LEMONS INTO LEMONADE: Can there really be such a thing as media crisis insurance?

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

“I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity,” said John D. Rockefeller, a man who lived through opportunities and disasters aplenty. 

But Rockefeller (at right, in 1885) is silent on a natural follow-up question.  Disasters, by their nature, are easy to recognize.  But just how do you identify an opportunity?  

AIG thinks it sees one. The insurance giant, still bearing the scars of a 2008 disaster largely of its own making, offered a new product this week designed to provide a modicum of protection against the sort of existential media crisis that it suffered.  (Read more about it here.) 

The blogosphere saw an opportunity of its own, lighting up like a pinball machine.  “Sounds like a scam,” chortled one wag.  “I’d like to sell you some cloud insurance,” sniffed another. 

And my favorite post: “I am going to start selling ‘Embarrassment Insurance.’”  Hey, please text me when THAT is for sale.

With all its flaws, a beauty of the free market is its self-correcting nature.  There is a market for everything, until there isn’t. Build a better mousetrap that meets a genuine need, get the word out, and you’re positioned for success.  But fail to meet a need – or if the need itself disappears – and you’ll soon fail to meet payroll. 

This attempt to provide insurance for the cost of crisis communications deserves an A for originality.  But it is flawed – and not just for the widely accepted reason that media relations is an inexact science. 

A comparison with garden-variety auto insurance, with which most of us are familiar, reveals at least three significant challenges:  

1. When you have a car wreck, the best insurance companies will not tell you what tow operator to use, or what body shop must perform the repairs.  They leave that to your judgment, and perhaps set a cap on the reimbursable cost.   Here, you are being directed to specialists from just two companies.  They are both large and reputable firms.  But aren’t you, and not your insurer, in the best position to decide what sort of help you should enlist?
2. When your car is repaired, your insurance company typically signs off on the job. It certifies, in effect, that the damage was repaired, and that the vehicle is roadworthy again.  How can any such certification ever be possible in a media crisis?   And if it isn’t, just what’s the point of the insurance?
3. Public relations is (and ought to be) a free discipline, since the speech in which it deals is largely protected by the First Amendment.  Insurance, on the other hand, is a highly regulated industry.  And when insurers pay, they have a say – just as they do now in how many hours it should take your local body shop to replace a bumper.  Is the PR world ready to accept that?

The market, as it does for every product, will decide the future of AIG’s initiative.  Yet, for all its shortcomings, it is probably an opportunity - just the first of many in this area.  Look for competitors to develop versions of their own. 

And there may be an unintended side benefit.  The insurance industry’s core specialty, after all, is risk assessment.  If legions of risk evaluators are unleashed into the arena of reputation management, certain companies will inevitably be flagged as “bad reputational risks” based on their behavior - just as they are now flagged as bad credit risks.  (Wouldn’t that present a media crisis all its own?)

Anyway, three cheers for that.  Encouraging good behavior – rather than influencing perception of bad behavior – has always been the holy grail of the best PR people.  In AIG, they may just have found the unlikeliest of allies.

WHERE ARE THE NO'S OF YESTERYEAR? Why an editor’s pushback remains critical in the Internet Age

by Steve Dunlop

In 1992, when I was the newly-installed president of the New York Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, I had the privilege of introducing Don Hewitt as the speaker at our Awards Dinner.  

It was my first encounter with Hewitt.  I felt awkward and on display sitting alongside this broadcasting legend on the dais, in front of a large and important audience.  I tried to engage him with some chit-chat.  Big mistake.

“Don was utterly incapable of small talk,” CBS correspondent Morley Safer would say years later at a memorial service for Hewitt, the pioneering television producer and creator of 60 Minutes, who died in 2009. 

And his reputation as an editor was ruthless.  In Safer’s words:  “Don liked to boast that he could cut the Lord’s Prayer in half and make it better.”

Failing miserably at said small talk, I innocently asked Hewitt if he would have a look at my introduction to him.

60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt (l) with Steve Dunlop at the Deadline Club Awards in New York, 1992. 

No sooner had I produced three pages of remarks from my inside jacket pocket than Hewitt conveyed exactly what he thought - with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Too long,” he told me, loudly enough for everyone on the dais to hear.   “You gotta cut it down.  Way down.” 

Too long?  He hadn’t even read it. 

Much has changed since Don Hewitt gave me a wakeup call about brevity.   Television was supposed to spell the end of the written word.  Instead, we find ourselves in an age where more people can reach more people with more sentences than at any time in history. 

But in this brave, twittering world, where talk is cheap and words are cheaper, it seems no one thinks he needs an editor. 

Editing is so 20th century - so obsolete, you may say.  I can always change something online after I’ve posted it, you rationalize.  (Really?  Ask Anthony Weiner about that one.) 

Editors cost money.  Who has the budget to be second-guessed?  They cost time, too.  Who wants to short-circuit the constant ebb and flow of words and ideas online?  If I don’t jump on this thought before someone else does, the theory goes, it will cost me dearly in hits.

But if more people have access to your thoughts and words than ever before, wouldn’t you want more than ever to get them right? 

When I was the morning news editor at New York’s WOR Radio, another experienced newsman, Reg Laite (now Dunlop Media’s senior trainer), made the case for the existence of editors.  While reporters may strive to be objective within their own stories, Laite told me, reporters cannot be objective about their own stories.  A story is like a baby.  Its parents develop an immutable sense of pride. And that is to be expected, precisely because they are invested in having created it. 

They are unable to stand back and see the story’s holes, its flaws, its inconsistencies.  But that is precisely what a good editor does.   An editor’s job is to be critical, to ensure balance, to cut.   And when in doubt about accuracy, to send it back. 

When it comes to self-editing, Abraham Lincoln’s oft-quoted observation about lawyers comes to mind.  “He who represents himself,” Lincoln is reputed to have said, “has a fool for a client.”

So I did cut my introductory remarks for Don Hewitt down.  Way down, as he suggested – on the back of a paper napkin.   I read my scribbled version to the big man, and asked for his feedback. 

“On See It Now,” I wrote, “he helped determine what television news could become.  On 60 Minutes, he continues to define what it is.  Ladies and gentlemen, Don Hewitt.” 

“That’s good,” Hewitt said, rewarding me with a half smile.  “Go with it.” 

Coming from him, that was high praise. 

SOME THINGS DON'T CHANGE

​Could you ever imagine James Earl Jones intoning, "Trust Twitter?"

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Change is like the weather.  Everyone talks about it, nobody’s in charge of it.   Over the last year, “Change” became a hit record (Taylor Swift), a political slogan (President Obama), and a hit TV series in Japan (about a teacher who suddenly ascends to the top political job in the country – sound familiar?). 

The first half of 2009 saw the emergence of Twitter and the demise of analog television.  Everyone talks about change, and about how lives and enterprises will be impacted by change. 

Human nature, however, does not change – and because media exist to provide a service to human beings, not to baboons or space aliens, they will always be yoked to the unchanging characteristics of human nature.  Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves of some constants that will remain guideposts to that nature, regardless of which media are swinging the bat.

Courtesy The Arizona Star.  Check out this cartoon in its original context at azstarnet.com. 

1.   Facts always trump rumors.  Journalists bemoan the decline of traditional news, and newsgathering ethics, in an age of bloggers who seem more interested in promoting a point of view.  Yet it is precisely because it is so easy to buy a megaphone nowadays that the indispensable grunt work of journalism – note taking, fact checking, editing, and developing a reputation for trustworthy information – has become more necessary than ever. 

According to the blog Paper Cuts, more than 10-thousand US newspaper jobs have been eliminated in 2009 alone.   Short term, the former holders of those jobs are in pain.  Long term, that pain will ease, because their core skills will not, indeed cannot, lose their market. 

2.   When facts are at issue, people migrate from social media to mainstream media, not the other way around.   An eight year old understands this intuitively.  I was using the boys’ room in elementary school when a classmate burst in to inform me that President Kennedy had been shot.   That was social media in 1963.  But it didn’t become real for me until our principal piped in live radio coverage for the entire school to hear over our PA system.    As a school, we migrated from rumor to fact. 

Now, consider the recent death of Michael Jackson.  On Twitter, where the story started as a rumor, error messages reportedly peaked at up to 5-thousand per minute, as users frantically re-tweeted messages carrying lots of questions but little reliable information.  By contrast, CNN, although it was not first with the story, logged 20 million page views in the hour after it broke.  

3.  Trust is the coin of the media realm.  Virginia O’Hanlon knew that she could trust the New York Sun to give it to her straight about Santa Claus.  The American public knew it could count on Walter Cronkite to do likewise with world and national events.  If an organization brokering in information loses the trust of its audience, the game is over. 

Trust can disappear in as little as a day or two; it takes long years to build.  This is more than an academic point.  It has financial implications.  CNN, founded in 1980, has figured out how to monetize page views; Twitter, founded in 2006, has not.   And could you ever imagine James Earl Jones intoning, “Trust Twitter?”

4.  Building that trust often involves personal danger.  Each year, I have the honor of working on the Deadline Club Awards, given at the Waldorf Astoria by the New York City Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.  This year, even as the editor of The New York Times helped the Club recognize the best in journalism, a Times reporter was being held by the Taliban.  (He later escaped after seven months in captivity.)  

Two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were in prison in North Korea, guilty of doing nothing more than their jobs.  (They were eventually sentenced to twelve years hard labor.)  One of the first honors to be given out on Awards night was the Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting.  Pearl, you will recall, was the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded in Pakistan by Al Qaeda.

What’s really changing, in other words, is at the margins.  Daily newspapers fold, local radio stations abandon news coverage, reporters apply for unemployment, and analog signals go dark.  Yet people are consuming more information than at any time in history.   Real journalism, in sum, is used more than ever, is as dangerous as ever, and matters more than ever. 

It may seem, at times, to be valued less than ever – but that’s rumor.  Not fact.