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The importance of communities is central to public relations theory, which has recently received renewed scholarly attention. The COVID-19 pandemic put in sharp focus the importance of community – and the detrimental consequences for society when community life is disrupted. This study combines theorizing on communities and the care-based relationship cultivation model to investigate public relations in a non-traditional setting. We conducted 41 interviews with community health workers (CHWs) engaged with Latino communities during and after the pandemic. Our findings uncover a variety of strategies CHWs employ to sustain community relationships, culminating in the new care-based community cultivation framework. To support community involvement, CHWs communicate their competency, are part of the communities they serve, and meet people where they are. To support community nurturing, CHWs actively listen, communicate with empathy, and educate while working from the heart. They also serve as safe harbors, acknowledge their role limitations, build trust through sustained relationships, and overcome challenges while respecting culture. To support community organizing, CHWs make service connections while acknowledging system limitations and tailor official health guidance. Additionally, CHWs work to overcome obstacles to community members’ well-being. Ultimately, we echo calls for more public relations scholarship to uplift marginalized communities, especially during crises, so that our work supports community well-being and safety.

Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competing discourses: On the one hand, a concern regarding the indexical erasure of AAVE as a variety of English spoken by Black Americans; and on the other, claims of a new register of ‘internet language’. Concluding, we argue that, in the participatory context of social media, the circulation of the label ‘TikTok language’ poses an issue for the raciolinguistic enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have become an urgent public health crisis and a significant cause of death, especially in developing countries like Ghana, where news media coverage influences public understanding of health issues, just as it does in other jurisdictions. This study employs an unsupervised machine learning method on 505 Ghanaian news articles published between 2014 and 2024 to analyze how the themes related to NCDs and the main attribution frames are presented. The results identified four primary thematic frames: stakeholder partnerships and crisis management efforts, Ghana’s NCD risk factors, systemic barriers to managing the crisis, and advances in healthcare technology. Additional attribution analysis revealed two key frames: a lifestyle frame, highlighting individual choices, and a socio-economic frame, connecting NCDs to poverty, weak health systems, urbanization, and environmental factors. Findings reflect global trends while emphasizing the influence of local structural factors in NCD crisis narratives. The study demonstrates the usefulness of computational methods for analyzing large news media text corpora, showing how Ghanaian news media mirror international framing patterns and also reveal unique local barriers and dependencies during public health emergencies.