Benjamin Haslem
This from Sydney's Daily Telegraph:
(A) furious chef, who regularly travels on the Blue Mountains line, hijacked a media conference at Central to unleash his wrath on acting chief executive Rob Mason, who was attempting to quell fears RailCorp was putting people's lives at risk through poor services.
RailCorp's media minders failed to follow a golden rule of issues and crisis management.
Where ever it's possible, you should hold a media conference dealing with a crisis as far away from the crisis as possible.
A case in point (other than the Telegraph story above) was the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.
Exxon handled its media relations from a site on the coast of Alaska. Here there were any number of angry fisherman, government officials and environmentalists to quote. The site was also incapable of handling the flood of journalists who arrived on the scene.
Anyone who travels on RailCorp's CityRail services in the morning peak knows it's in crisis. So holding a media conference anywhere on its network is fraught with danger.
Hat tip to Trevor Cook for this one.
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