Monday Morning Media Minute

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

You don’t like that story about you in today’s newspaper?  And you’re tempted to complain about it?  Be careful what you ask for.

Consider this item by Denver Post columnist Susan Greene:

“Snow means spin for the ski industry.  Mountain folk long have chided ski companies for overestimating accumulations and hyping snowfall.  Take, for example, the October storm on the (Colorado) Front Range when Vail Resorts eagerly announced that it shut down its headquarters because the heavy snow was so terrific.  What the company didn’t mention is that its offices are in low country in Broomfield, 75 miles from its closest slopes, where it was warm and sunny that day.”

Veteran reporter Bob Berwyn of the Summit Daily News had the temerity to point this out and observed:  “I sometimes wonder whether the ski industry wouldn’t benefit more from being completely transparent about weather and snowfall with its customers.  But when snow = money, perhaps that’s expecting too much.”

The Grand Poobahs at Vail complained to Berwyn’s editor and he was told he needed to do a “lot of groveling.”  Berwyn declined to grovel.  And he was fired with a couple weeks.

Score one for the ski resort?  Not so fast.  As the headline on Green’s column puts it, the controversy snowballed from there with the result that reputation and credibility both Vail Resorts and the Summit Daily News have suffered.  Part of the snowball was Green’s column.  I’m adding a small flake or two now.

If a story about you contains a significant mistake, by all means consider asking for a correction.  If it unfairly paints you in a negative light, consider your options for telling the story differently – and for pointing out to the reporter involved why you think you were treated unfairly.  But complaining about a story just because you don’t like it.  That can be dangerous territory.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

Vail Resorts will ask the lift operators, ski instructors and all the other seasonal workers on their payroll to take a 2.5 percent pay cut when they show up for the new ski season next winter.

So what else is new?  There’s a lot of that going around these days.

Here’s what’s new:  CEO Rob Katz won’t take any pay for a year and will take a 15 percent cut from his current pay the year after that.  He won’t take any kind of stock options.  Other executives will have their salaries cut by up to 10 percent.  And board members will reduce their annual cash retainers for serving on the board by 20 percent.  The seasonal workers will take their pay cuts at the beginning of next winter’s ski season.  The executives will take their cut in pay at the beginning of next month.

That’s leadership.  And it stands in marked contrast to the complete failure of leadership at AIG, which plans to hand out $165 million in bonuses to people at a company that has accepted $170 billion in government bailout money because, we’ve been told, their business was on the brink of collapse and threatening to take the rest of the economy down with it.

The employees of Vail Resort aren’t going to like having their pay cut.  They struggle to make it on what they make now.  But they’ll be less resentful because the execs are also taking a cut in pay.

Meanwhile, AIG’s handing out bonuses after looting the U.S. Treasury.  They’re going to be raked over the coals this week in Congress and elsewhere.  And they’ve set themselves up as a target for legislative and legal retribution.  They may have a few sympathizers on Wall Street.  But they don’t have any friends on Pennsylvania Avenue or Main Street.  And that’s going to hurt them.  Ultimately, they’ll pay a big price for those bonuses.

What’s the point?  If you find yourself in a situation where your actions or your clients’ actions will be unpopular because they’ll cause pain for the rest of us a little leadership and sacrifice will go a long way toward gaining public acceptance.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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