future of journalism
31:02 - The challenges with the COVID vaccine from socio-economic inequality to the disinformation around it
37:15 - Examples of good and bad leadership during the pandemic

For more from our guest, listen to Bociurkiw's podcast Global Impact and follow his work here. He is currently working on a book called 'The Digital Pandemic: How Tech Went from a Bad to Good Boy'.

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Farzana Baduel, CEO of Curzon PR is in conversation with Shruti Advani, a journalist whose recent article in the Financial Times about luxury lockdown in Kensington went viral. Not in a good way. Shruti received over 4000 messages in one week from across the globe including death threats, racism and sexism.

Despite being cancelled herself, Shruti holds an opposing view than most of her peers in the media when she says she would never cancel cancel culture. It is not cancel culture, but its social media amplification that is the problem, she says.

Listen to the thought-provoking conversation for a different viewpoint on the topic.

Episode highlights:

4.36: How her article lost context when released outside the paywall.
8.06: How she became a symbol for everything that was going wrong in people’s lives.
12.03: The kind of threats she received, online as well as in person.
21.08: How the people most vulnerable to COVID just showed kindness.
24.19 How the article was published at the wrong time.
30.30 The history of cancel culture and why it is an important part of a vibrant democracy.
31.36: Why the social media amplification of cancel culture is problematic.
33.50 Example from India on being comfortable with one’s history while having an environment that represents everyone who inhabits it.
38.07 Her one general rule in life when it comes to cancel culture.

Youtube Videohttps://youtu.be/rPMmbNePL5M

Selected links from the episode:

• Article ‘The awkward lessons of my luxury lockdown in Kensington’ by Shruti Advani in Financial Times
• The article as pickup up by The Daily Mail
• Tensions rise over race and heritage in the UK as more statues are attacked
• Anniversary of Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 people
• Mahatma Gandhi's salt march, which began his famous civil disobedience movement wherein he defied laws of the British colonial government.
• 2015 Dadri mob lynching in India that killed a man over the suspicion of storing beef in his fridge