Corporate Spin Doctors : Ex-Journalists Teach Firms How to Deal With Reporters
In 1977, Chuck Rossie, a TV news assignment editor, concluded reluctantly that he would never become Walter Cronkite. So Rossie got out of TV journalism and into the business of advising companies on how to deal with the media.
He started giving out public relations help, first with a nonprofit organization, then four years ago started his own consulting firm, the CMR Group, in Woodland Hills.
In 1988, Stephen Fox, founding president and editor of the business newspaper Investor’s Daily, realized that he would probably never displace Benjamin Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post. So Fox, 44, joined Rossie, 51, as a partner at the CMR Group.
Now for $250 an hour each, the two former news hounds, plus a New York City partner--a former CBS radio and TV news director, Ted Feurey--advise about 50 companies and government agencies, including Security Pacific National Bank, National Medical Enterprises, Six Flags Magic Mountain and the California Farm Bureau Federation.
Coping With Reporters
Their advice on how to cope with the media covers everything from coaching for interviews--with one of CMR’s partners playing the reporter--to giving emergency advice during a crisis.
It has not hurt their business any that, in recent years, coverage of business subjects has increased in print and on TV, to the point that executives are not just decision makers, but also spokesmen for their organizations. Fox would not disclose CMR’s annual sales but said the work was just as lucrative as when he and Rossie were journalists.
One of their clients is Security Pacific, where the two have trained about 300 executives on how to take press calls in stride. When reporters have questions, “they understand that they don’t have two days to think it over,” said Richard A. Warner, Security Pacific’s executive vice president for public affairs.
Advice from Rossie and Fox makes for “a reality check, and they’re very good at it,” Warner said.
In troubled times, the two former journalists’ advice is: Don’t make things worse by lying and speculating. And “get it over with” by telling the story quickly and fully.
As simple as the advice may seem, companies can founder without it.
Earlier this year, for example, San Pedro Peninsula Hospital was suffering through a public relations storm and at first would not have any communication with the press. Dissidents among the 350 community members who elect the nonprofit hospital’s governing board decided to try overthrowing the panel, blaming it for the hospital’s financial woes: losses totaling more than $7 million for 1987 and 1988.
The board members were “shocked, they were appalled” by the attacks from the dissident group and hoped that by staying silent the complaints would disappear, San Pedro Peninsula President John M. Wilson said. Even reporters’ phone calls, the hospital decided, did not deserve an answer.
But when the dissidents’ movement gained momentum, the board called in Rossie and Fox. “You haven’t even put your oar in the water,” Fox told the hospital’s board. “Now why do you think it’s unusual that the other side of the story is being told and yours is not?”
With that, the hospital started an aggressive public relations campaign, talking with reporters and sending out communiques to the hospital’s membership to counter the dissidents’ allegations and explain the hospital’s financial problems. When the time for the crucial vote came April 18, the community group overwhelmingly supported the present board.
Wilson said without CMR, the hospital would not have been ready to deal with the problem that the dissidents created. “None of us had seen anything like it,” he said.
A basic problem in business-press relations is that executives do not often see the need to explain themselves in a way that the average person can understand, Rossie and Fox said.
Fox also said executives tend to be surrounded by yes men, so when the press asks a tough question, the executives are often not prepared to answer.
“Executives are surrounded by people who are paid to understand what they mean,” Rossie said. “A journalist is paid to understand what they said.”
Perhaps just as important is that business people often do not understand the press, the consultants said. Much of their job is to explain the basics of reporting and how newspaper stories and TV broadcasts are put together.
The idea is to convince executives that the cards are not stacked against them when there is coverage about their companies and to urge them to respond to questions. An executive often sees a story about his business as oversimplified, according to Rossie, and so “reaches the conclusion, ‘I can’t tell my story in this arena.’ ”
That is a mistake, Fox said. To make the most of dealing with the media, executives have to be top-notch interviewees.
CMR advises executives not to let interviews wander, as normal conversations do, but to be concise and to the point. Rossie and Fox also tell clients not to let a reporter’s questions rule an interview. “You should also take the initiative,” Rossie said. “Mention things you want to talk about, bring up things you think are important.”
And Rossie and Fox caution business people to leave their normal vocabularies behind when reporters are in the room. Hospital officials who prate on about “DRGs” (government reimbursement categories for medical bills) and bankers for whom everything boils down to “basis points” (the smallest measure of yields and interest rates) only hurt themselves by making their stories less clear, they said.
‘Startling Phrase’
Rossie also told the story of an official with a charter airline who helped supervise aircraft maintenance and had to talk to reporters about the airline’s safety. He told reporters that inspection procedures were “not bad.” In the mechanic’s slang, that was high praise, Rossie said, but “to anyone else who heard it, it was a really startling phrase.”
They also advise clients to stick to the information that they are certain of. Rossie said he once had a client at a company that had sold an unprofitable division. Reporters wanted to know how the buying company could make the business profitable if the seller had not. But the client did not know how, so, following CMR guidelines, he said so.
According to Rossie, executives need to understand that “there are answers to give when there is no answer.”
