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Successfully adapting to organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis necessitated the effective deployment of technical communication texts delineating the expectations and structures for guiding behavior and interactions. A dearth of system-wide familiarity with changes in modalities has disrupted expectations and impacted engagement. During acute events, business and technical communicators will probably not be the initial source of transition messaging. Instead, this task will fall on managers, faculty, and other front-line communicators. The authors present pragmatic recommendations for adapting familiar discourses, semiotics, and mental scripts so that communicators can more effectively intervene during crises to ease organizational transitions and decrease uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the narratives produced in Associated Press, The New York Times and The Times (of London) reports surrounding key events in Kosovo and Syria, leading to calls for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention, and the construction of perceptions and cultural memories of the conflicts in which they are wielded. The article argues that the narrative themes emerging from this coverage produced uncritical calls for military intervention that are limited and ubiquitous, narrowly delineated the options for response and understanding, relied heavily on press briefings of those that advocate military intervention (ignoring alternative voices), failed to provide deep-level analysis of the conflicts, and remained constant across all three media outlets and across both the Račak and Ghouta events. The article then examines the implications, arguing that the coverage can be understood as the deployment of weaponized media on a battlefield of public opinion and wielded in a way necessitating Western military action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What became of Tanjug, the once celebrated Yugoslavian news agency, first coordinator of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, and major point of reference for the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debates of the 1970s? The authors explore a service that offered alternative perspectives to those of news agencies of the major powers. Tanjug’s alternative service prefigured the NWICO debates by two decades. It achieved news coups of considerable relevance to the narrative of Cold War conflict. Tanjug’s history prior to and in the wake of NWICO is insufficiently registered in media scholarship. It continued to provide an alternative news service up to the disintegration of both the Soviet bloc and of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The agency has survived even these setbacks, successfully accommodating the more limited and in some ways more conventional options available to a national news agency of a fairly small country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]