Tag: Rupert Murdoch

The NI guide to crisis communications in 5 easy steps

In years to come the News International phone hacking saga will be taught on PR courses as a textbook case of how not to handle a PR crisis.  Here’s why:

1.  Caught in a crisis the response should  be quick, consistent and open.  NI let the story about hacking rumble on for months, claiming all the while that it was a problem with one rogue operator.  Sticking to an incomplete story is a guarantee of greater problems down the line when the full story comes out.  Which it will.  ‘Fess up straight away if you’re in the wrong, it gives you some control over the story if it isn’t dribbling out over a long period as new allegations arise.  Most experts agree that  an attempted cover up can cause bigger headaches than the original sin.

2. If you’re in the wrong, apologise – fully and sincerely, and start talking about what changes you’re going to make to ensure that this never happens again. Presumably under the influence of their new PR company, NI are now set to run full-page ads in the papers apologising for what’s happening.  Rebekah Brooks’ initial statement declaring that it was inconceivable that she knew about hacking Milly Dowler’s phone fell several miles short of what was required.

Until the new PRs got to work, there hadn’t been much in the way of apology to the victims from anyone at NI.  Today’s meeting between Rupert Murdoch and Milly Dowler’s family may be a first step to recognising that this is a tactical mistake (as well as being morally indefensible…)

3. A bit of humility doesn’t hurt.  James Murdoch’s refusal to appear before the  Select Committee because the date was inconvenient was cringeworthy. Worse was Rupert’s apparent insistence to the Wall St Journal that the company had been handling the issue extremely well.

4.  Think about the information that everyone involved will need.  This includes regulators, customers, investors, suppliers, victims  and – a crucial group that NI has rather ignored – your own staff.  Former News of the World staff, sacked a week before Rebekah Brooks felt compelled to go, may feel this element of the crisis could have been better handled…

and most importantly

5. You need to be prepared.  NI don’t seem to have had a Head of Comms working on this until this January. so no wonder their responses have been flat-footed.  It’s worth:

  • Having a regular health check of the business to see where problems might arise and do scenario planning to see how you’d cope if the worst happened
  • Having a  team in place to manage a crisis, with people who are sufficiently senior to be able to take quick decisions without having to refer to managers
  • Identifying a media-trained spokesperson to deal with enquiries to ensure a consistent message gets through
  • Remembering the power of the non-traditional media.  Think how you’d deal with Twitter or Facebook in full flow…
  • Practising.  Running the odd “pretend crisis” session will test the systems you’ve put in place and make sure they’re robust.

Foopball, foopball, ra, ra, ra

In the wake of the coverage of Andy Gray/Richard Keys, I had  a blog post floating round my head yesterday about the  crushing ubiquity of football and the culture that surrounds it.    Had I got round to writing it,  it would have made some of the points made by Catherine Bennett  in her piece for today’s Observer Forget getting rid of sexism in sport.  Let’s get rid of sport:  an end to the blokey horror if it all, say I, to the absolute  inescapableness of it, to the obscenity of the money (pretty much any story in the Observer’s Said and Done column most weeks is enough to make you want to ban the game completely), to the new social necessity of following a team.

I blame Rupert Murdoch, for enabling the Topsy-ish growth of the Premier League, and Nick Hornby , whose   Fever Pitch made it socially acceptable for football to spread beyond the back pages, wheedling its way into every part of daily life like honey fungus.

Bennett makes another good point in her piece about the pervasiveness of sports chatter in the media: the low percentage of women and girls who enjoy the competitive nature of team games:

the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation finds that 36% of women “enjoy the competitiveness of sport”, as opposed to 61% of men. Why, then… should the sport-averse be subjected to extended sessions of compulsory sport, as if they were still in class, forced out into the mud to contemplate the skills of the school elite?

Good point.  And why, if this is the case, are the government so keen to promote competitive sport in schools at the same time as they cut School Sports Partnerships to the detriment of sports that girls might actually enjoy?  I played lots of competitive sport at school – netball, hockey, rounders for the school, a county trial for hockey.  All at the point of my PE teacher’s gun.  I hated every minute and gave up sport as soon as I could, only to rediscover the pleasures of exercise years later when – by then pretty unfit – I joined a gym.

Professional sport is entertaining enough to watch,  but it isn’t important.  I do  not feel it will be a national disgrace if “our medal tally” is worse at the London Olympics than it was in Beijing.  I do not care that ‘we’ are unlikely to win the World Cup again in my lifetime.  I was delighted about the Ashes, but no-one would have died if England had lost.  Sport, like most other things in life, is more fun to do yourself than watch someone else do.   Can we get a bit of perspective back please?

Reasons to be cheerful 1-2-3

1.  We are too skint to have been away over Easter and so are not now stranded with two children and caffeine poisoning at a foreign airport, ferry port, Eurostar terminal or beach-head 

2.  Not only does Cleggmania put a spanner in the Tories’ works (just feel the outrage fizzing off the Mail’s presses – someone was stupid enough to let David Cameron prove that that he’s second rate.  Heads must roll!)  But just as satisfying,  it could also really upset Rupert Murdoch 

3.  Spring is sprung, the grass is ris, and you can hear the birds in the back garden

Citizen Journalists 1 – Newspapers 0?

Rupert Murdoch says that the internet won’t mean the death of newspapers.

On the Huffington Post today, Arianna H says that she is continuing with the cohort of citizen journalists who so succesfully provided content for the “Off the bus” coverage of the US election.  In fact she is expanding their numbers, believing they can make a significant contribution to the site’s editorial process.

I wouldn’t want to bet against either of them, but can they both be right?

The Murdoch argument is that newspapers are failing not because of inroads made by online news sources, but because editors aren’t giving their readers what they want – Charles Warner (writing on HuffPo) has already described that as ” like blaming horses for the decline in the sale of buggy whips because of the invention of the automobile.” So I guess we know where he stands…