The starting point for any form of effective pre-publication or broadcast crisis PR is an understanding how editorial decisions are made, and who makes them. This knowledge is essential if you are going to be able to influence those decisions. If this knowledge is not acquired and applied, then your prospects of securing the optimum outcome for your client are scant.

While the right to reply email will come from a journalist, the response will be scrutinised by a lawyer. It is the lawyer rather than the journalist who will be pivotal in deciding whether the threatened publication or broadcast will go ahead, or how much of the story will be included in it. It follows then that the individual you need to exert influence when it comes to editorial decisions is actually the in-house lawyer.

All Fleet Street newsrooms have lawyers embedded in them. They are in constant dialogue with the journalists and editors, and most of them do their job with consummate skill, and are held in very high regard by the editorial team. I know from experience how demanding the work can be, as it often reqires difficult conversations. having done that work myself that it is demanding and sometimes requires difficult conversations to be had both with editors and with journalists where a publication carries a high risk and there is insufficient evidence to corroborate it.

From a recent submission by Associated Newspapers to IPSO: 

“All journalists are required to seek advice from managing editors and/or the editorial legal department in respect of any proposed stories which may raise issues under the Editors’ Code or the law An in-house lawyer is present until the daily newspapers go to press, and they remain on call 24/7 for the newspapers and for Mail Online, all the editorial content of the newspapers is read before publication by an in-house lawyer. Two in-house lawyers are embedded with MailOnline and Metro. Online editors select content for legal advice pre-publication, there is constant dialogue between editors, journalists and lawyers, and lawyers monitor content as it is published.”

This extract also stresses how essential it is for crisis PR work, especially pre-publication/broadcast, to be undertaken with the same level of knowledge of the regulatory and legal background. Otherwise, there is a grave mismatch of knowledge and consequently of power in the inevitable tussle that arises when a journalist wants something published which is errant and which will do serious damage to your client’s reputation/brand, and it is your job (or at least it should be) to stop that publication taking place.

If the threatened story is factually inaccurate, in whole or in part, then this must be communicated robustly to the broadcaster or publisher and the applicable regulatory or legal provision cited. However, that is not sufficient. The in-house lawyer has also to be convinced,for example that[ the IPSO Code is breached, then there will be some form of reckoning.

So, since such dialogue is essentially with a media lawyer, then surely it should be undertaken by a media lawyer? Doing it this way will ensure the requisite expertise is deployed, but also the necessary signal of intent is sent. Since all you are asking of the paper (as is usually the case) is to comply with a code which has been drafted by newspaper editors and which they have voluntarily signed it up to, it is hardly an unreasonable stipulation.

Any such dialogue will be most effective if the in-house lawyer with whom you are dealing knows and trusts you.