American Government is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester American government course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including Insider Perspective features and a Get Connected Module that shows students how they can get engaged in the political process. The book provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of American government and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. American Government includes updated information on the 2016 presidential election.Senior Contributing AuthorsGlen Krutz (Content Lead), University of OklahomaSylvie Waskiewicz, PhD (Lead Editor)

This free and open textbook teaches college-level journalism students to become information experts.
Using the themes of credibility and information literacy, the book helps today’s students, who start out all their research with Google and Wikipedia, to specialize in accessing, evaluating, and managing information that often is not accessible through Google searches.
The book includes chapters on public records, freedom of information requests, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, scholarly research, public data, interviews and more.
Through current examples, instructional videos, suggested classroom activities, and practitioner insights, the authors challenge students to examine the credibility of the sources they use as current and future professional communicators.

This text is provided to you as an Open Educational Resource (OER) which you access online. It is designed to give you a comprehensive introduction to public relations at no or very nominal cost. It contains both written and graphic text material, intra-text links to other internal material which may aid in understanding topics and concepts, intra-text links to the appendices and glossary for tables and definitions of words, and extra-text links to videos and web material that clarifies and augments topics and concepts.

The purpose of this volume is to introduce readers to the concepts of strategic public relations. The basic assumption is that readers have some general knowledge of management and business terminology. This book will help readers apply that to the discipline of public relations. The text is based on current research and scholarly knowledge of the public relations discipline as well as years of experience in professional public relations practice.

Our purpose in this volume is to introduce you to the concepts of strategic public relations. Our basic assumption is that you have some general knowledge of management and business terminology; we will help you to apply that to the discipline of public relations. Our text is based in current research and scholarly knowledge of the public relations discipline as well as years of experience in professional public relations practice.

Whether you are reading this book to learn a new field, simply to update your knowledge, or as part of an educational program or course, we value every moment that you spend with it. Therefore, we have eliminated much of the academic jargon found in other books and used a straightforward writing style. We tried to make the chapters short enough to be manageable, but packed with information, without an overreliance on complicated examples or charts and diagrams. We hope that our no-nonsense approach will speed your study.

Print and electronic communication, social media and even visual messaging all require a core skill: writing. Learn how to write and develop messages in different formats from professionals with expertise in different areas of communication.

Scholars and communication professionals have adopted strategic communication as an umbrella term meant to include a variety of communication-related professions, such as public relations, brand communication, advertising, and more. Although the term is not new, scholars have only recently examined it as a cohesive paradigm.