Why do media companies often fumble handling their own bad press?
December 3, 2007You would think that a media company would be, well, media-savvy. Especially if it’s a Web media company like CNET, surely they must understand how the 24-hour news cycle works in this new Internet age. You don’t let the rumour mill and blog posts just churn away for days, you have to respond immediately and forcefully. In the old media world it was called “getting ahead of the story”. But in the Jeff Gertsmann controversy I think CNET’s PR department has forgotten these lessions.
They initially failed to respond in any kind of official press release to the rumour that Gerstmann was fired for a negative review. You don’t just send out your PR person to talk to reporters, the company has have to make an official statement on its own Web sites. Having the PR flack talk to old-school reporters isn’t going to work, most of the action on this controversy is happening in the blogosphere and bulletin boards. CNET wanted to incite more user-generated content, well they’ve succeeded in a big way.
Nor do you clumsily remove the video review that’s at the heart of the controversy. That only feeds the rumour that his firing is related to pressure from an advertiser unhappy at the content of that review. That was just so poorly handled, they should fire or at least discipline the idiot who thought it was even remotely a good idea to try and pull the video like that. Especially since CNET’s a big user of Akamai, where content gets distributed and stored in a bunch of different servers all over the world. They should have known from a technical standpoint how useless it would be to try pulling down the review–you let that cat out of the bag the instant you decided to use Akamai.
The one good step is, they finally did decide to take the controversy head-on with this posting on Gamespot. But even that’s rather thin on details. Plus they don’t give it an honest byline — instead of coming from a person, the byline just says “By Staff, Gamespot”. That’s a cop-out. Somebody needs to step forward and be the public face of this controversy, somebody that people can look at and say yeah, I believe that person. Nobody is going to believe a statement that hides behind a corporate byline like “Staff, Gamespot”.