Crisis PR

Crisis PR

Jonathan undertakes much of his corporate reputation management work alongside top PR agencies who bring him in either to stop a story being published or to secure a correction it if has. He has even done crisis PR for a leading PR company.

The best way to deal with a PR crisis is to ensure that it does not happen; prevention being far better than any attempted cure. Some of Jonathan’s best work is done prior to publication/broadcast to prevent the publication of damaging media reports.

On the broadcast side; Jonathan has:

  • Brought about the cancellation of an entire TV programme attacking a major online retailer,
  • Procured the abandonment of both a Watchdog and This Morning piece about an online financial service company;
  • Achieved the dropping of a report planned for Radio 4’s PM programme about another major corporate client, sending off a letter within 20 minutes of being instructed.

Recent successes concerning threatened press stories include:

  • Acting for a major American consumer brands company preventing publication of a false story that one of its leading toiletry products cause chemical burns;
  • Representing a blue-chip school and preventing publication of a false story alleging that it had suffered a possible instance of coronavirus;
  • Acting for a Premiership footballer to prevent publication of a false story about his private life;
  • The dropping of a very adverse Mail on Sunday story about a major healthcare provider.

All of these stories would have inflicted substantial damage to brand/reputation. These outcomes were achieved by taking immediate and robust action, without recourse to litigation (i.e. no injunction was necessary), and so both discretely and at modest cost to the client.

Jonathan believes that his crisis PR offering is unique because of the goodwill, contacts and intel that he has gleaned from undertaking clearance and/or contentious content work for clients such as ITV, Sky, Huffington Post, MTV, Haymarket Media Group, and Newsweek, during which time he has in effect made editorial decisions in crisis PR situations.

Here is an article drawn from Jonathan’s work as a content lawyer in which he warns of a trap which PR folk can easily fall into.

The benefit of being known to support high quality journalism and training journalists is that Jonathan enjoys good relationships with the in-house legal teams at the major media outlets, which permits him to deploy persuasion and diplomacy when that has a real chance of securing the best outcome for his client.