Project Summary:The Corporate Communication Project asks students working in groups to analyze and respond to a real-world corporate crisis. Groups will select a corporate crisis that has occurred within the last five years and produce three separate but related texts from the company's perspective for three distinct audiences: a printed press release for news media outlets; a printed internal memo for employees; a recorded (audio or video) message for customers on CD (please also include the recorded message script on the CD as a computer file). These documents should address the crisis in a professional, ethical, rhetorically-effective manner. This project allows students to get practical experience with corporate communications in textual and multimedia formats both online and offline. Students groups should collect the printed press release, printed internal memo, recorded message on CD, and printed Document Analysis in a single folder with all group members' names on it. It is possible to identify recent corporate crises by searching outlets such as Google News. For learning purposes, the class will examine the grounding of several JetBlue airplanes due to ice storms in February 2007 as a case study. Instructor's Note: It is likely that some of the corporate crises groups select already have corresponding responses online (such as press releases). This may offer the temptation to borrow heavily from these documents while writing. However, this project requires groups to produce original documents, so I will check for similarities between any official and student versions of these texts. (This of course does not mean that groups are forbidden to draw rhetorical strategies from official materials or other professional models.) Deliverables:
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