The New York Times’ Ian Urbina wrote an incredible story covering worker safety, unenforced regulations and the role of the government agency tasked with overseeing the nearly 8 million work sites in the U.S.

The story, which details problems in a North Carolina cushion-making factory, shows how chronic under enforcement of safety rules can harm many of those who can least afford a health crisis.

A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — is also used by tens of thousands of workers in auto body shops, dry cleaners and high-tech electronics manufacturing plants across the nation. Medical researchers, government officials and even chemical companies that once manufactured nPB have warned for over a decade that it causes neurological damage and infertility when inhaled at low levels over long periods, but its use has grown 15-fold in the past six years.

Such hazards demonstrate the difficulty, despite decades of effort, of ensuring that Americans can breathe clean air on the job. Even as worker after worker fell ill, records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that managers at Royale Comfort Seating, where Ms. Farley was employed, repeatedly exposed gluers to nPB levels that exceeded levels federal officials considered safe, failed to provide respirators and turned off fans meant to vent fumes.

But the story of the rise of nPB and the decline of Ms. Farley’s health is much more than the tale of one company, or another chapter in the national debate over the need for more, or fewer, government regulations. Instead, it is a parable about the law of unintended consequences.

It shows how an Environmental Protection Agency program meant to prevent the use of harmful chemicals fostered the proliferation of one, and how a hard-fought victory by OSHA in controlling one source of deadly fumes led workers to be exposed to something worse — a phenomenon familiar enough to be lamented in government parlance as “regrettable substitution.”

One of the more interesting parts of the story was about a local doctor who felt compelled to write a letter to OSHA begging them to enforce the rules, but also to keep in mind that many in the area were unemployed and that the state needed the jobs provided by the factory. It was a great way to illustrate some of the problems hourly workers face in the current economy.

Royale workers became regular visitors at local health clinics, including the Clinic for People Without Health Insurance, then run by Dr. Ben Wofford.

Looking like “upright cadavers,” Dr. Wofford said, cushion workers arrived unable to stand on their own, supported under their arms by family members. They had showered and changed out of their work clothes, he said, but their breath still carried an odor he remembered from his boyhood days putting together model airplanes.

He had watched for years as his patients’ suffering worsened with the bottoming out of the state’s tobacco, textile and furniture industries. When people are out of work, he explained in an interview in his office above the pharmacy in Newton, N.C., a diabetic ulcer that would normally cost a toe takes a leg. Their nonfatal hernia bleeds them to death.

“You kill jobs,” Dr. Wofford said, “you kill patients.”

Reluctantly, he wrote a letter in 2005 alerting OSHA about problems at Royale. One worker was in especially bad shape, he wrote: “Indeed he may die as a result of his exposure.”

But Dr. Wofford also urged OSHA not to overreact. “I would hate to see this plant’s multiple shortcomings result in its being shut down,” he wrote, warning of jobs that could be lost. “Many are my patients and are already in dire straits economically.”

The other side of the story is that the plant claims it can’t afford to make changes to the glue or to the factory configuration, saying it’s too costly.

In a recent interview, Mr. Isenhour, Royale’s safety director, said the company never meant to harm anyone and initially did not realize the hazards of nPB. Royale has continued using nPB glues, he added, because alternatives are ineffective or risky.

Glues that use acetone, for example, are popular but highly flammable, he said. Converting the Royale plant to meet federal rules on fire safety would entail replacing the glue-spraying booths with metal walls, installing sprinklers and explosion-proof lighting and retraining workers, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, he added.

In 2005, when seven workers became seriously ill at one plant, Mr. Isenhour said, Royale had to lay off 40 people, close the facility and spend $50,000 to move operations to another site and upgrade the ventilation there. OSHA found high levels of fumes in subsequent years because no one informed the company that fans and filters needed cleaning for ventilation to work properly, he said.

If the company switched to a more expensive glue, he said, he would have to raise the price of each cushion, and the furniture makers Royale supplies would contract with Chinese competitors instead.

“We are trying to keep jobs in America,” he said. “But that’s expensive.”

Both government officials and employers weigh the costs and benefits of protective measures. Many studies show that investing in workplace safety saves money in the long run, but economists say that does not prove true in every case. This, of course, raises the most difficult calculus of all: comparing the worth of a dangerous job versus no job at all. How should companies and regulators put a dollar value on workers’ quality of life — indeed, on their very lives?

To date, Royale has paid nearly a half-million dollars — in court settlements, required upgrades and less than $20,000 in OSHA fines related to glue fumes. Those costs — and the harm to workers — accumulated in slow motion. Cushion making is a boom-bust business, subject to the swings of big orders from furniture companies. Royale and others in the industry frequently use transient, nonunion and illegal immigrant laborers, according to workers and court documents, who are less likely to report hazards and document symptoms.

This is long-form journalism at it’s best. It covers the people, the company, the industry and the government agency and regulations that shape it. The business media often overlooks those profiled in the story when they’re covering companies. The piece is an excellent example of work that many organizations can no longer undertake.

When a friend texted a picture of an alert from our local television station that said “Video: Coverage of Sunshine,” I laughed out loud. Then I went to see what the story was really about since I was fairly sure that the sun rising didn’t count for news (at least not yet). It’s Sunshine Week.

The first thing I found was the site for the week-long spotlight tagged “Open government is good government,” which is sponsored by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Bloomberg LP, American Society of New Editors, and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

There’s a brief history of the initiative’s purpose:

Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.

In 2002, the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors started Sunshine Sunday after some of the state’s government officials tried to create exemptions to Florida’s public record laws. The idea spread after their efforts prevented nearly 300 exemptions to open government laws from going onto the books.

Though created by journalists, Sunshine Week is about the public’s right to know what its government is doing, and why.

Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.

Participants include news media, government officials at all levels, schools and universities, libraries and archives, individuals, non-profit and civic organizations, historians and anyone with an interest in open government.

Everyone can be a part of Sunshine Week. Our coalition of supporters is broad and deep. And individual participation can make all the difference.

The only requirement is that you do something to engage in a discussion about the importance of open government. It could be a large public forum or a classroom discussion, an article or series of articles about access to important information, or an editorial.

There’s a tool kit for people interested in participating in the conversation, an impressive list of events across the country, and an idea bank of records to ask for or highlighting the use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

But my favorite part was reading through the stories created by asking for open records. Here are a few from the site.

Out of State Travels of Student Lender Prove Costly

Using Kentucky’s Open Records Act, the Lexington Herald-Leader discovered that the chief executive of two state agencies that lend money to college students had spent more than $50,000 on out-of-state trips, often exceeding the daily per diem limits and treating guests to $100-plus a person meals. Story

A Ton of Records on a $6.7 Million No-Bid Project

St. Louis Post Dispatch reporters filed public records requests to find out more about the environmental cleanup of a long-abandoned coke plant designed to make way for a new business park. The request generated 11,000 pages of records, which the reporters reviewed on site, rather than getting copies and likely prompting an environmental cleanup in the newsroom. The records search showed the $6.7 million project estimate was much too low, which officials knew at the time; that there was no public bidding; and that the original polluters paid only a fraction of the cleanup cost. Story

And Wait Until You Read How Much They Got in Bonuses

Using data gathered from a FOIA request, the Asbury Park Press reported that the federal government paid its civilian work force $105 billion in salaries in 2011 — then gave them another $439 million in bonuses. The database has been posted online. Story

It’s inspirational. My grad school fervor about the power of the media was rekindled. We often overlook the great stories in regional papers that bring about so much public good. It made me miss that heady feeling of being in the newsroom when you find something in a filing or just keep pushing until you break a story.

I thought about the late, great Mark Pittman, who had the nerve to sue the Federal Reserve and was such an inspiration to so many of us:

Pittman’s push to open the Fed to more scrutiny resulted in an Aug. 24 victory in Manhattan Federal Court affirming the public’s right to know about the central bank’s more than $2 trillion in assistance to financial firms. He drew the attention of filmmakers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, who featured him prominently in their documentary about subprime mortgages, “American Casino,” which was shown at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival in May.

 “Who sues the Fed? One reporter on the planet,” said Emma Moody, a Wall Street Journal editor who worked with Pittman at Bloomberg News. “The more complex the issue, the more he wanted to dig into it. Years ago, he forced us to learn what a credit- default swap was. He dragged us kicking and screaming.”

Then there was the story on my local TV station, a panel discussion talking about the football scandal at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

A panel discussion at 1:40 p.m. will include key parties involved in the lawsuit filed by local media against the University of North Carolina. Dick Baddour, former UNC director of athletics, and Jon Sasser, attorney for former UNC football coach Butch Davis, will join journalists and other lawyers to discuss the three-year legal battle over emails, phone records and parking tickets waged by those trying to report on allegations of athletic and academic improprieties.

Davis was fired and Baddour retired from UNC as scandal swirled that football players accepted gifts, trips and cash and were registered for classes that never met. The university, in a series of internal and external investigations, has said that the problems with changed grades and no-show classes were limited to one department and did not benefit student-athletes any more than other students.

It’s good to be reminded of why being a reporter is important and why fighting to protect open records is essential to holding government officials and others accountable. Go out and file a request – it’s an important and sometimes overlooked tool, especially in today’s fast-paced, commentary heavy news world.

Last week my former Associated Press client Tori Ekstrand invited me to speak at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a two–hour snow delay in New York, I finally found my way to the Freedom Forum Center on campus where Tori, now an assistant professor, and a handful of her undergraduate students gathered to hear my point-of-view on the evolution of the communications industries.

In a nutshell, I explained, we’ve entered an age when every company and every individual is a media outlet with the capacity to create and syndicate content. At the same time, nimble media upstarts with names like Buzzfeed, Politico, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, TMZ, Drudge, and a myriad others have mastered the art of headline histrionics. In so doing, they have siphoned off a growing share of the public’s ever-divided attention spans from legacy media, which today are struggling to retain the influence they once enjoyed.

I was surprised to learn from Tori that some 60 percent of the students in UNC’s journalism program are not majoring in journalism at all. Instead, they’re pursuing careers in advertising and public relations, which may be a smart move given the economic challenges the media industry continues to face, i.e., Maureen Dowd’s column in The New York Times, and the industry’s embrace of new hybrid ad/edit revenue-generating schemes such as “native advertising” and sponsored content.

Separately, I had forgotten that Talking Biz News’ founder Chris Roush was a senior associate dean and the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in Business Journalism at the university. Talking Biz News is a must-read for those working as or with business journalists. Chris invited me to pen a post for the site on “what’s wrong with the relationship between PR people and business journalists.”

Clearly there’s much wrong in this symbiotic relationship, but it doesn’t end with the business/financial news beat. The historical love-hate relationship between journalists and PR professionals has taken a distinct turn toward the latter in recent years and cuts across virtually every media beat.

There are a number of reasons feeding the growing acrimony between the two professions, or at least the short fuses journalists have today for PR operatives:

1. The ratio of PR people to “pitchable” journalists is now estimated at 4 to 1, resulting in email inbox overload.
2. New data-driven vendors let PR pros automate the media relations process, producing greater volumes of often misguided story pitches.
3. Journalists have many other sources for their story ideas, including those they follow in real-time on Twitter and Facebook.
4. Media relations is pushed to junior staffers at many big agencies — and in-house communications departments — with relatively little supervision or mentoring

With that said, I have to disagree with Chris’s premise that the relationship between PR people and business journalists is completely broken. The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Kafka, CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Bloomberg News, Reuters, the FT and countless others – including local media outlets — frequently turn to PR professionals whom they’ve come to trust for delivering timely and accurate information.

The relative number of these trustworthy PR pros may have dwindled in recent years, but I assure readers of Talking Biz News that time and information-strapped business journalists continue to appreciate and value the responsive PR pro who “gets it.”

The discipline of “earned media,” as it has become know, is alive and well and still drives the fortunes of the vast majority of PR organizations. Call it what you want – media relations, publicity, media engagement, story pitching – the task of capturing the affections of beleaguered journalists thrives. As an art, however, media relations has seen better days. Here are some likely pleas from both sides of the media relations equation.

Journalists to the PR professional:

• Do not send a story pitch without first researching what I cover.
• In fact do not send a story pitch to a target list of reporters without knowing what each and every person on that list covers.
• Please refrain from sending me a manifesto. If you cannot articulate the story in a couple of sentences, then don’t bother sending.
• Keep the email subject line newsy, not cutesy.
• Take the time to learn and understand what you are pitching.
• Deliver on the promise, i.e., don’t offer an executive for an interview and then be unable to produce him or her.

PR professionals to journalists:

• In spite of the voluminous number of pitches landing in your inbox, please try to reply – even in the negative — if the pitch is within your coverage area. We just want closure.
• If the pitch is not in your specific coverage area, but still editorial valid, please forward to an appropriate colleague.
• Please know that if you do not respond to our overtures, we will be free to take the story idea elsewhere.
• Please know that we would be happy to serve as your arms and legs when you’re in a bind.
• Just as you have a job to do, so do we. Civility is preferred.

Of course, the savvy communications professional today is no longer solely reliant on (and suppliant to) editorial decision makers to have their stories or POVs shared. The PR profession now has the creative capacity and a range of publicly accessible media platforms to deliver content directly to the public, bypassing the media filter altogether.

Does the profession (and its clients) still covet a business feature in The FT or on the Bloomberg News wire? You bet.

But as public consumption of news and information migrates to mobile and social, the PR pros no longer have to endure the indignity of getting dissed by a stressed out reporter who paints all PR people as evil. Alternative means for engaging end audiences via independently produced content are on the rise.

Peter Himler is a principal at New York-based Flatiron Communications.

A few weeks ago I used this column to complain about how marketing fundamentals were invading the public relations field and eroding media relations basics.  New tools for a new era of engagement has had a sweeping impact on the public relations field.

While I firmly believe that this new way of thinking has been largely detrimental to media relations, there has been some interesting new ways to use media relations for a marketing effect.

The idea came to me when I was looking at Twitter and saw that a notable technology editor at a national business publication had blasted out a tweet about a bad PR pitch she had received.  Apparently, some PR agency had sent her a pitch about a limited time deal at everyone’s favorite doughnut shop.

At first glance, this made absolutely zero sense.  Why would a tech editor care about donuts?

Reporters, especially business reporters who tend to focus on specific, often times esoteric topics like the mechanics of a leveraged buyout, are flooded with poorly targeted emails.  In fact, it happens so often most reporters I know are completely unfazed by these wandering bits of mail.

However, after a closer look I am a believer that the wayward doughnut pitch was not in fact poorly targeted, but perhaps a clever new way of utilizing media relations.  (Full disclaimer, I was not involved in this pitch, so my theory below is only rooted in an understanding of current practices that may or may not have been applied to this email.)

The impact of the internet and social media on news media has been talked about ad nauseum, so without diving into a broad examination of this changing field there is one important evolution reporters should understand.  Journalists are no longer simply the arbiters of information for their specific beat but are now influencers of the general population (especially those that engage on social media).  For public relations in the modern era, influencers are fundamental tools to deliver a message.

Consider that this tech editor maintains an active Twitter account with thousands of followers.  The information she shares with her community of followers is not confined to technology news, but is filled with updates about her day, opinions about the tech industry and general musings on life.

In this light, one can certainly argue that the doughnut pitch was not a common PR misfire, but perhaps a targeted approach to a highly influential consumer.

What if she had tweeted in the past about her love for this brand?  Would a PR person then be off-base to assume she wouldn’t be interested in what’s happening with this brand?  Either way, when she took to twitter to alert her followers about the pitch, and the marketing promotion it highlighted, a PR objective was achieved.

Is this the best way to practice media relations?  Absolutely not.

I can’t imagine there is a reporter out there who would condone increasing the number of bad pitches they get.

To be clear, I am not condoning sending business reporters consumer PR pitches just because they have an active twitter account.  Targeting and thoughtfulness in any approach to media are still the most important considerations, but in a new media era carefully targeted pitches don’t necessarily have to address a reporter’s beat.