How and why to feed the media beast
By Janelle Foskett, managing editor, FireRescue magazine

Have you ever watched video of a serious fire emergency, like the San Bruno (Calif.) gas explosion, or read a scandalous story online about a fire chief’s alleged inappropriate behavior, and found yourself wondering, “If this happened here, at my department, how would I handle the media?”

If you haven’t wondered this, you should.

According to prominent fire blogger Dave Statter of STATter911.com, it’s essential that every department have a clear plan for how to communicate with the public long before a major event actually happens. Also critical are those regular (non-emergency) communications with the public that help build what he calls “reputation equity.”

Statter addressed these issues today in his FDIC session “The PIO Reporter: Telling Your Story in a World Where ‘Spin’ Doesn’t Work.” Considering Statter’s decades of experience in the media as well as his involvement in the fire and EMS community, I was eager to hear his thoughts on how firefighters can navigate this “post-media world.” Here’s what he had to say:

Janelle Foskett (JF): How often should fire departments communicate with the public and/or its stakeholders—every day, every week?
Dave Statter (DS): The short answer is daily—in fact, multiple times a day. The tools are available for a fire department to easily communicate directly with the public. The Internet and various social media platforms are free and they’re easy to use. It’s no longer a requirement to go through your local TV station or newspaper to communicate with the people you serve.

You need to open that line of communications with the public. Become a trusted and valued source of information for your community. It could be a blog from the fire chief. It could be the PIO putting out news of what the fire department is doing that day or safety messages. It might be a picture you’re sending out with a little caption. It might be a couple of lines about an incident. But you want to feed that beast constantly. It’s a key to building an audience. It’ll be slow in the beginning. You may only have a few people, but the more you do it, the more people will be watching for it and relying on it. And as I say all this, you still need the traditional news media. While their audience has been shrinking, for now they still reach the larger audience. This is just a way for you to reach the public directly and unfiltered. So many of us—even me, who has spent 38 years in the belly of the news media beast—have blasted the news media for something we’ve seen and didn’t like. But instead of cursing the darkness, I say turn on this light and use these to tools to start communicating directly with the public.

And the size of the department doesn’t matter. You all have the same tools. Obviously, the big issue is who at your department can do that for you.

JF: Good point. So who should be in charge of this?
DS: I would look for the most Internet-savvy person in your department—someone who has an interest in taking this on and someone who’s a good communicator. You need to set guidelines, of course. The person who handles this should know the direction of the chief (or whoever’s in charge), what the tone is and what type of information to put out there. Timeliness and relevance are important. By doing this every day, it becomes second-nature for both you and the audience you’re building. It’s like using the Incident Command System on a daily basis. When the big emergency happens, you just ratchet it up and expand what you’re doing. And you need to be there when that crisis happens in your community. The goal is to be that instantaneous source of information on these very same platforms you are using each day.

JF: What methods of communication—Twitter, Facebook, press releases to local newspapers and other media outlets—are best for your message, or in this day and age, should you just use them all?
DS: I’m finding that in a growing number of communities, the news media is keying in on the blogs, Facebook and Twitter feeds of the fire departments and getting a lot of their information there. For example, near where I live, the DC Fire and EMS Department is very active on Twitter. The news media monitors it and they get information that way from the DC PIO, Pete Piringer. And there’s a blog for the Prince George’s County (Md.) Fire Department. The news media gets a lot of stories from PIO Mark Brady that way. Both departments still send out traditional news releases, and they both still use the one-on-one contact with the news media. But you’ll find the news media is getting more and more of the news from these newer forms of communication.

There will be times when you may need the more traditional press release, but too often I see departments putting out press releases WAY too late. It doesn’t come out until a day or two after an incident. By then the news media and the public have seen the story from many other sources.

JF: What about blogs? I know some Los Angeles-area departments are using them.
DS: The Los Angeles Fire Department has been the fire service leader in this use of social media and all digital media. They’ve been a real beacon. Brian Humphrey, Devin Gales and Erik Scott are doing a remarkable job pushing out information on every platform imaginable, including their popular news and information blog. I know a lot of people on the East Coast are looking at what they do. The blogs are a great, great tool. They use widgets, too. This allows the LAFD to not only tell its own story but to do so on someone else’s website. Very smart.

JF: What would you say to someone who says, “I don’t have time to tweet or create a Facebook Fanpage or submit press releases to the media about a recent rescue.”
DS: What they’re saying is that they don’t have time to communicate with the people they serve—that they’re too busy to keep the people informed who pay their salaries or donate to the department, or that they don’t think it’s important at the height of a major emergency in the community to let the public know what actions they need to take. I think that the fire department should be a trusted and valued source of information for the citizens it serves. The way you can do that is through the daily communications that become even more important when a crisis hits.

JF: What is the major benefit to doing this, especially in the context of budgets being scrutinized?
DS: You’re helping build reputation equity by communicating with the public and with key stakeholders. These are the people you need on your side when there’s a budget battle. I’ve seen too many departments decide only when the axe is about to fall that they need to let the citizens and those who hold the purse strings know how important the fire department is in their lives. It’s too late. Besides letting them know what you are doing, you should find ways to connect with the citizens and community leaders each and every day.

JF: Now on to the scarier stuff—handling the big emergencies or scandals. With regard to a scandal, is there ever a time when you want to sit on news to see if it just goes away? Does that even exist anymore as an option?
DS: Sitting on the bad news and hoping for the best is a very dicey way to handle this issue, thanks to the Internet. Whatever your business, there are few secrets anymore. Compared to calling up a reporter in order to get a story told years ago, now there are so many avenues for people to anonymously reveal an organization’s deep, dark secrets using the Web. And once it hits the Internet, it’s compounded very quickly. If it’s really bad or interesting news, before you know it, your reputation is going down in flames. You have to be able to handle the bad news quickly or be buried by it. I advocate that if it’s really bad news and it’s going to get out eventually—and it almost ALWAYS does these days—tell it yourself.

JF: In terms of getting in front of the story, is there a difference between how you would do that (or maybe how aggressively you do that) when it comes to a scandal vs. an emergency?
DS: With the reputation issues, my motto—and the motto of many others—is “Get it out, get it right, get it behind you.” The faster you get that reputation issue behind you, the faster you can start restoring your image. Hopefully that reputation equity you’ve built along the way will help you in that process. And when I talk about telling the bad news yourself, I’m saying you don’t have to wait for the reporter to come knocking at your door. I’ve seen fire departments and other organizations that have been very successful in minimizing damage by telling the story first. At the very least be prepared to get it all out in the reporter’s initial story. The goal of getting it out is to keep from stretching this story over many days, with little leaks here and there. That is death by a thousand cuts.

As for the major emergency in your community, the public expects instantaneous communication. They expect information about the crisis as soon as they pick up their phone and check out Facebook or Twitter. If you don’t provide the information, somebody else will. If you have the interstate shut down for a hazmat situation, you need to immediately tell the public what they need to do and what’s going on. Don’t wait for the big press conference OKed by the joint information center with everybody looking all nice a couple hours later. That’s too late. You need to get the information out right away using all of the social media tools. Sure, you can still have that press conference as soon as you’re able, but the immediate, confirmed information and important updates—what’s happening, where it’s happening, what the public needs to do—needs to get out instantly.

JF: In the age of instant reporting and the “anonymous source” where some members of the media will rely on anyone for information, how do you decide which misinformation to correct and when?
DS: When it comes to anything that really challenges your reputation, I think you need to answer it, particularly if it’s wrong information. Before you know it, those errors are picked up by many other websites and your image problem has been compounded. But remember, you should be doing this because the information is not accurate—not because your ego has been bruised by a factual story that makes your department look bad.

One recent example of how bad information gets spread across the Internet happened a few weeks ago in Connecticut. A newspaper’s website posted a story on OSHA’s findings in connection to two LODDs. I immediately spotted two or three glaring errors in that article. I called an editor at the paper and before they could even correct it, three or four other news organizations had picked up the misinformation and put it out on their websites. So it’s important to get that misinformation corrected as soon as possible. It’s so easy to allow your ego to say I’m not going to deal with them because they did a bad story on us. But it may be more important to swallow your pride and correct the wrong information.

JF: Are there sample guidelines that fire departments can find online and download?
DS: You’ve got to come up with what works for your community. It’s like how all politics is local; all information is local when we’re talking about an emergency. The smart departments are establishing those guidelines themselves and are drilling with them. There are plenty of guidelines and policies being used by fire departments. Make sure that they’re up to date. I think there’s still a lot of old-school training out there about how to do PIO work—ideas that don’t really work in the current environment. Look to some of the leaders. Look at what LAFD is doing. Remember that Facebook is a giant these days. It’s really important to make sure you’re there.

I saw a really good example of handling crisis communications just before I left television news last year. It was an active shooter at a community college. I’m so used to the police department pushing us back. We got there, and the cops were waving us in. They had a really good spot for us where we could see what was going on, interview people and not be in the way. They had PIOs there to answer our questions and get us almost instant information. We didn’t have to wait for a formal press conference. I realized that this progressive police chief—not a young guy, but an older guy who’s been around for a long time—was saying, “I need the press to communicate with the public because I’m going to have a lot of panicked parents and other students and I need to get that information out.” It was obvious to me that they had drilled on this with various agencies, the fire department and everybody else and were ready to communicate. What I didn’t get to see and don’t know, is if this same police department was able to also transmit the important information to the public through the various digital platforms. If that was the case, you couldn’t ask for anything more in a time of crisis. If it wasn’t, I would imagine it will be the next step for an organization that clearly cares about keeping its citizens informed.

JF: This is great information. Do you have anything else that you’d like to add?
DS: I saw a major incident recently where the quote from the fire chief was, “I have to deal with the fire issue so I won’t talk to you [the press] for a couple of hours.” And I’m thinking, yes, you do have to put out that fire, but you also have to put out the other fire that’s happening in your community. You are the experts. People want to hear from the fire department about what they should do. There are plenty of others on Facebook and Twitter who will provide that information or misinformation if you won’t. You may have another conflagration on your hands if you don’t deal with it quickly and deal with it well.

More about Dave Statter
Dave Statter spent 38 years in broadcasting in the Washington, D.C., area before retiring in June 2010. Since May 2007, he has edited the website STATter911.com, which focuses on fire and EMS issues worldwide, with special attention to news and videos he generates from the Metropolitan Washington area. STATter911 is part of Elsevier Public Safety’s Fire & EMS blog network, which can be found at http://fireemsblogs.com. To reach Statter, e-mail dave@statter911.com.