KWS is very pleased to be able to offer clients access to a communications and reputation management master. John Allin and I worked together when John was the Media Affiars Manager for Victoria Police. Now KWS offer his exceptional talents to clients in need of a comprehensive communications specialist. John revels in a crisis and on occasions our clients have needed his dexterity with media. KWS is keen for our clients to build and protectv their reputation. Workplace behaviour complaint and other matters affecting client reputation can now be managed.
Reputation management – and all that is bundled up in those two words – simply has to be on the radar of all corporate executives and senior management as they go about their day-to-day business. Those who fail to acknowledge the impact of the media do so at their own peril. Fact: it is a journalist’s to hunt down good stories in the public interest. What actually is in the public interest, though, is often a topic of hot debate.
Sometimes information will fall onto a reporter’s lap; perhaps by a disgruntled employee leaking tantalising details of workplace scuttlebutt (that may or may not have elements of truth) or by a journalist trawling through a public (or a confidential) report. Indeed there are thousands of ways a journalist will get information that may become a key part of a story.
A story that could spell disaster for an organisation if there has been no proactive work or if the response is hasty, defensive, sloppy or just plain wrong.
Knowing how the media works is essential preventive medicine in the corporate environment – or any workplace. Many companies today factor in media training as part and parcel of their professional development programs for senior executives and corporate spokespeople.
While media training is an excellent skill to have, KWS believes a fundamental understanding of media – in particular newspapers, television and radio – is essential. Why? So that someone in the organisation can get on top of a situation by actually knowing:
- How to identify a good story that will help to profile an organisation favorably
- Who will be interested in a particular workplace initiative
- What swift action to take if something goes wrong and is likely to attract media attention
- What to say and what not to say to the media
- Who to keep in the loop
- How to work the media to achieve the best outcome
Having this knowledge embedded both in corporate philosophy and also in practice manuals can often remove the need to hire expensive spin-doctors to help mop up the mess afterwards and mitigate reputation damage.
Complaints, diversity, equal opportunity, workplace behaviour and whisteblowing are all increasingly becoming news ‘fodder’. This is why executives in the workplace should know as much as possible about how the media works – for the sake of the organisation.
John Allin has an insider’s view of the media. John is our media and communications strategist and adviser and also runs his own consultancy – John Allin & Associates. He is the person we believe can give our clients ‘Keys to Media Doors’ In recent times John has been a writer and communication strategist for the Australian Medical Association (Victoria), the Country Fire Authority, Battiston Consulting and the Springvale Botanical Cemetery.
For more than 25 years he was a journalist and editorial executive at The Age. This included four years as editor of the Warrnambool Standard (Fairfax’s Victorian regional daily). John worked for The Age mainly in Melbourne but was on assignment from time to time in southern Africa, Papua New Guinea and Scandinavia. He reported on various “rounds” including police, education, environment and politics. He was editor of the newspaper’s Tuesday lifestyle section Melbourne Living. He was responsible for editorial training at The Age, taught news writing part-time at RMIT and chaired the university’s Journalism Course Advisory Committee.
He left mainstream journalism to take up the position of media manager at Victoria Police and, later, head of media and public affairs at Deakin University.
He is a Fellow of Leadership Victoria, an alumnus of the Cranlana Program, board director of Kilvington Girls’ Grammar, member of the Melbourne Press Club and a member of the Public Relations Institute of Australia. He is also a Quill Awards judge for Outstanding Journalism
His most recent short story, Kirste’s Wine – in which he tells of revisiting a child abduction case which he covered for ‘The Age’ 33 years ago – appears in Outside the Law 3, published by Five Mile Press in July 2009.
