Damage Control: Is junior covering your crisis?

Eric Dezenhall and John Weber in Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong have an interesting take on crisis management.

They suggest that every crisis is unique (ho-hum) and sometimes being honest and upfront about what they describe as a "marketplace assault" may not be the right tact to rescue your reputation.

Unfortunately they offer few concrete answers, only hinting at the tactics they employed - some obviously too unscrupulous to document - to save their "fictitious" clients.

One para at the end chapter on future crisis management trends, however, caught my attention:

"Is Junior covering your crisis?

The news media of the future will be characterized by too few reporters with too little training chasing too many stories. And more and more businesses will be burned in the process. Why? Because money -- not public service journalism -- is king in newsrooms today. It started when big companies such as General Electric, Disney, and Time Warner bought NBC, ABC, and CNN, respectively, and turned up the pressure to transform news reporting into a profit-making enterprise. Once considered to be treasured (and pampered) jewels in the corporate portfolio, news executives were ordered to make a buck for the company like everyone else. Concurrently, massive changes in consumer lifestyles and technology via the Internet were swiftly reshaping how people got their news. As a result, network TV audiences, as well as daily newspaper readership, are shrinking rapidly. Fewer viewers and readers mean less advertising revenues. Less revenue means less money to pay experienced, generally older reporters adn to cover the costs of dispatching news crews. Fewer, younger, and less experienced reporters, and less money available to thoroughly research stories, will increasingly result in stories that are quickly and poorly reported and done primarily because they are cheap, easy to do, and visual. And this will create enormous opportunities for mischief, misrepresentation, and malfeasance because someone has the video and a story too expensive and too time-consuming to check out."

MORE.