In his Crisis Guru Commentaries, Jim Lukaszewski provides real answers to real questions about your most critical communications problems and issues.

This issue was triggered by the question below.

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Question:

Dear Crisis Guru:

More and more clients are expressing a preference to respond to interview requests by e-mail.  Is this a good idea?  How will reporters react?  I'm really very wary of this approach

Thank you,

Wary From Wichita, Kansas

Answer:

Dear Wary:

The news media needs to get used to more structured relationships.  Look around.  The vast majority of bad news is the work of plaintiffs attorneys, activists, angry people, and folks who are just plain sloppy with the truth.  All are welcomed by a willing media now caught up themselves in the rush to bloviate and blaughg, blaughg, blaughg, rather than the deliberate work of journalism.

The major benefit of more structured approaches like E-mail is that the words provided are clear.  A second benefit is that we can share exactly what was said with all the people we care about, or who care about us, rather than just the 15 words the reporter chose to include in the story.

The Lukaszewski Group is recording more interviews now, putting the transcripts up, and asking reporters to post their notes (on their own sites) so the publics who care and are affected can make up their own minds.  And we are far more aggressive in publicly correcting and clarifying media mistakes on Web sites as well as instantly sharing those corrections with our key audiences and publics.

News subjects have always been on their own to defend themselves, maintain some semblance of orderly relationships with their publics, and control their own destinies.  The Web and E-mail are tools to balance media power.

In a media environment where anyone can now be a journalist, the rest of us must manage our own destinies.  And the Web has brought us the ability to have the last word as well as conduct our own conversations directly with anyone we choose, or who wants in.  E-mail also allows us to choose the tools that help us get our most important messages across carefully and completely.

This is mostly a concern of the traditional legacy media:  the ABCs, CBSs, and NBCs of this world, plus the traditional daily newspapers and local traditional media.  Bloggers and other new media types actually prefer these long, lengthy written answers, and often transcribe conversations they have with those they deal with for the very purpose of assuring that everyone’s total views are viewed and heard.

Whether the traditional legacy media like it or not, it is part of the wave of future communication and is, when you step back for a moment and look at it, an extraordinary step toward openness of the entire process.

In certain story circumstances, the E-mail approach can assure that what you need said gets through.  Recently, I was working with a client who is being attacked by a major U.S. news organization for a malfunctioning medical device.  The complexities of this situation were enormous, but the reporter’s questions were extraordinarily simple.  Rather than have the reporter talk to 35 people, 35 times, it seemed much more useful for the reporter to submit questions, and allow those most qualified individual in the company to answer and provide written materials.  A professional communicator connected the medical specialist’s answers with the reporter’s questions to move things along and clarify any issues or circumstances.  And, all in all, it did work rather well.  The article was negative, as expected, but the company’s position was stated clearly.

We discovered early in the process that all of the highly technical questions were being fed to the reporter by the plaintiff’s law firm that had filed the handful of the current legal cases against the company under attack.

Incidentally, this was discovered by accident.  When the company filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request about the topics this reporter was asking about, it discovered that applications for Freedom of Information are public documents.  The company also discovered that the only other applicant for the same information was one of the law firms litigating against it.  Neither the name of the reporter nor his media outlet ever appeared.  The reporter, instead, led the company to believe that his news organization had made the FOIA request.

Cordially,

Jim Lukaszewski