Trying to manage a PR crisis? Here’s some advice

Managing a communications crisis is a delicate operation; kicking and screaming won’t get you anywhere, writes Simon Neville

Dear business leader. Thank you for hiring me to manage the crisis you find yourself in.

Before we start, let me make it clear – I am a communications professional with over a decade’s experience of working as a senior journalist, who understands how newsrooms operate and have been on the receiving end of enough (unsuccessful) legal threats and demands for re-writes to know what I’m talking about. But I am not a magician.

If you want me to find a freelancer to pen a nice piece about what a great person you are (or as you may prefer to call it “put your side of the story across”), I know lots of journalists who will write anything you want, within the law, for money. What I cannot do is find an editor who will publish it in any self-respecting publication.

I appreciate that you want a crisis manager to “control” those pesky journalists, but the tools you may use in business – demanding underlings cower to your exacting demands – will not work with journalists. It will only make it worse.

The reason most journalists take up the profession is to hold people like you to account. They don’t do it for the money; they do it because they know that they are not beholden to those in positions of power. This is what gives them power and no amount of money spent on crisis comms will change that.

But what crisis comms can bring you is expertise to help guide you through a potential minefield. I will walk you through to the other end with both your legs intact. If you turn around at the end of the journey and say “what was the point in that?” then be my guest, turn around and try it on your own. But my job is knowing which way to turn.

When a journalist inevitably writes about you, I know it is better to ask for corrections based on factual inaccuracies, instead of bemoaning the entire “tone” of the article as wrong. I know you are more likely to get a change made if you help the journalist to understand the points you’re making. Holding their hand and gently supporting them can work wonders.

If you want to have a say in the media’s narrative, speak to them; engage and show them how you’ve been mis-characterised. Because, if you think acting like a prick will make them think you aren’t one, then I have some magic beans to sell you.

You are not paying me to strong-arm journalists. You are paying me to stop turning a crisis into a massacre.
Here’s the truth – journalists don’t really care about you and your story. They have reams of pages and bulletins to fill and for a brief period they have taken a passing interest
in you.

But please remember, whilst you might be an-all powerful demi-god in the eyes of your colleagues and industry; to a journalist you are nothing more than a stray cat who has momentarily caught their attention. The smart strays will show love and affection. The stupid ones will start scratching and biting.