Dennis Kneale
February 2016
On a startlingly bright Saturday morning, after a lovely, sunlit drive north out of Los Angeles and into the Pacific Palisades of southern California, past a guarded gate and a carefully plotted patchwork of large homes nestled among the craggy cliffs and canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, I arrive at the House that Mike Built.
Out front, a large glass sculpture obscures the view of the front door, almost as if guarding it. Inside, the place overflows with paintings and sculptures: originals by Peter Max, LeRoy Neiman, and Mark Kostabi and limited-edition prints by Picasso, Warhol, Chagall, Miró, and Norman Rockwell. Out back a dark infinity pool seems to spill endlessly past a serene pond, which gives way to a stunning vista of lush mountainside plunging down to the Pacific Ocean.
This is the home of Michael S. Sitrick of Sitrick And Company, which does a thriving business in the art of strategic communications, practicing PR as persuasion. He is the “Ninja Master of the Dark Art of Spin” (Gawker), “The Flack for When You’re Under Attack” (Forbes), and the “prince of PR” and the “Wizard of Spin” (fifteen years apart, in the Los Angeles Times). Most fitting of all, perhaps, he has been called the “Winston Wolfe of Public Relations” (Fortune), referring to the “fixer” played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. Though his firm provides communications services in a wide range of cases—launching companies, bankruptcy reorganizations, corporate governance, hostile takeovers, regulatory fights, government investigations, reputation management, lawsuits, and high-profile divorces—Mike Sitrick is known best for crisis advice, and he is legendary as the best in the business.
He has spent nearly three decades building Sitrick And Company (spelled with that upper-case A), which has evolved and thrived with the explosion of the Internet, TMZ, 24/7 celebrity journalism, and the rise of social media. In Mike Sitrick’s view, most companies in crisis deserve a fair trial in the court of public opinion, a shot at redemption, and a chance to make things right, though he has turned some clients down. He has been a spectral presence in some of the highest-profile stories and hottest controversies to ignite the media:
• The scandal at Hewlett-Packard after its chairman was accused of spying on board members and reporters
• The feud between Disney’s then-CEO, Michael Eisner, and Roy Disney, board member and nephew of Walt Disney himself, culminating in Eisner’s stepping down as chairman and the early retirement of one of the most powerful CEOs in Hollywood a year later
• The tumult at BlackBerry
• Scandal in the Catholic Church
• The mosque at Ground Zero
• The restoration of the estate of Michael Jackson after his drug-overdose death
• The exposure of the doping of Olympic athletes by the Russian government
The clients involved in these stories have authorized Mike Sitrick to talk about their cases or the facts have previously been made public. He can’t—and won’t—discuss cases that are pending or in which the details or his involvement have not become public.
The tougher the case, the more impossible the situation, the more likely Mike Sitrick is to take it on and try to pull off a miracle. Some people who know him attribute this to an urge to stick up for people who get picked on—a soft spot he developed as a Jewish kid protecting his younger brother on the multiethnic streets of the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s.
I’m honored to help Sitrick share the secrets of his craft in a book that is equal parts how-to and tell-all—or tell-almost-all; this guy knows secrets he never will tell. We have known each other for more than fifteen years, having met when I was the managing editor of Forbes in New York and he visited me with a client’s story to sell.
Sitrick published an earlier book on his approach in 1998—eons ago in Internet time. He signed the copy he sent to me after we first met, way back then. I still have it and brought it with me on this visit to his home. On the first page, he wrote: “Dennis, enjoyed our lunch. Hopefully, a couple of cases we work on together will be in my next book. Mike, 5/17/99.” Which was kind of prophetic, it turns out.
Sitrick’s new effort is all the more important in this age of the Net and social media, when any misstep can blow up into a worldwide embarrassment on Facebook, when the Outrage Brigade on Twitter, armed with virtual torches and pitchforks, can destroy the career of any CEO, company, or celebrity.
I show up at Sitrick’s home at 9:30 a.m. expecting four hours of first-round interviewing. He ushers me in the front door, mutes the smartphone that is grafted to his ear, and says he has an emergency conference call coming up. He is almost six feet tall and trim, his lack of a potbelly impressive given my struggle with my own. His face bears stubble from a working vacation at his house in Hawaii, and the new goatee gives him a devilish glint.
I follow him into his home office, where paintings waiting to be hung rest on the floor and a cup of coffee waits, getting cold. Sitrick turns away from me and sits down to hover over a screen and keyboard, editing a statement drafted by the emergency client’s general counsel and waiting for the call to commence.
Sitrick had agreed to set aside this time for me to help him map out some Big Thoughts for the book, but he is preparing to brief a star New York Times reporter and has no time to talk. An entertainment executive has launched a holy war on Sitrick’s wealthy client, resorting to dirty tricks that could get that executive fired. Sitrick also has a second situation, another feud between rich guys, which he is about to offer to a Wall Street Journal reporter. A Sitrick client hopes to damage his foe by linking him to misdeeds alleged by a third guy.
Oh, and there’s this delicate matter: a bitter divorce case in which the angry ex-wife has just filed an eighty-six-page motion that, among other incendiary items, accuses her ex-husband, Sitrick’s client, of child abuse. The attorneys assure Sitrick it is a trumped-up charge she filed only after losing badly in court; she is just trying to punish him. He asks them to provide more details and evidence, and they do.
None of which bears on the emergency conference call that is about to begin. His phone rings and Sitrick, now wearing a headset, answers it. The call goes on for almost an hour, and I eavesdrop shamelessly, though only on Sitrick’s side of the interchange. This is a privilege I am afforded only because I have signed a non-disclosure agreement to work for Mike on this book. Mike, who from the onset said we would have to mask the identity of the company and its executives, briefed me later on the parts of the conversation to which I wasn’t privy.
The young CEO of a hotshot financial firm, a unicorn worth a few billion dollars, is being ousted, a step that’s necessary to insulate his company from fallout over what he says were well-intentioned misdeeds in trying to accommodate torrid growth. As half a dozen people listen in, including Sitrick and his colleague Sallie Hofmeister (formerly a reporter and editor at both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times), a company lawyer explains the predicament and says the SEC might yet get involved. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach; no reporter ever would get to hear a frank exchange like this. We lust to get on the inside, to know the “real” story, but we rarely do, if ever.
All hell is about to break loose. The company is getting hammered in the media, which will interpret the founder’s abrupt departure as a calamity both for him and for the company. Everything seems to ride on getting one thing right—the press release.
For the ousted CEO, his reputation is at stake. He doesn’t want potential compliance problems mentioned at all, and he wants the release to emphasize his continuing, integral role at the company he created. The company, though, can’t ignore the material issues, some of which have already been reported in the media. Some on the call argue for the company to make a mea culpa, but that might set off the founder and blow up the entire deal, to say nothing of the fact that it would create problems for the company with regulators and others.
Sitrick is just an advisor on the sidelines, but he soon takes over as quarterback. You can’t announce that the founder will stick around as a “close advisor,” he says. What if he gets in trouble with regulators? And what good will a mea culpa do, especially if it sets off the founder? Instead, he tells them, the company should say it is taking a series of steps to strengthen its internal policies, procedures, and controls. This, it turns out, is one of Sitrick’s rules: focus on the fix.
Sitrick taps at the keyboard and waters down the phrase to say the CEO will be available to ensure “a smooth transition.” He starts to put it in the lead paragraph of the release (the “lede,” as journalists call it) as a sweetener to get the buy-in of the departing chief, but after some deliberation, he buries it further down in the announcement. He adds the line about taking steps to strengthen internal controls.
Then someone suggests Sitrick tighten up the details of the release, show it to the exiting CEO, and tell him this is as favorable as it will get. “We get these guys on the phone and we say we can live with this, but we can’t go further than this, then have Mike weigh in on why, from a PR standpoint, this is the best thing, not just for the company but for [the CEO] himself.” The exec on the call makes a direct appeal to Sitrick: “Mike, he has tremendous respect for you, tremendous respect. If he hears you . . . it could make the difference.”
“I have no problem with that,” Sitrick responds, “because I believe this is in his best interest as well as the company’s. If I were advising him, I’d tell him the same thing.”
This was, in Sitrick’s view, critical. His one absolute in business is never to lie, not even a little. They agree to reconvene for another call in an hour, after some further consultations. It blows through his entire Saturday, and some of Sunday, but that happens a lot.
All of this agonizing over a seemingly simple press release, over minutiae that the uninformed might dismiss as . . . who cares? But to Sitrick the details are paramount. In today’s business world, the “story”—the public account of an event or a company or a senior executive—is as important as the reality. One of Sitrick’s favorite sayings is that perception is reality.
Online, as Sitrick has seen, a misimpression can be repeated a million times, and a lie left uncorrected becomes the truth, festering forever on Google. Decades of brand-building and corporate “good will” can be wiped out if an online beating goes undefended. A harsh truth, if not softened by nuance and perspective and the rest of the story, becomes the only truth, a truncated version of what happened. It can damage your reputation. Permanently.
Even the best-run, biggest companies have been known to blow it in their response to a crisis. They start out in denial, shut down, and raise the shields just when they should open up and at the least find out what reporters want to know. As Sitrick tells it, the easy thing to do is to advise a client to refuse to comment, stay silent, don’t talk to the press—because this shields the advisor, who would get the blame if the client talks to reporters and gets skewered. Sure, there are cases where “no comment” is the right option, when you don’t know the facts or the facts don’t clearly support an acceptable statement, when your client is in a particularly sensitive legal situation, or you are negotiating a settlement with the government. Most times, however, Sitrick says, the better instinct is to find out what the reporter wants, get the facts, and then, if the facts support you, speak up.
But while the need has never been greater for image protection and rapid response, Sitrick believes the business world suffers from a scarcity of smart advice in crisis communications. His take: this isn’t a game for amateurs, but an awful lot of amateurs play this game. This has been his view throughout his entire PR career, and he has held it more firmly as his experience has increased.
Through more than a thousand cases (he has lost count), Sitrick has developed a battle-tested regimen for crisis response. He understands the power of storytelling and harnesses it for the purposes of persuasion. The media, both old and new, want to tell a story, and he sees his job as helping them get a better one for their audience (and for his client). I have seen from the other side of the desk that he knows how to undercut and counterpunch his clients’ adversaries, how to turn the media to his clients’ favor, and how to preempt or mitigate a bad story. He gets the importance of responding instantly and repeatedly, and he uses accurate, fact-sourced details to establish his version’s credibility.
Rather than telling his clients to duck and cover, Mike Sitrick tells them that if they don’t tell their story, someone else will tell it for them. Failing to respond early and strategically leaves empty space and airtime to be filled by someone else: your adversaries, short-sellers, media grandstanders, Wall Street shills.
That points up a key difference between Sitrick and most other people in the crisis business, a difference that I have observed as a reporter, editor, and television news anchor. Many companies and PR people regard the media as their enemy and reporters as arrogant and evil. Many reporters, in turn, view companies and PR people warily, suspicious they are out to block a good story.
Sitrick, on the other hand, has a clear affection for journalists. He even started out as one, albeit briefly. I have dealt with hundreds of journalists, and Mike Sitrick is, hands down, a better storyteller than most of them, at all times staying within the four corners of the truth. And reporters need good stories. He respects them and refuses to trash them. (Although, when they get it wrong, he tells them so, demanding a correction when warranted, even if he has to go over their heads.) Sitrick figures most of them work hard, they try to get it right, and often they believe they are fighting for the underdog, a trait with which Sitrick can identify.
Sitrick sees reporters as essential to getting out his clients’ version of the truth, and he stresses the value of understanding their deadline pressures, their competitive zeal, and their fear of getting beaten on a story. Stories are the currency he carries—exclusives, interviews, counterpunch tips, profiles—when he meets with members of his vast network of reporters and editors. This guy delivers the goods, acting as gatekeeper to some of the biggest stories and scandals of the past decade and beyond.
On occasion, Sitrick and his partners on a case will fight an ongoing story by developing and placing a different one, a counter-narrative offering compelling new details. His firm’s ex-journalists, lawyers, and executives are particularly adept at this technique. They also have been known to divert negative news by creating a bona fide news event. Mike Sitrick trains his people to approach their practice as a litigator approaches a trial, gathering the evidence, presenting the facts, preparing for cross-examination, and crafting a compelling closing argument—which is, in essence, a story that sees things his client’s way.
From day one, in fact, Sitrick staffed his firm largely with exjournalists because, as he likes to say, it is easier to teach PR to a journalist than to teach news judgment to a PR person. His partners include former reporters and editors from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Barron’s, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Houston Chronicle as well as on-air talent from CNBC, Fox Business Network, NBC, and CBS. Of eighteen partners profiled on the Sitrick website recently, more than a dozen are veteran journalists.
Sitrick gets a callback from that New York Times star reporter, greeting him as if they were about to catch up on the latest gossip, and tells a story that would arouse any reporter’s interest in the rich-guy feud: details of “character assassination,” “harassment,” “anonymous attacks.” The reporter is loving it.
Meanwhile, I pad over to the kitchen, where his wife, Nancy, is pouring me a cup of coffee. She is even trimmer than Mike is and looks much younger, and the first thing you notice is the great haircut—an attractive bob, one side longer than the other and curving under toward her jawline. She has had it for ten years, and every time she thinks of trying a new style, someone compliments her on it (as her visitor had just done), and she stays put.
They met in college when she was just eighteen and he was nineteen. They have been together ever since, marrying a month after Mike graduated with a B.S. in business and journalism from the University of Maryland and six months before Nancy graduated. They have raised three daughters, who now have seven offspring of their own. “You’re my play date today,” Nancy tells me. My arrival means her husband has something else to do while she goes out to meet friends for the day.
At the end of a hallway leading to the family room are framed photos of grown kids and sons-in-law and grandkids—two sets of twin girls in two separate families, plus a boy for each set of twins and their newest addition, a baby girl from their daughter in Hawaii—smiling at the beach and posing for groupies rather than selfies. These are some of the only photos in which you’ll see Mike smiling. In almost every shot in the many profiles published about him, he stares into the camera like some badass.
I mention to Nancy that, despite my having known Mike for fifteen years, he has never said much about his family. That’s his way, she explains. He internalizes, masking his emotions and restraining any burst of anger, a persona he learned from his father, a longtime Chicago radio executive and adman. Sitrick has never been known to lose his temper, even when dealing with the most ferocious investigative reporters. Few people really know her husband, Nancy believes. And then she seems to issue me a challenge: “I always tell people, ‘You’ll never know Mike.’”
From what I have been able to piece together before today’s visit, I know this much:
He is the oldest of three sons, and even today he consults on business matters now and then with his brothers, David and Ronald, both of them successful lawyers. And although Mike Sitrick has known some of the most renowned business leaders in the world, he credits his own father as his most important mentor. Now in his nineties, Herman Sitrick taught Mike the ethics of hard work, accountability, and responsibility. When Mike, early in his career, told his father about a problem he was going to bring to his boss, his father replied, “Your job is not to bring problems to your boss. It’s to bring solutions.” It is an adage he has lived by ever since. Herman still has his own ad business in Chicago, and he still goes in to the office every day. Like his oldest son, Herman Sitrick married young, and seventy-one years later, he and Marcia were still married, until she passed just prior to the publication of this book.
Mike endured the culture shock of a move from the South Side of Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama, in his senior year of high school, when his dad got a top job running a group of radio stations. After a freshman year at the University of Alabama, he transferred to the University of Maryland at College Park, a fateful decision: that’s where he met Nancy.
He figures marrying Nancy was the smartest decision of his entire life, one that set him up for everything else that came his way. “My wife, my best friend, and my soul mate,” he calls her in the dedication to her in his first book, “without whose love and support during all these years, none of what I have accomplished would have been possible.”
Sitrick wrote for his college paper, local radio and TV, and then free-lanced for the Baltimore News American, and the Washington Star, passing up a full-time job at the Chicago Tribune to take a PR job in the University of Maryland agriculture division. (It paid $160 a week; the Tribune offered $125 a week. Mike told me he loved journalism, but preferred being able to eat.) He jumped quickly to Western Electric in Chicago and then, still in his early twenties, went to work in the administration of Chicago’s legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley, where he rose to deputy director of public information for one of the city’s largest agencies. Mike later joined a local PR firm and then, at the age of twenty-seven, became the head of PR at National Can Corporation, then a Fortune 500 company. In 1981 he took the job that largely determined the rest of his career: vice president, and then senior vice president, of communications at Wickes Cos.
Nine months later, after the brilliant turnaround artist Sanford Sigoloff swooped in to take over the firm and guide it back to health, Wickes filed for Chapter 11 reorganization. Mike Sitrick handled communications strategy, which included putting Sigoloff at center stage and focusing the story on what he was doing to save Wickes. The fine points Sitrick learned about the U.S. Bankruptcy Code and the insights he gained into the emotional and psychological effects of a turn in Chapter 11 helped him start his own firm. He got one of his first cases before he even had incorporated—Roy Disney’s Shamrock Holdings, which was making a run at Polaroid in 1989—and he went on to build one of the largest and most successful practices in restructuring and strategic communications.
I met him a decade later, when I was a top editor at Forbes magazine. I had reluctantly agreed to meet with Mike Sitrick at the request of someone I knew well, a crush from my college newspaper days, expecting yet another PR guy with an axe to grind and a client to bill. I was thinking, “So he comes to you through someone you trust, just like the mob does in Goodfellas.”
I was braced to resist his overtures. Something inside a journalist makes him want to resist when a PR spinner comes calling. Resistance isn’t futile, it’s a virtue. And something about Mike Sitrick himself made me even more resistant, as we met at a bar near the Forbes offices and he settled into a chair, shrouded in shadows and the purple-blue tinge of neon lights. Maybe it was his three-thousand-dollar tailored suit and the fancy, perfectly knotted necktie.
He had an unreadable poker face, with a fingerprint-sized birthmark on his left cheekbone that made it look as if he recently had been in a fight, and you should see the other guy. Rather than unspooling enthusiastic flights of fancy, he uttered plain, unadorned sentences in a low and gravelly voice. He could have been a great stand-in for Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, which had come out two years earlier.
Which is all to say that Sitrick wasn’t your typical PR guy at all. He wasn’t a glad-handing, backslapping, hale fellow well met. He didn’t dabble in small talk; he was too focused to bother with it. He didn’t ask questions about me personally or talk about the Yankees. He even hates golf—four hours knocking a tiny ball around strikes him as a waste of time.
This guy had no time for any of that. Friends say his only real interests are his firm and his family, notwithstanding his impressive art collection and the vintage guitar in an old, scarred case in his office. It is one of nine he owns. (When he was nineteen, he was offered a recording contract in Nashville, but was told he’d have to drop out of college and go on tour. His mother vetoed the idea, telling him, “You’ll go on tour, okay, but it will be Vietnam.”)
Sitrick sat there with a story to sell, and he laid it out as if he were spinning a yarn. I was working on a vodka martini with olives, he was drinking seltzer, and now my resistance was subsiding because I kind of liked the tale he was telling. Today neither one of us can remember it, but I am sure it had all the requisite Sitrickian elements: a central hero getting beaten up in the ring, a point of conflict with larger things at stake, a foe that was being unfair or unethical or misleading, detailed evidence that the other side was wrong, and, whenever possible, a man-bites-dog twist.
Over the years, when I was at Forbes or in my later anchor stints at CNBC and Fox Business, I worked with Mike Sitrick on a dozen or more stories. Sometimes his solutions don’t involve public relations at all but leaps of strategy—one reason Sitrick calls his style of PR “strategic communications,” a term a lot of people throw around, though it is practiced by very few. These strategic directives come out of nowhere, his partners say, and go beyond just managing the story itself to solving the larger problem that triggered the story to begin with.
Too often, in Sitrick’s view, PR people focus only on the task at hand, doing the chores they were asked to do instead of looking at an issue strategically. To him the real point is the problem the client is trying to solve. What is the client’s ultimate goal and how can we use our skills and our contacts to help achieve that? It’s the strategy that’s important. Communications is just the means to an end.
Classic case: the rescue of Twinkies. On Christmas Eve 2008, Sitrick got a call while on vacation with his family in Mexico. A lawyer for a Sitrick client, Twinkies maker International Bakeries Corporation, told him that GE Capital had just reneged on providing $125 million in credit. This could derail the entire six-hundred-million-dollar refinancing package that IBC had spent a year assembling to be able to get out of Chapter 11. Without the GE credit, the company could go belly-up. The lawyer wanted Sitrick’s advice on how to handle media for the lender-liability lawsuit his client was about to file.
Sitrick responded with a question: hadn’t GE recently received bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program after the global financial meltdown? A quick Google search showed the company had received two kinds of federal infusions, with the implicit promise of recirculating that money in the form of loans to help rebuild the U.S. economy. How could GE now justify withholding this help from IBC, a company that employed almost thirty thousand workers? “What do you think GE will say, when asked by the Wall Street Journal, ‘Didn’t you get $800 million in federal assistance to enable you to lend money to save jobs?’ We need to get the unions involved, contact local congressmen and senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.”
So they scrapped the lawsuit idea, and Mike instantly mapped out a plan to make this a jobs issue. Playing up the thousands of jobs at risk at IBC, he and the team with whom he was working put pressure on GE Capital by bringing this matter to the attention of U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer of New York and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who in turn wrote strong letters to GE’s management. They also got the company’s union leaders and the Twinkies-packing rank and file involved, who contacted local state and federal representatives. Within weeks, IBC won the GE backing and completed its Chapter 11 reorganization to emerge as a renewed company, able to fight another day.
Sitrick’s colleagues say it’s a “Mike thing.” In a meeting with a client, Mike suddenly will say, “I know what we could do,” and then sets out an audacious plan. The first response is incredulity—we can’t do that! But it soon becomes clear that, by golly, it will work. Their ringleader has been “thinking outside the box” since long before it became a business cliché.
Even Mike Sitrick himself says he doesn’t quite know how he comes up with these catapulting ideas. His neural network is running scenarios and simulations based on thousands of past moves in the crisis chess game, figuring out a pathway and pursuing it until a new adaptation becomes necessary. He is his own machine-learning algorithm.
Much of what Sitrick does, therefore, may not be teachable. He is guided by gut and a tingly Spidey-sense, an intuitive knack for divining, in each confrontation, which methods to deploy at which junctures, when to counterattack and when to let the frenzy run itself out. His cases don’t all conform to the same template. Each one is different, every person under fire has unique needs and assets, and the particular facts dictate what follows.
Yet some things can be put down on paper, surely, or displayed on a Kindle or iPad screen. Knowingly or not, Sitrick has developed the process for managing a crisis and shaping the story, forming his team with his well-honed approach. And now we endeavor to put his ethos and methods into a book for anyone else to learn. The way Sitrick sees it, this book isn’t just for PR people, it is for CEOs, senior executives, celebrities, entrepreneurs and business owners, and anyone else who must deal with the media—or who would want to do so by choice.
In the months after that first attempted interview at his home in Pacific Palisades, Mike Sitrick explained for me the art and science of his strategic communications and crisis-quelling techniques, stealing time for interviews from his constant emailing and conference calls. His aim was to boil down a lot of what he knows and teach it to others by offering a glimpse of what he does, guided by some central tenets, incisive points, adaptable guidelines, and tested techniques.
He starts with a fast overview of his regimen for response. It will be the guidepost for this entire book, showing up in the various case studies we will assemble, analyze, and explain. Now, Sitrick could just sprinkle these gems out over the course of the next two hundred or so pages and force you to search for them, but who has the time? And so he serves it up right here at the beginning. If you don’t read to the last page of this book, you are dead to us, but at least you have the gist, right here, and you can fake the rest. Here they are, Sitrick’s Ten Rules for Engagement:
Rule 1: First, get the facts.
Rule 2: Identify your objective.
Rule 3: Act preemptively.
Rule 4: Use a Lead Steer.
Rule 5: Focus on the fix.
Rule 6: Social media often are a means to an end.
Rule 7: If you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you.
Rule 8: Put your opponent on the Wheel of Pain.
Rule 9: “No comment” can be PR malpractice.
Rule 10: Never lie.
Not all of these rules apply to every situation, and each case requires a different assortment of these guidelines, plus extra considerations particular to the case. Nor are all of these rules absolute. Mike Sitrick also emphasizes three corollaries:
First, don’t wait until a reporter’s deadline to respond. The longer you wait, the less influence you will have on the story.
Second, understand the rules of “background,” “not for attribution,” and “off the record” and the differences between them.
Third, in rare instances you can kill a story, but only by harnessing pertinent and incontrovertible facts that demonstrate the reporter has it wrong.
Social media exercise significant influence, but Mike believes that to bring about major change—such as legislation, indictment or criminal charges, congressional hearings, or even the firing or exoneration of a top executive—in most instances a story that began on social media needs to be picked up or re-reported in “old” (traditional) media. He offers three examples:
• There is no question that Donald Trump’s use of social media contributed to his election as president, but even with his twenty-two million or so Twitter followers (who put him in the top fifty tweeters), it was the mainstream media’s reporting of Mr. Trump’s tweets that made them so effective. Twitter limits messages to 140 characters, but the stories resulting from these tweets were almost always considerably longer and often on the front page or leading the evening news. The mainstream media coverage of these messages either brought them to people’s attention for the first time or reinforced them while giving them the credibility of being in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, or CBS Evening News. Then there is the fact that according to various reports, many if not all, Twitter accounts include bots and inactive accounts, which reduces the number of real, active followers.
• One client of Sitrick And Company dismissed the criticism heaped on him by two Hollywood blogs as meaningless gossip, only to discover that Vanity Fair, which, of course, had a much wider audience, used these blogs as a basis for its story, citing them at the beginning of the article. This took the story from a limited audience in Hollywood, to a national story, which was then picked up by other media throughout the U.S.
• When a television news program was criticized in various social media outlets for a story of national interest, nothing much happened until the criticism was repeated and expanded in the traditional media. The news organization questioned the veracity of the criticism, but in the end the scandal resulted in widespread firings of the program’s staff and ultimately helped push the program off the air.
In handling more than a thousand cases, Sitrick has devised an approach that is as focused and high-precision as a police procedural—Dragnet meets CSI—and he has been able to lay it down through examples and case histories, which you will read here. Along the way, you also will hear about his Five Stages of Crisis and Three First Steps when confronted by the media.
The question isn’t whether you’ll face a crisis one day, especially if you are at the top of your game. The question is what will you do when crisis comes? Crisis arrives unexpectedly, swelling and subsiding in an almost mathematical, recurring pattern. A crisis can be quelled and refocused with a common set of responses if you know the right fixes and when to deploy them.
That is Sitrick’s forte, the thing he was born to do, although crisis-management is only one part of his portfolio of strategic communications services. In the chapters that follow, we will try to show you how he does it, not just tell you how he does it. So suit up and strap in. This guy moves fast.