Archive for the ‘journalism’ Category

"Excited" "new" "Canadians"

It seems like just a year or so ago that Netflix found itself in the New York Times apologizing for hiring actors to pretend to be excited about the company entering the Canadian market. And didn’t the US Federal Emergency Management agency have to apologize for pretending that its own employees were journalists, when it faked a news conference? Oh yeah, they did!

But hey, those guys are amateurs. They are certainly not “Canada’s home for hard news and straight talk”, a network that is “unwavering in their commitment to uncover the real stories impacting the lives of everyday working people and their families“.

So when Sun News wants to cover a citizenship ceremony, what ends up happening? The minister’s office sends down the orders to put together a ceremony at the Sun studios (not where Elvis and Jerry Lee hung out, sadly), and when they have trouble putting together enough warm bodies to make the ceremony look legit… the ceremony gets faked, with public servants posing as new Canadians. Here’s the video, in all its cringeworthy glory. Keep in mind as you watch it, that six of these people are not “new Canadians.” They are federal employees.

I’m guessing the two small people on the end aren’t the public servants. They appear to be children, although in this topsy-turvy world who can tell? Here’s the story as reported in the Globe and Mail, obtained through Access to Information requests by the Canadian Press.

The story’s money quote:

When a bureaucrat sent Sun News a list of possible citizenship ceremonies to cover in Ontario, a network employee suggested another scenario. “Let’s do it. We can fake the Oath,” reads an email from a sunmedia.ca email address, the name blacked out of the document.

I suppose I should draw the lessons, although I can’t imagine I have to:

• Journalists shouldn’t create pseudo events or cover them as real events.
• Public servants should have more integrity.
• Hard news and straight talk don’t mix well with “Fake the Oath.”

Let’s all be a bit better than this.

UPDATE:

The political appointee Candice Malcom appeared on Sun News today to apologize for the event. Sun News host Pat Bolland claimed that they knew nothing of the fakery. For what it’s worth, I never would have suggested the strategy followed in the wake of this muffup. Here’s the video:

UPDATE 2: Sun News Network’s David Akin weighs in with his take on the event.

Get enough public relations professionals together, and you’ll inevitably hear the conversation. The one I’m thinking of starts around war stories, then moves to why the corner office folks (or the C-suite, if you’re more modern than I am) don’t listen to us, don’t take us seriously.

You know why? Because we cheapen ourselves. We do things that we shouldn’t, and we suffer the consequences.

Case. In. Point.

In California, water is a big deal. The water 18 million people in southern California use to drink, wash, and take care of their sewage arrives in their houses via a 240-mile pipeline all the way from the Colorado River. So I’d figure that the topic of water there is discussed a bit more than it is here in my city of Ottawa, where a mighty river brings all the water we need to our figurative doorstep.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story yesterday about one of the authorities which manage the water supply for 2 million folks living south of LA, the Central Basin Municipal Water District.  The CBMWD apparently signed a $12,000/month contract with a consulting firm to write and place stories about them on a news site called “News Hawks Review.”  The documents around this were obtained by the Times:

Central Basin News Site Agreements

The selling point? That this would be indexed by Google News as a news outlet. Well, that door’s slammed shut — as of this morning, Google News has de-indexed News Hawks Review. In discussions with the LA Times, Coghlan claimed to have no editorial role with the News Hawks site. However, he was a frequent contributor to the site and was listed as a “reporter” with an affiliated “newshx.com” e-mail address.

Before I start opining, a caveat. I attempted yesterday to contact News Hawks Review, Coghlan (the company seems to not have a web site, which is curious for someone working in social media), and the CBMWD for comment and to ensure that the LA Times coverage was not inaccurate. None of those people responded to phone calls or emails. So if I’m extrapolating from incorrect information, be aware that I tried to verify the facts as reported.

There are two issues here, to my mind. The first is that what was done is, in my opinion, unethical. This was an attempt to create a simulacrum of news coverage without disclosing the financial interests.

I asked PRSA for a comment about this, and here’s what Prof. Deborah Silverman, the chair of their Ethics Board, told me by email:

“This practice is contrary to the Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Ethics, which espouses honesty and accuracy in communication, the free flow of information, and disclosure of information. The Central Basin Municipal Water District’s use of a communications firm to create “news” disguised as media coverage is a serious breach of ethical standards, and the district is operating in a manner that does little to aid the public’s decision-making process.” I’m sad to say that I also e-mailed my professional association, the International Association of Business Communicators, and nobody responded.

Did CBMWD know their communications person or people were engaged in unethical behaviour? Did they endorse it? I don’t know.

Second, this is a ridiculously ineffective use of thousands of dollars. What is the measure of success here? What opinion was changed by these innocuous stories? A youtube video accompanying the story has a whopping 101 views:

Meanwhile the documents posted by the LA Times show the communications folks for CBMWD referring to this as a “unique and innovative utilization of an internet news service to distribute actual news.”

If we as PR professionals can do no better than to use the tools at our disposal in unethical and deceptive and ineffective ways, then why SHOULD the C-suite listen to us? And if the boss thinks this is what we do, why would he or she think of us as anything other than unethical shills?

UPDATE: Thanks to the PRbuilder blog, I discovered two things. First, Ragan’s PR Daily covered this issue, and second, that the LA PRSA chapter has sent a letter to the Times calling this an “egregious breach.” I don’t think the letter’s been published in the Times yet, but the Ragan story has it.

Rob Ford tells the media their questions. Then answers them. (Image from CBC)

Rob Ford is the mayor of Canada’s largest city. The dedicated Flacklife reader may note that I’ve covered Mayor Ford a couple of times here. The most notable post was the one in which I included audio of his interview (to use the term loosely) with CBC Radio’s national show “As It Happens” — an pre-booked interview which was 210 seconds of intense awkwardness.

That was October. This is August. And Rob Ford has worked hard on his media relations skills.

Today, he met with the Premier of Ontario, and afterward, met the Toronto media for a scrum. But this was a scrum with a difference. Listen and learn:

[audio:http://www.translucid.ca/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/robford1.mp3|titles=robford]

This is taking the Donald Rumsfeld school of media relations to an entirely new plateau. News conferences are far more pleasant when in two minutes you can tell the gathered reporeters what they would be asking, answer those questions, and leave.

I don’t know whether to rejoice at the innovation or… jump off a bridge.

Audio from the National Post’s Youtube channel.

I grew up in Cape Breton, where there’s been a long — and far from uniformly successful — history of government agencies trying to support and grow the island’s economy. Back in the late 1980s, when I had gone from an aborted decision to go to graduate school to being a freelance journalist, there were full page ads being taken out in the New York Times offering “Free Money in Cape Breton.” Those ads were successful in bringing in many entrepreneurs, some of whom built legitimate businesses, and others who were less scrupulous.

Currently, economic development is led by a Crown corporation called Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, which works with another entity called the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. ECBC’s CEO is a man named John Lynn, who formerly worked with grocery retailing giant Sobeys. And he appeared on CBC Cape Breton’s Information Morning program as part of their annual “year-in-review” series of interviews. Former co-toiler in the trenches of freelancing Parker Donham pointed to the 15-minute conversation on his blog Contrarian. Here it is :

[audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/cbnsinfomorn_20101220_42870.mp3]

I don’t know the details of the issues Lynn and Sutherland discuss. And I don’t know John Lynn at all. But I have to agree with Parker on his general assessment of Lynn’s media performance. Don’t criticize the media as he did while you’re on the air; you come off as peevish, irritable, and defensive.

Let’s compare and contrast with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, who did NOT want to answer questions from the Today Show’s Matt Lauer about a rumoured takeover of his company by Google (I saw this via Brad Phillips, a/k/a Mr. Media Training):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So you can be cranky, irascible, and somewhat confrontational, or you can be quirky and a little bit off the wall.Which interview came off better?

A Toronto company named EasyDNS has become a potent case study of two things: crisis communications and the limitations of journalism in the Internet age.

EasyDNS provides domain name servers for clients all over the place and is also a domain registrar. Until early December, there wasn’t much reason for an average person to know much about them.

But that was before a misunderstanding catapulted them into the middle of the largest news story of 2010. Someone, somewhere, confused EasyDNS in Toronto with EveryDNS in New Hampshire. EveryDNS had terminated its servicing of Wikileaks. This ticked off the supporters of Wikileaks, and when someone mistakenly identified EasyDNS as the villain, things went wrong.

Valleywag was the first major site to make the mistake, posting “Wikileaks loses its domain” on December 3rd. Within two hours of finding the Valleywag post, EasyDNS has gotten the post corrected and put up  a blog post of their own explaining the situation. After that, the Financial Times(registration required) the  New York Times “The Lede” blog, the Associated Press, and The Guardian all — independently — ran stories perpetuating the idea that a company who until now had no dealings with Wikileaks had struck the organization a blow.

Mark Jeftovic, EasyDNS CEO (Globe and Mail)

And in the meantime, EasyDNS’s team, led by CEO Mark Jeftovic (left), who seems a savvy and smart guy, were eliciting corrections and trying to keep their site and blog up to provide correct information. Aaaaannd… they were approached by Wikileaks to be one of several companies providing DNS services. By December 6, EasyDNS was providing service to Wikileaks.

You can read the full timeline in quite some detail in Timeline of an Epic Fail, the company’s blog post trying to compile all of this information. I’m more interested in teasing out some of the implications.

First: you are always at risk. I’m sure that if Mark Jeftovic at EasyDNS had someone tell him in November that his company would be misidentified as a “villain” in the biggest story of 2010, he’d have chuckled (or “chunkled”, as he writes in his timeline). But he was. One of my rules for crisis communication and response is that even things that are HIGHLY unlikely sometimes happen.

Second: as an organization, you need to be flexible enough to devote ALL your resources to resolving organizational crisis. At one workplace a few years ago, my team and I were running flat-out on a crisis that threatened customer service standards, financial damage, and public embarrassment. A few office doors away, I don’t think the response would have been “Crisis? Is this a crisis?” You need to have your whole organization be aware that a crisis state exists (not necessarily an EMERGENCY) and that action has to be quick, decisive and significant.

Second-and-a-half: Just because you’re totally focused on the crisis, don’t forget you have other business. EasyDNS was sending out e-mails to its customers as well as updating its own blog, as well as keeping feedback channels open on e-mail, twitter, and phone. They seem to have done a good job of keeping their existing customers informed and addressing their concerns.

Third: Be politely persistent with media who get something wrong. It’s shocking and disappointing that EasyDNS were badly served five separate times by media both blog-based and mainstream. It’s certainly made them more cynical about the quality of journalism. Who can blame them? But they did things right. What’s also interesting is that some media noted the error, while others simply corrected it in their online versions.

Fourth: Don’t be shy. EasyDNS was tireless in chasing down rumours and being proactive. Particularly if you’re “in the right” as they were, don’t just hope for things to “blow over”, be quiet, and wait for eyes to pass you over. You’re already part of the story. You might as well be a FULL part of it. I don’t know how “human” the company’s voice was before this, but their tweets, blog posts, and e-mails had a great voice, correcting errors and portraying emotion without coming off like ranters or bullies.

Fifth: recognize that in crisis lies opportunity. Jeftovic was already thinking this way when he wrote his blog post OK, so would we take on Wikileaks at this point? Now is there business benefit to EasyDNS actually doing this? Probably not directly. But my impression of EasyDNS has gone from zero — until yesterday when Jeftovic appeared on CBC Radio’s “Ontario Today” (you can listen to an interview with Jeftovic there) I’d never heard of ‘em — to “this is a company that has its act together and has some principles.” That can’t be bad.

Are there other lessons to be learned from this incident? You tell me. And attention Craig Silverman! There’s likely a whole chapter of “Regret the Error Volume 2″ in this story.

Stephen Duckett offers reporters a cookie (Calgary Herald)

Earlier this week, I wrote about Stephen Duckett’s unfortunate choice to focus more on his cookie than on the reporters chasing him for comment.

A quick summary: while Alberta Health Service, the agency managing that province’s health system, was going through some serious criticism over wait times and other issues, reporters buttonholed its CEO, Stephen Duckett, looking for comment. He wanted them to wait for a media availability that was happening in a short time, and instead of commenting kept walking, repeating “I’m eating my cookie!” in response to persistent questions.

Now, I read via CBC that Duckett is out as president and CEO of Alberta Health Services. The agency has issued a rather terse news release, saying:

AHS announcement

A couple of things to note here:

• the wording is important, particularly these phrases: “will no longer serve” and “both the Board and Dr. Duckett have jointly agreed that now is the time to move on.”
• According to the CBC story, one board member has resigned, while a Calgary Herald story suggests three board members may have resigned. This decision came direct from the province’s health minister, Gene Zwozdesky. The Herald story is somewhat unclear on who told them this, but apparently the agency’s board chair said “I did speak to the minister and his directions were clear.” Sounds like marching orders to me. This may also explain the resignation or resignations..
• I suspect the provincial government needed to be seen to be cleaning house on a messy situation. Keep in mind that a Conservative MLA was kicked out of caucus last week for criticizing health management in the province and that opposition parties are baying like hounds on a fox hunt on this.

Departures at the top of any organization are difficult to manage, and this one appears particularly messy. But to conclude that it’s because of one bad media encounter going viral leads me to two thoughts:

1. If this was because of “Cookiegate”, it’s a bad decision
2. If it wasn’t, there’s likely a great deal that we normal humans don’t — and won’t — ever know.

Don’t judge too quickly. We outsiders aren’t privy to what really is going on within the organization.

Update: The Globe and Mail has its analysis.

As if we didn’t need proof that media training is an ongoing need from Rob Ford’s interview with As it Happens.

Check out how Stephen Duckett, Alberta’s top health-care bureaucrat deals with media:

That’s 134 seconds of pain that could have been avoided by a little less flippancy and a little more diplomacy.

Mitigating this: a full and clear apology and acknowledgement that he muffed it. Good on him for that.

UPDATED: Monday, November 22: The leader of Alberta’s Opposition Liberal party is calling for Duckett’s resignation. Meanwhile, a government backbencher has been expelled from caucus over a rather intemperate e-mail he sent quite broadly last week. Seems like a high-pressure time in Alberta’s health sector.

Today is Maclean’s day in Canada. For six years, I did media relations at a Canadian university, which meant Maclean’s Day was … well, sort of the inverse of a national holiday. It was the day on which you could be assured that all the local media outlets would be calling for comment from the president on the university’s standings in the league tables of Canada’s universities, published by our only national weekly newsmagazine.

This was BIG news in Canada, and some universities used their Maclean’s ranking as part of their marketing and recruitment activities. At the university I worked at, we were much less comfortable doing that. Was that because we were never at the top of our class? I can tell you no, but I don’t know if you’ll believe me or not.

It’s worth noting that at one point, a consortium of universities tried to organize a boycott of Maclean’s, refusing to provide them with data. The goal was to either stop the rankings entirely, or to influence how the data were crunched and presented.

So our standard lines were along the lines of …

• “The Maclean’s rankings are one measure of some aspects of performance of universities.
• We have issues with the way Maclean’s collects and analyzes data.
• We don’t celebrate when we rise or mourn when we fall.
• We will look at the numbers and see if there are things we can focus on to improve the university experience for our students.”

Humans have a natural desire to rank and to rate. Who’s best? Who’s worst? And one truth that is sometimes forgotten in the quest to rank is this: even if everyone’s excellent,  SOMEONE has to be worst. One of the big problems with the Maclean’s rankings (from the universities’ perspective) was that the rankings weren’t accompanied by a score. Now, you don’t know if the point-spread between #1 and #20 was 5 “points” or 50.

Education rankings, whether in Canada or the US, are big business. For Maclean’s, it means an extra 500,000 readers for their Universities issue. I’ve no doubt advertising is charged at premium rates too. Maclean’s also packages the material into an annual guide that sells for $20. In the States, US News and World Report has just announced it’s killing its print editions… except for the university rankings and other special issues.

And the ranking mania has moved to public schools. Here in Ottawa, the local paper publishes a ranking of public schools that is prepared by the Fraser Institute. And in Los Angeles, you can even get rankings for your teacher, thanks to the Los Angeles Times. The Times hired a consultant who crunched achievement test scores, then produced reports on how each teacher and school did on “value-added” — essentially how much each teacher or school improved a child’s achievement test scores. The teacher or the school’s performance was charted like this:

So what’s wrong with this? Shouldn’t people be assessed and evaluated? In Washington, DC, the “Schools Chancellor” fired more than 200 teachers in July based on their effectiveness rankings.  The Times coverage suggests that this is a step up from, or at least an add-on to, traditional teacher assessment methods. This is how the Times describes those methods:

teachers’ performance reviews, which are overwhelmingly based on short, prearranged classroom visits by administrators and other subjective measures.

All of this would be — pardon the pun — academic. But for the fact that some people believe a teacher who received poor rankings committed suicide. There’s no way of knowing what brought the teacher to kill himself.

But I guess the questions that are going around in my mind is this:

• When is it appropriate to identify and assess the performance of people publicly?
• Where does performance assessment end and shaming begin?
• Can ratings and aggregate scores be trusted to make firing decisions?

We PR folk talk a lot about performance measurement, and we do so because we believe in it. But if you can’t temper numbers with humanity, what’s the point?

I was pretty gobsmacked yesterday when I heard Richard Fadden, the head of CSIS (Canada’s intelligence agency), tell CBC’s flagship newscast The National that his agency knew of cabinet ministers in provincial governments and members of municipal governments who were “under the influence” of “foreign governments.”

Fadden didn’t point to a specific country, but dropped a serious hint by mentioning that about half of CSIS’s budget is devoted to China. He also said that his agency had informed the federal government at its highest levels of their concerns — the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Privy Council Office (PCO).

The reverberations haven’t stopped yet — and yesterday’s 5.0 earthquake that was centred near Ottawa was just a physical manifestation of those ripples.

I’ve not worked for CSIS, either as an employee or a consultant, and I’ve never played in the sandbox of federal politics . So I’m looking at this from the outside, as a PR guy.

At some time in the past several weeks, our chief spook does an interview with one of CBC’s most respected journalists (winner of multiple awards, and some say the inspiration for Live Aid) in which he subtly points at China as an influencer of Canada’s political class.

The day before China’s president arrives in Canada for an official visit, CBC airs the interview as part of a package looking at Canada’s intelligence operations. This is also just before the G8 and G20 meetings are held in Ontario, bringing multiple heads of state to Canada for discussions at the highest of levels.

Fadden then retracts some of his comments in a statement:

“Recent comments I made in the context of a special report by the CBC on CSIS have given rise to some concerns about foreign interference in Canada.  The following statement is meant to place those comments in context.

All of the activities of the Service take place within the law and the CSIS Act in particular.  The CSIS Act requires the Service to investigate threats to the security of Canada – including foreign interference.  The Service has been investigating and reporting on such threats for many years.  Foreign interference is a common occurrence in many countries around the world and has been for decades.

I have not apprised the Privy Council Office of the cases I mentioned in the interview on CBC.

At this point, CSIS has not deemed the cases to be of sufficient concern to bring them to the attention of provincial authorities.

There will be no further comments on these operational matters.”

It didn’t take long for a frenzy of reaction to start. Premiers, mayors, intelligence analysts — all were weighing in on what Fadden had said, and then on the retraction.

Calls for Fadden’s resignation began to surface, while others (such as former senior public servant and current columnist Norman Spector and right-wing blogger Adrian McNair) called for heads to roll at CBC for their journalistic practice.

So from a PR perspective, what can we draw from this?

1. It’s pretty rare for CSIS to open itself up to media scrutiny as it did for The National. So I find it hard to believe that this was done without a great deal of forethought. And even if it was given little prep time, given the time lag between the taping of the interview, some negotiation should or could have been undertaken to mitigate the damage of Fadden’s remarks. At the very least, I hope they brought in some outside interview prep; if they didn’t, then that explains a lot in terms of the miscues.
2. Is CBC at fault here? Should they have broadcast the interview at an earlier time? It’s hard for me to agree with that. What’s CBC’s job? To deliver news and to get ratings. They maximized their exposure with this story. Brian Stewart and Peter Mansbridge didn’t make Fadden say what he said. They ran with it. As they should have.
3. If we agree that this was deliberate, then the most important question to my mind is: what does CSIS gain by having this information come out publicly? If we believe it was a mistake, then the question becomes: how could CSIS get this SO WRONG? Is it a case of an agency and a person unused to dealing with media fouling up? Or is Fadden just loose-lipped (NOT a characteristic he’s known for, apparently, or one that’s desirable in a spymaster).

It’s been interesting contrasting this with the McChrystal affair in the United States. In one case, a general known for his outspoken, maverick image stops too far over the line and resigns; in the other, a senior bureaucrat barely known in the media at all speaks frankly, backtracks, and appears to be waiting out the storm.

(Photo credit: Charlotte Morrall, CC licenced on Flickr)

Back in the day, I was a freelance journalist, as well as an editor of a couple of magazines in Halifax. The great thing about Halifax was that even the dorky, callow editor of some city magazines was considered enough of a somebody to get pitched by bars and the like to interview people. I got to talk to Chris Smither and Garnet Rogers, among other people (I nearly died of nerves before meeting Rogers at the Green Bean coffee house, I was such a huge fan). Sadly enough, even now, 17 years after I went back to school and left my editorial job, Southender and Bedford magazines have no online presence beyond this useless flash page. Shame.

So it was a pleasure the other day to revisit those days and do a quick video project for Ottawa Tonite with singer-songwriter Coco Love Alcorn. Coco’s one of my favorite young performers. She combines a huge talent for writing songs that are amalgams of jazz and folk with a truly winning personality (at least to me) that is equal parts sultry and silly. We hosted her at a BobCat concert a while ago, and one of my strong memories is of her scatting her way through her song “Sugar” and, after she finished, having our friend Pam collapse back on the love seat and exclaim “I am SPENT.”

I was pleased with how the video — shot at the Black Sheep Inn and done on my friend Tom’s Flip Mino and edited on iMovie — turned out. And it reminded me of how much fun it was to ask people questions. So I thought I’d put it here too. Enjoy.