In his Crisis Guru Commentaries, Jim Lukaszewski provides real answers to real questions about your most critical communications problems and issues.

This issue was triggered by the question below.

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Question:

Dear Crisis Guru:

What is the life cycle of a bad news story? Any insight into this would be helpful.

Thank you,

Manager, Corporate Communications

Answer:

Dear Manager:

For many reasons today, mostly having to do with the Web, blogs, and new media, bad news stories tend to have the potential to live on forever. Therefore, the concept of a news cycle or story cycle is pretty much gone. Once something negative happens to you or you are involved in something negative, and it gets in the news or on the Web, it’s amazing how many times it will crop up in the future, simply because a reporter searches for something similar and gets a hit. Perhaps an advocate is looking for something to support his or her case, or additional evidence of some kind, and comes across your situation. Maybe an irritated employee is looking for almost anything that will provide leverage. Whatever bad news occurs is likely to keep cropping up, or remain lurking out there, for a long, long time.

Communicators often like to talk in terms of the life cycles of stories because this tends to reassure management that the bad news is going to be over soon. However, we know two things about bad news: once it is occurring, the remnants ripen badly; and the problem can reassert itself and become visible again at almost any time.

A better metaphor may be the pulse of an issue or problem. Sometimes it has one and sometimes it doesn’t, but resuscitation is always possible.

The antidote for these circumstances involves your immediate and appropriate responses to whatever bad news occurs, when it occurs. Management’s tendency is to allow things to go unresponded to and left to die off of there own accord. In today’s world, when the news is devastating or severely negative, employees, those who oversee your activities, your customers, and others in whose lives you play a role expect you to stand up for yourself, and to calmly, clearly, and constructively, clarify, correct, or comment on whatever erroneous information has become public. Search my Web site, www.e911.com, for the phrase “corrections and clarification.” You’ll come across a lot of information about how to do this very effectively.

Again, the reason for doing this is that when the topic crops up out there in a negative way, it’s highly likely that your responses and your explanations, your corrections and your clarifications, will surface as well. In effect, if you want to, because of the Web, you can have the last word—although that last word may have to be said again, and again, and again.

Hope this is helpful.

Jim Lukaszewski