2 years ago my assistant, La Toya, sent a press release to a young reporter at one of the daily newspapers.

Our client, the Managing Director  of a  new  hotel,  said that the reporter had called several times for an interview that they had developed a rapport and she would be the best person to whom we should send the release. 

Typically, I would have cautioned against going with anyone new (this particular reporter had just finished her internship with the newspaper)  but this was a press release announcement  giving facts on the hotel’s progress. There were questions about its late  opening and budget overruns. 

Should have been simple enough,

Except that on the day we opened the newspaper, the press release became an article with  every single quote   ascribed to my assistant, La Toya, whose only role  was to press the send button with her email signature at the bottom for inquires.

 We were mad. The client, well, he was livid.

When we called and asked for  ( and yes after 2 days passed, demanded )  a corrected version we were told  by an obviously embarrassed reporter that the editor  said no.  La Toya’s  email address was at the bottom of the release,  this particular editor assumed (incorrectly) that  the quotes had come  from her. "Next time don’t do that," we were told.

 Everything between the client and my firm went downhill from there. I would go so far to say we lost a valuable contract  because an editor refused to admit that she got it wrong.

It’s unfortunate, but I have several  stories like that. Stories where  reporters and editors  neglect correction requests with little consequence. Where the buck stops with one person and you have little or no recourse to appeal. 

I know that minor errors  in the news  are part and parcel of  journalism with its rushed deadlines, understaffed newsrooms and sometimes an over zealous need to create a headline with more sizzle then substance.  But what happens when what is being reported is so wrong, (and I am not talking about a typo in a name or a puntuation mistake ) and the the “oh oh we blew it” is so serious that the small  square retraction box buried under the weather box  on Page 3  does not quite seem to suffice.

Scott Maier, associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication writes  on the Poynter website" that a  better rule of thumb is needed for reporters who get  the big picture and the small facts wrong.

Here’s some  statistics from Maier’s  research  on corrections by the media.

“Industry and scholarly research have documented time and time again that errors in the news media are disturbingly common. The largest accuracy audit, a recent study that Philip Meyer and I conducted of 22 newspapers, found an error rate among the highest in seven decades of accuracy research: over 59 percent of local news and feature stories were found by news sources to have at least one error. 

"In nearly the same proportion, news sources identified 'subjective errors' -- information considered technically correct but misleading," Maier said. 

"But these errors of meaning were what news sources found most egregious -- and measurably damaging to media credibility.”

Of the people Maier  surveyed, only one in 10 informed newspapers about errors. 

“Many said they thought the inaccuracies were inconsequential. But some wondered why they should bother reporting errors and assumed newspapers wouldn't respond. When asked to review stories for accuracy, news sources found factual errors in about every other news and feature story.”

I am not sure what the answers are:  opportunities for the wronged party to  give another view of the story, a corrected headline that circumvents the wrong one, deleting an article  if published on the web, tying correction rates to performance evaluations of reporters. Or may be it really lies in taking the time to recheck  the work sentence by sentence, and thereafter  hold reporters and editors accountable for mistakes. 

 We hold  journalists to a higher standard than most other professionals.  We are told, and know it is human to err but I think when newsrooms refuse to admit error, when they set themselves up to be the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong, true or false, that’s when the very foundation of  begins to crumble.

Someone asked me this yesterday. This wasn't about saying “No Comment”  but rather about being quoted on a situation about their industry but  not directly related to their organisation.

 There maybe lots of good reasons to stay silent, but one simple question to ask is  whether anyone will miss you (your organisation’s voice) if you don't provide a comment.

 Plenty of reporters will call for comment on issues or events that are tangential to your business. If the story is not about your organisation, stay out of it unless you have a clear message that you know will make it into the story and you are comfortable that the story won't turn into something you don't want to be part of. 

Here are some other reasons by Ragan contributor Jim Cameron

1) When you have history with a reporter / publication that misquotes you and always gets the story wrong.

2)When you are asked for confidential, proprietary or personal info not relevant to the topic. 

3) When you don't have a message and therefore end up in what feels like a deposition.

Are there any other reasons I have missed?

How is a corporate communicator to relay serious information in a world of shrinking news holes, reduced access to reporters, hard to reach editors and a well populated digital world?

We have to reconsider our approach to media relations, which has long  been premised on pitching stories to reporters. The old way is dead  and the  top down model of communications, where the news agenda was determined by the very few who deemed  what was important is forever gone.  But how should the media relations expert get by in the digital world;  5  things stand  out for me:

1) Think multi-media. Today’s press release should be sent off in ways that allows it to be repurposed across platforms. Attaching  digitised video and photos are now a norm but I also like linking  information to third party sites, this  stands out for an editor

2) In the digital world it’s about the 100 m race. Speed matters. As spokespersons we are often ready to comment in the shortest possible time frame when it comes to traditional media.  And just like we monitored newspapers religiously we must apply  the same  vigilance to journalists  who are filing stories  on-line. There is a simple reason why. Comments from Joe Public  are posted in real time and  some of them can be very negative. Should the story spread  so too does the  feedback.

3) As business communicators we have to face the fact that with Google, a story never dies. In fact it may take on  a second and a third life. News can be repurposed across platforms and could well move from an industry specific outlet to a mainstream media aggregator. (By virtue of the  lists I have on Twitter that platform has become my   personalised newspaper). A company in crisis needs to move faster to acknowledge the problem, set a context for curing the problem, then follow up relentlessly to assure that stakeholders are aware of improvements.  Toyota’s mistakes over the past few weeks prove this point.

4) We have to offer more  hard news because reporters will have to sell feature concepts to their editors to earn space in the papers. And newspapers  are working with fewer reporters on staff.  Expertise will matter now more than ever and we will have to be better informed about the industries  we work in, not simply the company or the product, to pitch effectively.

5) Companies should not assume that the entire horizontal conversation, the peer to peer  conversation happening on facebook and twitter  etc is premised on humor and short form visual content. Sure they can go viral distance but substance still remains the key.

When Lenny Grant, one of the Caribbean's leading editors/journalists, presented this paper to the International Association of Business Communicators (T&T) last month, I know immediately it had to be shared. 

These are tips you can begin implementing right away, I culled them from  one of my favourite bloggers on media issues.

1) Find a journalist who is writing about your area of interest.  Quote that person’s work in your blog posts, website, newsletters, etc., and give that person proper attribution.  Don’t just do this once, do it frequently. 

2) Feed information to journalists that care about your area of interest.  It is likely that you know something that they should know, so tell them.  Even if they don’t use the information immediately, you have given them information that they can build upon.  (Don’t over do it.  An occasional, high value tidbit will be welcomed, but frequent “noise” will not.)

3) Talk to specific industry reporters about the value they provide.  Discuss the areas where they are doing great and talk about the areas where you would like to see improvement. But don’t just talk about where they could improve, talk about how you can help them improve. 

State of Play is a wonderful political thriller made more dramatic by the superb work of Australian actor, Russell Crowe, who plays  a long-haired, overweight, whiskey loving  reporter investigating the murder of  a young boy.  

What's great about this movie is that it is set in the office of a big city newspaper and it rolls out the  tensions that  are currently  being played out in newspapers across the globe between the editor and reporter,  the journalist  and blogger.  As a newspaper junkie, these interesting dichotomies are  reasons enough to go see this incredible movie.

In the subplot the tense relationship between bloggers and traditional journalists  is depicted. 

Young bloggers work in the same building but the context is  entirely different.   The traditional newsroom is overcrowded, dirty and old.  The reporters use computers that look like they been through several wars.  Crowe's character has an  office for instance that looks exactly like the  one my father  occupied over  his  five decades in the media.   It is stacked with paper, pin-ups of important but ancient stories and dusty, thumb-marked books that are never to be thrown away.

Rachel McAdams, is Crowe's nemesis. She's from new media and as if to make the contrast more startling  between herself and Crowe, the director makes her character crisp,  fresh, young. Her work area is certainly more modern than Crowe’s.  At first, when Adams asks Crowe for help, he resists. They are wary of each other, but in the end work together on a story of Watergate proportions. 

Their work ends up in print - before it makes it online.  

"When people read this story, they should have newsprint on their hands," explains McAdams' character.

I won't give much more of the plot away but there are some important  lessons  about journalism  that can be gleaned from what is clearly the best newspaper- themed movie to hit the screens in a very long time.

Investigative reporting is the bane of good newspapers: The movie's depiction of journalists as skeptical, resolute, and not easily duped was amazing. Stories and facts are checked and rechecked and then checked again.  That's a good lesson for anyone trying to spread information in our evolving media world. Traditional journalists maintain that the reason why  bloggers can never replace them is because  blogs come with hidden agendas and  facts are rarely ever second sourced. Editors, they claim, raise the right questions, launder  issues through the legal washing machine and send stories back  to be cross referenced. In the State of Play when the Crowe’s sources reveal a connection deeper than the murder of a young thief, his editor wants to assign him another experienced journalist to work on the story. The blogger is not experienced enough. The tactic  is later discarded but it still points scrooge like fingers to this question:  are bloggers resourced enough to do the kind of stoic detective grunge work  that made Woodward and Bernstein so respected? This  is a  genuine and  important question. In State of Play we have reason to believe that the answer is yes. But this is  still  a movie and I don’t think this is quite true ( as yet) in the real world.  

Can the divide be bridged?: At the end of the movie when  Crowe and Adams  exit the final scene there are several cutaways of how newspapers get printed and then distributed. The production is fascinating but you can't help but think it is a process whose time has come. State of Play movie paints a clear print versus online scenario, which in the end works because the print wins. This is not what's happening in the real world though.  Newspapers are folding by the dozens and the only way to stop the hemorrhage  is to have  more integration between the online and print world. One way to do so is for  journalists -print and online-  to see themselves as one.  Every reporter should be an online journalist, equipped  with the knowledge of how to upload stories, write headlines for search engine optimisation and work in online ecosystems. Bloggers ought to take a page or two of experience from traditional reporters in the areas of cultivating sources,  and investigating stories. What I am really trying to get at is there shouldn't be print people and online folks in one news operation. Each one should have one name, journalist. Editors have to begin to cultivate the mutual cordiality.

What to do before the real convergence?  In the movie there is an excellent  background story of the paper’s new owners trying to stop its  financial collapse.  They want the controversy and the  editor (the wonderful and ageless  Helen Mirren)  is under pressure to deliver  sensational news that will sell. While this part of the story remains obscure and only a secondary sub plot, in the  real world of journalism this issue is  on the front burner. Editors are under pressure to deliver and if they don’t then the fear of  job loss and business closure is real. But perhaps the real fear is that  editors  are now forced to spend so  much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that they aren’t able to devote the time  needed to  invent a new prototype that works better for everyone. We see that is Mirren’s worry in the movie as she struggles to  discover the right balance.

Make State of Play a must see movie. If you work in journalism or the media, I am interested in your comments.