The Barack Obama campaign launched FightTheSmears.com, in an effort to combat rumors about the presidential candidate and his family. This plan is a unique approach to handling rumors, but will the open communication help or hurt the campaign?

NEW YORK: The tomato industry concentrated its outreach efforts on buyers to bolster the message that some tomatoes are safe to eat, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) try to identify the variety or region of tomatoes that triggered the salmonella outbreak in recent weeks.

Over the past few years, corporate crises such as product recalls and data breaches have received increased media attention. Accordingly, companies now plan for damage control in crisis situations, which has led to greater specialized crisis planning.

Jeremy Pitcock is suing Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, the law firm that fired him, for $90 million in alleged reputation damages, and, according to New York Magazine, he's involving Mike Sitrick's Sitrick and Company, the PR agency that wrote the press release announcing sexual harassment as the grounds upon which he was fired.

WASHINGTON: A new report from NASA's inspector general claims that the NASA press office appeared between 2004 and early 2006 to withhold or delay dissemination or research on climate change for political reasons.

At the Cannes Film Festival last week, actress Sharon Stone responded to a question about the recent Chinese earthquake - which killed more than 69,000 people - by stating, "I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice, [do] bad things happen to you?"

When talking about how bad they are at promoting themselves, PR pros often claim the irritating cobblers' children defense.

NEW YORK: Time Warner Cable's PR staff is conducting blog outreach for its test of an Internet usage-based pricing plan.

Although former White House press secretary Scott McClellan gained instant attention for his recent book - What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception - discussions soon turned to criticism of the PR industry as a whole.

Sparked by the debate over McClellan's book, discussion grows about the role of spokesperson