In media training, PR people go to great lengths advising clients to be very, very careful if they want to use humor when dealing with reporters.Here’s an example of what happens when a top executive, Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Alan Mulally, tries to be funny and ended up red-faced instead.
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Just how many reporters treated this episode off the record? Man, he told the story first and then said it was off the record! So he can’t blame anyone who does not, right? 🙂
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Bayi: right. and we also tell our clients never to say anything off record, unless they have an 8thDan Black Belt in Media Handling Skills. Anything any spokesperson says to the press should be on record or assumed to be on record.
Nevertheless, if you want to risk it then you should set the ground rules before speaking, not after.
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Heheh!
Wot a fool! You know, there has been countless well-published instances of people saying “off record” and finding out they’ve put their shoe firmly down their throat later.
Mullaly would have been better advised to keep his mouth shut.
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I think your policy of teaching a “no off-record comment” policy ultimately is self-defeating and a disservice to your clients. If media training is what it is, then shouldn’t you be teaching them to distinguish between the quality and reliability of international news media (I’m thinking Reuters or perhaps the FT) and local outlets, say Kontan?
Your clients have every reason to be fearful and suspicious of the professionalism and capacity of a lot of local “journalists” which would make the “no-off-record” rule wise indeed.
But if your clients really want to build relationships with reliable media, they have to throw them more than the pre-packaged no-leak bone whose recipe you specialize in. That requires giving as much as possible on-record on certain issues, and giving “off-record” background that fills out the story and can be hopefully followed up on-record in the near-future. Believe me, few things raise the ire and distrust of journalists who care about what they are writing than the antiseptic news-less press releases and briefings you seem to take such pride in sculpting. In my experience, there is room for and at times a neccessity for toning down the adverserial source-journo relationship to enable a modicum of mutual trust that allows “off-record” commentary. The “media training” you describe seems designed to abort the creation of such trust and worse still, condemn the client to an absence of media coverage. Or is that the purpose of the exercise?
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Kay: With all due respect to foreign correspondents and respectable news organizations, the quality of journalists from even the most reputable news organizations is not even. One need not go on at length at the spotty record of, say, The New York Times, to support this assertion.
As such it is safer for businesspersons to treat everything they say on record. We do, hoever, have a caveat on the “no off record comment” dictum: they can choose to go off record only if they have an 8th dan Black Belt in media handling skills. Then again they should know that they take a risk of it backfiring because ultimately the journalist’s loyalty is not to them but to the readers. If it is a big enough story the journalist may just decide to burn his source for the story.
One other point: local reporters are also a varied lot. Some of them are very good but many of them are bad. I think the 80/20 rule applies here, as it is with foreign correspondents. Only we need to judge foreign corespondents by the higher pay scale they receive, compared to the much lower salaries of the local reporters. You know the saying about peanuts and monkeys.
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Unspun 
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