In the meantime, the editor of the campus newspaper is reaping huge accolades for scooping local and national media. Read about it at www.editorandpublisher.com.

Will

Thanks, Will.

Good post, but may I ask: Why are you destroying your brain with this 24 hour news?

Michael, it's a good question. I've thought a lot about this. The most honest answer I can come up with: There's something incredibly reassuring about watching news that's so shallow, conventional and sentimental in its coverage. As long as I'm on my couch busily and effortlessly critiquing the corporate media, I don't have to think about the actual stories themselves, or the real problems--mine, others' or everybody's.

Happy?

Too early to cast too many stones yet, if only out of respect for the Virginia Tech victims and their families and friends (of whom there are many in my hometown of Richmond, Va.).

But I have to disagree with you, David. While life does come at us fast, and it's impossible to plan for every possible scenario, a good crisis plan anticipates the worst that could happen and ensures the procedures, processes, vehicles and people are in place to at least minimize the damage in times of crisis. Many organizations have benefited from crisis plans -- of which crisis communication is a critical component -- and I expect when all of the facts come out about how this situation was handled, we'll find a lot could have been done to minimize the extent of the damage that was done by the gunman at Virginia Tech.

Well, maybe you're right, Robert. But it may also turn out in this case that they had a crisis plan but that good old human judgment failed to set the plan in motion, because the humans thought/hoped they had an isolated situation not worth shutting the campus down over.

I'm not arguing against making crisis plans. (Note I said *nearly" an oxymoron.) I'm just saying the best-laid crisis plans ....

Yup, crisis communications planning can be crucial. In fact, it may have been responsible for thrusting Rudy Giuliani into national prominence. Few people know this, but everything hizzoner said following the 9/11 attack was written for him by his crisis communications team in 1993 following the first World Trade Center attack. How many people died? "More than any of us can bear," the now-famous answer, was written eight years earlier.

Back to the Virginia Tech shootings, I am increasingly annoyed at the journalists who try (by the tone of their questions) to blame everyone but the shooter for the deaths. He was a 23-year old man who killed a bunch of people. He was an adult who was responsible for his own actions -- no need to second-guess who did what right or wrong other than the criminal himself.

Will

Wow, Will. I didn't know that about Giuliani. You got a source on that?

Bravo Will!

This has always driven me just nuts! Unfortunately, it seems to be yet another symptom of the "new" code of behaviour that somehow, conveniently, somebody else is virtually ALWAYS responsible for your bad choices.

While I won't argue that having a crisis plan which prepares for the many awful scenarios your organization could possibly face is important, I wish the media would refrain from falsely sensationalizing tragedy. I can never decide if they do it strictly for the ratings, or if they just have to fill time but either way, I usually don't watch more than the initial "basics" of stories like this because it makes me too mad.

Kristen

David, my source for that was an in-residence course I took last year on crisis and risk communications by Guild Communications (www.guildcommunications.com). Not sure if you'll find documentation on the web site -- it was mainly the instructor's lecture. His name was Terry Flynn.

Will

Thanks, Will.

Kristen, I agree. By the time these TV news organizations get through with a story they have molded it heavy-handedly infused it with sentimentality (is that the Masters' music CNN is playing over the VT coverage?) and then sucked those phony sentiments dry.

By the end of the process--okay, by day two--it doesn't feel the slightest bit real. It seems to our consciousness as if the reports invented the story out of thin air for their own purposes, to make you pay attention while "you're in the Situation Room."

No wonder we hate the media. They're killing kids on college campuses for the sake of a story!

The media are killing kids on college campuses for the sake of a story???? That's a bit strong, isn't it?

I'm continuously disgusted by how the news media glom onto these stories and "suck them dry," as David put it so well. But I've gotten to the point of just ignoring it because otherwise I'll spend all my passion on being angry at the news media, rather than trying to extract some learning out of what happened, which is a better use of time.

And I completely agree that no one but the gunman can be blamed for what happened. But if other college campuses can learn from what happened at VT, and if other organizations can be better prepared to communicate with their constituents during a similar crisis, then the thoughtful and respectful examination of what went wrong is worth being criticized over.

I meant that the cable news creeps so make these stories fit into their sentimental, cookie-cutter themes that it sometimes FEELS like they're making the stories for their own purposes.

I don't actually believe CNN is killing kids, no. But I do believe it is killing me.

Anybody remember the good ole days before 24/7 cablecasting of news? Back then, the three major broadcast networks would break into their "regularly scheduled programs" (soap operas) and stay on the air for an hour or two bringing us up to date on what they had at the moment. They would close that broadcast with "watch tonight's news for more..." and "we now return you to our regularly scheduled program (soap opera)."

Now, does anybody want to hear my rant about weather reporting?

Will

And the thing is, today's 24-hour news has become the soap opera itself. Amazing, isn't it?

Might as well, Will.

Just got this, from O'Dwyer's Newsletter publisher Jack O'Dwyer:

Public Relations:

Refusal of Authorities to Face and

Reveal Facts Cost 30 Lives

by Jack O’Dwyer; odwyerpr.com; 4/18/07; April & showers are user/pass to view images. Return unsubscribe if so desired.

The murder of two students at Virginia Tech April 16 should have been broadcast over loudspeakers and put on the campus radio right after the discovery of the murders at 7:15 a.m. Instead, campus police revealed at 9:26 a.m. that a “shooting incident” had “occurred.”

BUREAUCRATIC DOUBLETALK COST LIVES

The failure of Virginia Tech cops immediately to put out a bulletin that two students had been murdered and the assailant was still on the loose resulted in the loss of 31 more lives (including that of the shooter).

The culprit here is official reticence to face unpalatable facts. PR’s job is to provide such facts. But it cannot perform better than the people it works for.

Rage over this delay now accompanies the enormous burden of grief being shouldered by the families of the victims, the student body and faculty of Virginia Tech, and the entire nation.

Explanations by authorities that it was felt the murders was an isolated “domestic” incident and that the assailant had left the campus were no more reasonable than the theory that the assailant was still loose on the campus and might kill others.

Available to police and school administrators was the campus radio station, a loudspeaker system, e-mails to student dorms, the local media and other forms of communication.

Official explanations for the failure to announce the news, citing the impossibility of closing down the entire campus, are adding fuel to this fire.

In the Tylenol murders, police and firefighters roamed the streets of Chicago suburbs with bullhorns warning people not to take drugs of any kind. They no doubt saved many lives since more than 50 poisoned capsules were later found. They were the real heros in the Tylenol poisonings.

Everyone on campus had a right to know shortly after 7:15 a.m. that there had been two murders in one of the dorms. Whether classes were to be held as usual is another matter. Students and faculty at least would have been on guard.

Withholding bad news, which is an automatic reaction among those in authority, was the culprit here. Information is power and apparently those in power often don’t want to give it up. They’re also afraid of information, afraid of the effects it might have.

Titanic Was Classic Case

The classic case is the sinking of the Titanic. Officials knew two hours before the ship sank that it was doomed. They did not immediately convey this to the entire ship.

First message should have been that the ship was going down and the second that there were at least 1,000 more passengers than there was room for them in the lifeboats.

Passengers included many artisans who could have been given access to the carpentry and machine shops of the ship so they could tear up decks, lash tables together and do whatever else they could to avoid freezing to death in the Atlantic.

The huge trunks holding the possessions of the rich could have been emptied and used as boats had the truth about the Titanic been told instantly.

Key information belongs to a specific public and sometimes to the entire public. Withholding this information, a practice that has become identified with the PR industry, can have disastrous effects.

PR speaks so often of its role in creating “strategy” these days that it forgets its original promise to the public–the release of accurate information and “most cheerfully” answering questions of newspeople.

That was the announced goal of Ivy Lee in 1907.

What a crock of shit. As predicted, this guy wants to blame everyone but the shooter. How on earth can O'Dwyer get it so wrong? Everybody on the planet but Jack O'Dwyer knows who the culprit is. Holy cow!

Will

Will, are you saying the captain of the Titanic isn't respnosible for what happened at Virginia Tech?

Everybody on the planet except Jack O'Dwyer and Brian Kilgore know who the culprit is. From BAK's Report:

>

Apparently, Kilgore's idea of crisis communication planning is to roam the halls of academia looking for chained doors.

Come on. Our profession has more to offer than this!!!

He was?

Well, now's as good a time as any for my weather rant. How long does it take to tell me the temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, whether it's raining and what it's going to be like tomorrow? About 15 seconds. Oh, and if I'm a farmer I might want to know if it's going to frost tonight. Two more seconds. And I don't need a meteorologist to tell me all that. I don't need Weather 101 every night.

I'll leave it at that -- no need to get into how that information was once upon a time delivered by a hot bimbo with with short skirt and cleavage who had only a first name followed by "The Weather Girl."

Will

If you listened to The Weather Stooge, Will, you'd know that the frost doesn't occur until the morning, when the sun comes up.

My God, are you ignorant about the weather.

Somehow BAK's Report got cut. Let me try again:

Tuesday, April 17, 2007, 2007
PR Responsibilities before and
during a crisis

As I watched the news yesterday and read web sites and newspapers today, I wondered, as oft I do, what the role of PR was, in this case at the Virginia Tech tragedy.

In the CNN coverage I saw, we were told the name of the town where the school is, but not much more. No maps, no good graphics of the campus, no info on the student and staff population... just the same cell phone photos over and over again. And no one from the school standing up on its behalf, and explaining what it knew.

But this morning, the disgust grew. And sloppy reporting may be to blame here, and maybe I'm unfair. But I don't think so.

Cops could not get into buildings because doors were chained shut. I'm betting those were fire doors with crash bars, designed for fast exists in emergencies. And I'm betting they were not chained shut for the first time yesterday morning, but had been for days, weeks, months. And I bet PR people walked by them over and over and did not go to the campus security office screaming bloody murder.

If they were chained shut, and if they were fire doors with crash bars... the president of that school should be taken away in handcuffs in front of the international media. And then every good journalist is the USA should be asking the PR people why they had not taken steps to prevent "chained closed" from being words that could be printed all around the world.

Our job at PR people is to look for trouble, WELL IN ADVANCE -- and prevent it from happening.

Once upon a time, David, I knew enough about the weather to watch the frost come up in the morning after a long night of drinking and cavorting. No wait -- that was the sun.

Will

I really hope this is the last thing I have to say on this subject, but did anyone catch NBC's Brian Williams on MSNBC last night, sharing the gunman's "multimedia manifesto" as Williams kept calling it, and specifying twice that there is "no joy" in the fact that NBC got the package and got to share it with the audience?

What a clown: For a journalist, OF COURSE there is joy in getting the exclusive, just as surely as there's jealousy at CBS and ABC and CNN.

Much more annoying was the reaction of every anchor and reporter on all the networks, shaking their heads at the killer's message, as if he were speaking in Swahili, as if they just couldn't understand a word he was saying. Do we want to learn something from this or not?

Yes, this guy is nuts; yes, it's beyond indefensible to kill people randomly because you're mad at "society."

But we don't learn by shaking our heads. We learn by listening, and how far off WAS the kid when he was talking about boozy, snobbish, hedonistic students with trust-fund and no sense of their own good luck? (As opposed to the sainted, virginal victims this story has turned the Virgina Tech students into.)

If I were covering this story, I'd beg my editor/producer to let me dig into this guy's upbringing (why haven't the news people told us anything about his parents?) and his cultural and social experience, trying to build as rational an explanation BEYOND his obvious mental illness that I possibly could.

As an early professor of mine said while we were reading "Death of a Salesman," "If you decide Willy Loman is simply insane, the story's not interesting. It's his sanity you should focus on."

But no: These so-called reporters want to shake their heads, write off this gunman's pain as well as his actions, and wait for the inevitable next "random" school shooting, so they can shake their heads in ignorance again.

That's because shaking their heads and wrapping the story up in a bow of the killer's insanity is easier than what you suggest, David. Since when are most TV journalists (I said most, not all) willing to do any hard work?

It's laziness, all right. Emotional and intellectual laziness, mostly.

Yes, the shooter bears nearly all of the blame for this incredibly sad story. Yes, in retrospect, more could have been done to alert the VT students. Yes, in all likelihood, something like this will happen again. But one thing nobody has mentioned here as a contributing factor is how ridiculously easy it is for ANYONE to acquire guns in this country. It's harder to get a driver's license ... or even a freakin' IABC membership. Until we do something about that, we can be certain we'll see more of these horrible events transpire.
Greg

Greg, surely you didn't mean to slip "nearly" into that first sentence. Nobody else pulled the trigger.

Will

Check this out, folks; hat tip to John Wagner for pointing out today's WORST PR PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!

http://www.prnewswire.com/news/index_mail.shtml?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/04-18-2007/0004568071&EDATE=

Holy cow.

Hopefully, the process of natural selection will send these worms back to the rocks under which they should have remained.

No wonder our profession has such a difficult time with credibility.

An interesting story on the ethics of marketing after the Va Tech tragedy:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18203281/site/newsweek/

Good post.

Our prayers also for those who lost their lives...and all those impacted by this tragedy.

I agree with our point on communicators face flak in a crisis situation. But does it also not highlight the perception of communicators as saviors? Are we?

Thanks for that lin, Robert.

Potenital saviors, yes, Aniisu. Unsung, of course, through history (excepting that great live blogger Paul Revere). Had the VT communicators somehow gotten a lock-down message out in time and effectively, the story of the first two murders would barely have made cable news and the communicator would have had a war story for a spouse.

But you make a good point: Communicators can be saviors.

I put "nearly" in there on purpose, Will. I think there's some portion of responsibility to be laid at the feet of a society that can't keep a person who has been judged a potential danger to himself and others from buying all the handguns and ammo he wants. I saw some stat recently about the relative number of shooting deaths a year between England (which has sensible gun control) and the U.S., and it's shocking. England's in the low three figures, while we have easily 100 times more.
Greg

Sorry, Gregg. Your argument falls on deaf ears. A 23-year-old adult man killed 32 people. Only one shooter pulled the trigger. Any other argument as to responsibility is pure bullshit.

Will