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Breakfast Briefing: The 5 stories PR pros need to know on Wednesday morning, 11.16.2016

The media is even less optimistic about the Trump administration after the president-elect and his family ditched the protective press pool on Tuesday night to go out for dinner.

by Frank Washkuch / November 16, 2016

Trump Tower in New York City. (Image via Wikimedia commons, by Bin im Garten - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Trump breaks with press protocol. President-elect Donald Trump and members of his family took a break from transition team planning on Tuesday night and went to the 21 Club for dinner without the protective press pool tagging along. Trump similarly ditched the pool, which has followed presidents and presidents-elect for decades, last Thursday as he traveled to Washington to meet with President Barack Obama.

Protective pool is the reason @AnnCompton was with George W. Bush on 9/11, as his plane stayed in the air. This stuff matters. https://t.co/KWvuqBpACV
— Brad Mielke (@TheBradMielke) November 16, 2016

Transition team trouble. Vice president-elect Mike Pence is reportedly purging lobbyists from the transition team, with the Associated Press reporting infighting among different factions of the group. Two members of the transition team handing national security issues were fired on Tuesday. President-elect Trump, still tweeting nearly at campaign levels, criticized The New York Times’ coverage of the transition on Wednesday morning, saying it was going "so smoothly."

Twitter takes on alt-right. The company suspended several prominent alt-right accounts as it continues to take steps to crack down on hate speech, including that of Richard Spencer, who runs a hard-right "think tank." Spencer compared the action to Stalinist purges in media interviews. Twitter also announced new policies to crack down on hate speech on Tuesday.

Report: Snapchat files for IPO. Snapchat parent Snap Inc. has filed confidentially for an initial public offering that could take place as soon as March. The company could be valued as high as $25 billion, making it the biggest IPO since Alibaba two years ago, according to Reuters.

‘The official shoes of white people.’ That’s what a neo-Nazi group called New Balance over the weekend after one of the shoe company’s expecutives expressed support for President-elect Donald Trump’s trade policies. The company has rebutted the support, saying in one of its most recent statements that it "does not tolerate bigotry or hate in any form," but critics say its statements aren’t strong enough.