The Recorder

On Dealing With the Media in the Wake of Disaster

By Hannah Nordhaus
May 23, 1994

Pettit & Martin marketing director Victoria Spang returned to her office one day last summer to find more than 40 voice-mail messages awaiting her attention.

Spang's popularity was not to be envied, however. The reason she was in demand was that Pettit had assigned her to handle media inquires in the aftermath of the July 1 shooting at the firm's 101 California Street offices.

And with the tragedy's one-year anniversary approaching, Spang says she expects another wave of inquires.

On June 7, Spang will recount how she deals with her responsibilities in a speech to the National Law Firm Marketing Association. In "The PR Predicament: Handling the Media in a Crisis," Spang will address what a firm can do before, during and after calamity strikes.

Her advice ranges from preparing a spokesperson for press exposure and supplying them with facts on the firm, to identifying an internal crisis team and outside therapist to help staff though the aftermath, to keeping a notebook with media inquires to ensure timely responses.

The media's mercenary interest in tragedies like Pettit's resulted in reporters sneaking around the firm's halls, piles of message clips, a crush of offers from tabloid television shows and attention from the more reputable papers that a firm's marketing department could only dream of in less trying times. With an eye to its reputation and its own emotional involvement in the situation, Pettit hired a public relations firm, San Francisco's PBN Co., the week after the shooting.

"I was so busy trying to respond to the media," Spang says, "that PBN was really able to help us…shape our thinking in terms of what we wanted to communicate in the long term."

Among other suggestions, the PR firm advised Pettit to buy space in local newspapers thanking the community for its support. PBN also helped evaluate interview offers that came the firm's way from various newspapers and tabloid news programs. Ultimately, Pettit decided to cooperate with only one newsshow that pitched a gun-control, senseless-assault-weapons angle for the story.

Larry Kamer of Kamer, Singer & Associates, a PR firm that specializes in crisis related work, emphasizes that it is important for any business to prepare for the media onslaught that inevitably follows misfortune.

"The most important thing a firm can do when responding to whatever crisis situation might arise — a criminal act, embezzlement of funds, a mass illness — is to realize that they have to be open about it and that they will have to deal with the media," says Kamer.

For Pettit, that meant volunteering certain members of the firm for interviews with news organizations on the one-month anniversary of the shootings to communicate that the law practice was surviving.

"We wanted to get away from just being known as the firm where the gunman entered," Spang recalls, "and be known again as a top-notch law firm."