Last week, the Salt Lake Tribune cut their newsroom staff from 90 to 56 and announced they will stop publishing statewide news sections and reduce content in other sections. The Denver Post announced they will drop 30 positions. The Boston Herald recently went from 240 employees to 175. The reduction of reporters is a trend that has been going on since the digital became ascendant.
In 2000, there were 65,900 reporters in the United States, but by 2015, there were 45,800 reporters and their salaries had cumulatively diminished over those years to fall behind the inflation rate. Take broadcast reporters out of the equation, and pay for reporters is below the national average. The decline in job numbers fell mostly on the newspaper side, but local radio also took a big hit.
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Every incident management team has an equilibrium--a balance, a state of mind--where maximum efficiency is reached, maximum effort is possible, and stress is maximally managed.
Think of it as spinning plate. If everything is in balance, the plate spins smoothly but once the balance is upset, wobbles ensue. Wobbles have a nasty tendency to quickly become more dramatic and are difficult to return to a balanced state. We've all probably been on wobbly incidents and it is not a good feeling. The stress increases and the incident issues do not receive the best thinking the IMT can bring to bear. PIOs occasionally ask me for advice. Even if they don't ask, here's the advice I give in part or whole to those who may want to stand up in front of a group or do media interviews: 1. Be true to yourself. The easiest way to lose credibility is to pretend to be someone else. People will know right away. As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” 2. Be humble. The ancient Greeks wrote a lot about hubris for a reason. 3. Be honest. Albert Einstein's quote applies to our work: “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” In chapter 5 of Theorizing Crisis Communication, authors Timothy Sellnow and Matthew Seeger refer to the Incident Command System (ICS) as "rigid, hierarchical" and suggest ICS "does not account for emergent groups or flexibility as disaster situation changes." They further quote another scholar who describes ICS as "ineffective for large-scale disaster response because its centralized structure cannot mesh with the political and social realities inherent in American Society." Finally, the last and most significant criticism of ICS documented in the chapter is that "the bureaucratic model lacks flexibility and does not accommodate collective improvisation..."
Needless to say, these criticisms do not match my experiences. There is a disconnect between practice and academia in how we describe and define what PIOs do. Practitioners tend towards the positional descriptor, incident information, which is not frequently found in the academic literature. Crisis communications seems to be the preferred term for scholars. However, that can refer to a whole host of public affairs, corporate communications, and incident information issues. Most often, you will see it applied to reputation management studies where topics like damaging rumors or corporate malfeasance are covered. Some writers use crisis communications to mean just about everything to include incidents, but still focus a bit more on the business world. A few scholars started using disaster communications to separate out the communications issues associated with incidents like fire, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and hurricanes. That sounds a little sensational and doesn't quite apply to some all-risk assignments, so right now, I'm stuck between crisis and incident.
It comes from our very first comment ever and was offered by Dean Siebold in response to this post. Says Dean:
It's an election year and a potentially chaotic one. That means candidates from all over will have "asks" of our firefighters, incident management teams, and agencies. Some will certainly try to wrap themselves in the image of firefighters.
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Occasional thoughts on incident response, crisis communications, wildland fire, and other topics.
Docendo disco, scribendo cogito. Blog DOB: 4/26/2018Copyright © Jim Whittington, 2019. Archives
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