Blogs are gradually emerging as mainstream media in India. I previously mentioned in my own blog that the presence of a free press and recent proliferation of media outlets in India has relegated bloggers to the background, unlike in societies where there are limits to freedom of expression. This is true especially in the space of ‘issues’ where the ability of bloggers to influence public discourse in India seems to be limited by being ‘somewhat unnecessary’.

As temperatures drop across the East Coast, where the clean up efforts from Super Storm Sandy are ongoing, stories of resilience are permeating online: tales of New York City Marathon runners shifting gears from the cancelled event to volunteer efforts in Staten Island, tales of moms in New Jersey organizing clothing and supply drives to help those in the cold and dark, tales of musicians gathering in Brooklyn to entertain volunteers.

A case study on Israeli citizen diplomacy. 

What can branding in the commercial sector teach us about nation-state image communication?

Nicholas Cull on the role of film in public diplomacy. 

WASHINGTON – BBC Television tonight will cover U.S. election returns in a live evening-long broadcast – in Britain as well as in the U.S.

“Europeans are far more interested in the U.S. than the U.S. is interested in any other country,” explained Dick Meyer, the BBC executive producer guiding the coverage, speaking at a USC forum here yesterday.

Nation states are facing a second wake-up call in public diplomacy. The first wake up call, prompted by the 9/11 attacks, was the realization that perceptions of foreign publics have domestic consequences. The second wake up call, which rang out first for China during the 2008 Olympics, and then for other countries with Wikileaks, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Movement, is that adversarial publics are able to challenge states in the quest for global public support. How states can effectively respond to this second wake-up call is a pressing area of public diplomacy research.

The last place that the Polish Ambassador to the United States Ryszard Schnepf might have been expected to appear in his first two weeks in Washington was the opening performance of Our Class, the searing play about a dark episode in Poland’s history: the 1941 massacre of Jewish citizens by their Catholic neighbors in Jedwabne.