Crisis Communications

Amid the worst shooting on a U.S. military base in history, the Pentagon, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and FBI face the challenge of balancing a public hungry for up to the minute news with making sure they always have 100% correct information.

This was the first major news event in which media organizations used Twitter lists to get the news out. The Austin American-Statesman was among the first to set up a list.

PRNewser spoke this morning with Dallas Lawrence, Chair of Social and Digital Media Practice for Levick Strategic Communications. Lawrence previously served as director of the Office of Community Relations and Public Liaison for the United States Department of Defense and also as spokesperson for Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

We asked Lawrence what the chain of communication looks like internally in a crisis situation such as Fort Hood, now that multiple government agencies are involved. Based on his past experience, Lawrence said, "by now, you're probably seeing communications fully coordinated by the Pentagon."

In terms of communications tactics, Lawrence stressed that accuracy is key. "While you need to calibrate that response, you also need to get it right. You can't fall victim to what some of the cable networks have fallen victim to, which is putting first story you hear you out there and then finding out it's wrong. The military has found a very good balance between rapid response but also making sure they get it correct," he said.

If anything, the military is best organization to handle crisis, said Lawrence. "One of the benefits the military has is having professional public affairs staff on every base. Some organizations may experience a crisis for first time, and don't have people that have crisis reflexes. Every person in public affairs is an enlisted person that has experienced crises."

It's been a rough fall for Condé Nast. The media powerhouse shuttered several titles, laid off hundreds of employees and reported sharp decline in ad revenue.

Now, the company is getting PR help. CEO Charles Townsend and Chairman S.I. Newhouse, Jr. have hired crisis manager and media coach Michael Sheehan. The executives were reluctant to make the hire, but did so after Lucky publisher Gina Sanders urged them to, reports the Post's Keith Kelly. Sanders is married to Condé "heir apparent" Steven Newhouse and worked with Sheehan when she was at Teen Vogue.

Sheehan has experience in politics and finance having counseled Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, AIG during last year's crisis, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and JP Morgan. He has also served as speech coach at every Democratic convention since 1988.

The Pentagon canceled its contract with the Rendon Group today, a week after Stars & Stripes first reported the firm's controversial journalist profiling conducted for the military. An email from Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, a senior communicator in Afghanistan noted that the decision was his alone, and that the issue had become a distraction.

The Defense Department tried to downplay the timeline, and the nature of the profiles, till they started surfacing online. The DoD also denied that journalists were refused embed spots because of them. Though on Friday, a public affairs officer with the 101st Airborne Division said he had used the conclusions contained in Rendon profiles in part to reject at least two journalists’ applications for embeds.

Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, military spokesperson for U.S. forces in Afghanistan said the practice of denying reporters embed positions is "flat out incorrect," on NPR's On the Media today. You can listen to the interview here:

Related: Journalist Obtains His Own "Rendon Report"

Since the Stars & Stripes article on Monday about the Rendon Group's evaluation of potential war embeds, there has been some back-and-forth about when the profiling was conducted, and for what purpose.

The denials about timeline and evaluation of slant are debunked now that war reporter PJ Tobia has published a copy of his own Rendon report on True/Slant. In it, Tobia's Afghanistan reportage is characterized as "neutral to positive" while older work, including "Afghaniscrewed: How I Spent My Fall Vacation" for the Village Voice was negative-to-neutral. Tobia's source at Rendon told him that those with a "negative" grade are more likely to a platoon that guards sandbags.

Journalist groups including the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Military Reporters and Editors association and the International Federations of Journalist have expressed deep concern about the profiling and barring of writers for the tone and chosen topics of their previous work.

The Rendon Group drew a lot of attention to itself in the runup to the Iraq war in 2003, for its role in creating the Iraqi National Congress who in turn fed the U.S. false information about WMDs. The CIA-funed INC was in fact, named by John Rendon in the 1990s after the first gulf war.

Evaluating and advising on journalists looking to take on an embed assignment is part of Rendon's $1.5 million contract with the Department of Defense. The Rendon pie chart obtained by Stars & Stripes was clearly part of their media analysis offering. The firm also boasts something called the "Early Warning Radar" to ID the bad stuff before it happens.

[via FishbowlLA]

Sunshine, Sachs & Associates picked up some high profile crisis PR work today, adding former Merrill Lynch chief executive John Thain to their client roster.

S&S president Ken Sunshine wouldn't say much to PRWeek's Tonya Garcia: "I will confirm that we're representing Mr. Thain, but that's as far as I'll go," Sunshine said. "We take great pride in our discretion."

If anything, the agency website jibes with that statement.

UPDATE: Bloomberg has more: "Before hiring Sunshine Sachs, Thain approached public relations firm Rubenstein Associates."

(Tibet supporters, one step ahead of The Torch)

This is the Spring of big PR agency work getting exposed by the mainstream media, not ideal for those handling entire countries.

Mark Penn's very public departure from Clinton campaign was over conflicts of interest involving Burson-Marsteller's work with Columbia. The article put the contract at about $300,000 for the year.

Though Hill & Knowlton's contract, along with whichever agency China hires per their RFP to do damage control will be far greater than Burson's Columbia take, the Army of Davids rule applies to the number of pro-Tibet groups banding together draw publicity to the conflict over the region, according to The New York Times this morning.

According to the article, China hired Weber Shandwick after losing the Olympic bid back in 1993. Since then, the Army of Davids has just as many channels of communication as Goliath. It's an oversimplification of a complicated news cycle.

Look at the tactics in the article:

"To get that word out, the International Tibet Support Network, a London-based group that coordinates pro-Tibet organizations, has been sending press-focused bulletins to its 153 member organizations."

"Every other month, Students for a Free Tibet holds conferences for members of pro-Tibet groups, where media training is a focus. The sessions cover everything from giving a good sound bite to answering reporters’ questions artfully."

Combined with more guerrilla methods:

"With an eye toward demonstrations that will get coverage, S.F.T. also holds weeklong “action camps" four times a year. Attendees learn to organize protests and deal with the police, and receive training in attention-getting activities like rappelling and guerrilla street theater."

For the millions of people who log-in to NYTimes.com every day, yesterday brought one of the biggest exclusives the paper has secured in a long time: an interview with alleged call girl Ashley Alexandra Dupre, aka "Kristen," who brought down NY governor Eliot Spitzer.

PRNewser will admit that it threw us for a bit of a loop to see the Times linking directly to her Myspace page. If anything, Ashley doesn't seem to mind the attention. She hasn't taken down the page, which as of the time of this post, has received over 4 million views.

Peter Himler at the Flack is already plotting Ms. Dupre's PR strategy:

You can milk this one, baby. Just play it coy with ET, Extra, Access, GMA, Today and all the others when they come calling this week. Don't overextend yourself. Don't take the first offer from People or US Weekly for the real inside scoop, or Playboy for the outside scoop. Be choosy. Think in the long-term. You don't want to flame out too soon. A measured media strategy is the ticket.

Ms. Dupre certainly has the country's attention. What she does with it is anyone's guess.

FishbowlDC reports that the Facebook page "Support David Shuster: Tell MSNBC He's the Best" was not "encouraged or sanctioned" by the recently suspended MSNBC anchor.

Whether it can be linked to him or not, a former Fox News Channel PR staffer has emailed PRNewser to say this would never fly over at Mr. Murdoch's media empire. According to the former staffer:

At Fox, no one could do anything publicly without Fox's PR department's consent. This mostly applied to interviews-- if an on-air talent got a call for an interview, they'd have to OK with the PR department first. A Facebook page is a pretty blatant way to promote yourself-- catch the title?

Here at PRNewser, we think Shuster would have a few more tactful ways of saving his job, which insiders tell us isn't in jeopardy, than creating a Facebook page.

Meanwhile, TVNewser is covering the story non-stop.

If anyone beats us to a PR Week scoop, I guess we can accept that it be Hamilton Nolan. I mean, he did used to work there. Does he take glee in reporting this item for Gawker.com?

PRWeek spends a lot of time telling publicists how to do their jobs. Embarrassing, then, that last week the magazine bombarded subscribers with unwanted emails. Bonus feature: the message included the names and passwords of other subscribers! All that time the staff spends writing features about crisis communications is coming in handy now.

For the official response from PR Week Editor-in-Chief Julia Hood, click here.

(image cred)

Mark Hopkins at Mashable compares some recent new media PR crisis' and how different brands (Myspace, Digg and Target) responded. We're guessing you can figure out who fared better:

What is really going to separate the men from the boys, so to speak, is how companies react, and how engaged the brains company of spokespersons are when it comes to filtering what is a potential incident, and what is simply link-bait.

I think we can all agree that Target has an intensely stupid position. While the issue may be minor, it still warrants comment, or at least a "we'll get back to you," not a "you're a second class journalist, and we don't take kindly to your type around here" response.

The potential incident vs. link-bait point is key in this discussion. As PR pros, it is our job to be able to think on the fly and match a proper response to the particular issue at hand.