Jonathan Franzen, author of the best-selling Freedom, is so hot these days.

He's so hot the Chicago Tribune called him the Lady Gaga of the literary world.

He's so hot The Atlantic panned him.

I mean, the guy's so hot he told Oprah to take a hike--and she's still promoting his latest book.

Goes to show a fiction author--who doesn't write about vampires or wizards--can still command some attention in the 21st century. So, writers, why not take some advice from him.

In February, Franzen gave The Guardian his 10 rules for writing. Even though they're billed as rules for fiction authors, they still ring true for non-fiction writers--and, yes, even corporate communicators, particularly Nos. 1, 3, 7, 9, and 10.

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

3. Never use the word "then" as a conjunction - we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.

9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Click here to see the other five rules. You'll have to scroll down the page, because the story includes writing advice from a host of famous authors.

This is a guest post from Jessica Levco, Ragan's healthcare editor.

By now, you've heard about the shooting at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

And as a communicator, you're curious to see how the institution responded. The hospital responded with this news release on the website: Update on Shooting at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

That headline gets right to the point. But take a look at what's being said at Johns Hopkins University. If you look at the news release section on the website, you'll see this headline:

"Statement on the resolution of an incident at Johns Hopkins Hospital."

Scratching your head?

So were we.

Surely, someone from the legal team wrote this. Or maybe the da Vinci robot.

But it turns out that it was written by Dennis O'Shea, the executive director of communications and public affairs at the Johns Hopkins University.

He defended his title choice.

"Decisions like that are made in the context in which 50,000 things are happening at once," O'Shea says. "We wanted to be as neutrally descriptive as possible."

Well, that was achieved.

It's conservative. It's fair. It's safe.

But what's the point of writing a headline if you're not saying anything? This headline was so generic; we imagined that it could work for any emergency scenario.

But O'Shea says he wants people to concentrate on what the president is saying, not the headline.

"We wanted the message to speak for itself," O'Shea says.

We kept reading. We liked what the president had to say. It was warm, personal and gave details about what happened.

Those who were directly involved did what they needed to do, calmly and ably. Those who were not directly involved kept on doing what they are there to do: The hospital remained in operation. Patients were taken care of. Faculty taught, students learned, staff did their critical work in support of the Johns Hopkins mission. I am grateful to you all.

It's just too bad the message and the headline didn't match up.

We wouldn't recommend that the institution take a cue from newspaper headlines, "Johns Hopkins Shooting Turns Prestigious Hospital into Crime Scene" or "Johns Hopkins Shooting Draws Comparisons to 'Grey's Anatomy' Finale," but we thought the Johns Hopkins University headline should've told the reader something.

Here are a few examples:

How Johns Hopkins Hospital is handling the shooting
Johns Hopkins Hospital response to the shooting
Our response to the shooting at Johns Hopkins Hospital
What we want you to know about the shooting
Johns Hopkins Hospital responds to shooting

"Yesterday (Thursday), we were going 100 miles an hour," O'Shea says. "But sitting here 24 hours, I might've said something like, 'Statement from President Daniels,' but even after our discussion, I'm not in the mood to second-guess it."

We can only imagine how difficult Thursday was for O'Shea and his team. And we're grateful he had a few minutes to talk to us about a headline.

I'd love to blame it on a virus. Tell you that some seditious little bastard with too much time on his hands used his parents DSL line to hack into PR Daily's content management system and start unplugging wires and plugging them back into the wrong outlets.

If only this were the case.

As many--indeed, many--readers of PR Daily, of which I am the managing editor, pointed out this week, the links to several stories on the website and in the e-newsletter were broken. If this happens once, well, big deal, it happens, you fix it; you move on. Sure it's not a best practice, but nothing to scramble the jets about.

Problem was it kept happening: On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday--there were two broken links on Wednesday. My frustration was bottomless, abysmal. But instead of banging my head against the wall--OK, I did bang my head against the wall for a while--or drinking--OK, so, I drank bit, too--I got to the bottom of the problem.

Briefly, the problem was caused by garbled code and an internal error on our part.

I can't promise it won't happen again. Believe me, I'd like to, but experience has now taught me that making such a vow is foolish. In the meantime, I'll just have to remember that relative to all the injustices in the world, this one is minor--it doesn't even register, not by a long shot.

But it's still frustrating as hell.

How do you react when a protestor with a cameraman crashes one of your press conferences or events?

You don't panic, no matter how dumbstruck you are. You don't call out the hounds or summon the muscle-bound security. You definitely don't tase them. (Remember the "Don't tase me, bro!" viral video?)

This situation isn't a hypothetical--it happened Tuesday afternoon at a Ragan Communications conference in Vancouver. A woman dressed like one of the conference attendees entered a ballroom where the conference was taking place and began protesting McDonald's, which was one of the presenters at the event.

Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, was there when the protest began.

"The whole episode offered a great lesson in what to do when someone hijacks your press conference or event," Ragan said.

"I made the decision to let her speak and NOT to have security drag her from the room," he explained. "Her co-conspirator was filming her with a Flip cam, which meant they were hoping she'd be dragged from the room. That would have given her a dramatic video to send to local news outlets, YouTube, etc.

"Instead, she got a pretty boring video of her delivering a canned speech."

After the event, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--you know, PETA--entered the fray and hijacked the event hashtag on Twitter. PETA supporters tweeted anti-McDonald's message, which included a link to a website about the restaurant chain's treatment of chickens, and included the hashtag that conference attendees are using to talk about the event on Twitter.

If you can offer some advice on how to handle hashtag hijackers I'll buy a steak--or veggie dog--your call.

PR Daily readers know that the last two days there's been a broken link. I'm the managing editor of PR Daily. Here's the scoop:

On Monday, we ran a story with the headline, "10 reasons your audience doesn't like you--and 10 tips to win their affection."

The link to this story, which appeared on the website Social Media Today, did not work. We received a number of e-mails and reader comments. Our favorite comment said, "Reason No. 11 that people don't like you. Your links are broken."'

Touché.

On Tuesday, we ran a follow up with the headline, "10 reasons your audience doesn't like you (the link works this time)--except the link didn't work.

D'oh!

So, instead of trying to share the link and risk it not working again. Go ahead and type this into Google: "Social Media Today, Top 10 reasons why your audience doesn't like you." No quotation marks when you Google it.

If it doesn't work, let me hear it in the comments.