PR Crisis Breakdown of the Week

I did make. So I, I do want to point out the couple things I want to talk about today. The two things. Well, and I'm going to start with this. I'm going to apologize because I will not be articulate at all. I have not done anything live or recorded or any thought coherently in the last week and a half. So that's just one. My brain is still a little bit in vacation mode, except right now I'm in. I'm in caregiver mode. I am a nurse, a non real. But I've elevated myself to nurse practitioner because I want to feel like that upper level. So that's what I've been doing. I've been on nursing duty right now for someone recovering quite well actually. So I'm not even home yet from all that. But I have been working the last couple days and this is what I jump back into. So a couple things. One, last week when I was on vacation, I had a reach out, you know, and I told my team, I said, I'm not working. I don't want, I don't want to be disturbed about anything. And then I got a text from a booker from NBC and he is my favorite booker. And one of the reasons why is he really helped me one time for this one interview, I was in New York City and I had to get from one place to another place and it was a mess. And he really, really helped me out. So I've always been grateful to him ever since. So when he asked if I would do an interview. Yeah. Cause it's you. And it was the Sean Combs verdict came in. Now I had recorded my podcast the week prior to that. So my podcast is the PR Breakdown podcast with Molly McPherson. It's out once a week. It comes out every Wednesday. I recorded it before I left for vacation. And at that point the jury was. There was one jury holdout. Now I don't have a conspiracy brain unless it comes to celebrities. People in the public eye did he. And I thought, I thought for sure that okay, did he got to the juror, Diddy got to that juror. Now I recorded and said I thought that he would be convicted on all counts. Then I went off, la la la la la. My vacation. And then I got the call or we found out that there were two counts, you know, that he wasn't dinged for. But I said, I'm not going on TikTok. I'm not going on social. We did this interview. And the great thing about this interview, people in my members of my substack know this. There's people who follow me, but members of my substack know this. Last month, I launched the beta version of my Mollify app, Molly Fine, which is a play on Mollify. I like to calm things. So it's a beta version. And so my membership has this app that they've been using. But I needed to come up with a response for Diddy, like, quickly. So I used my own app to come up with my responses. And I'm sitting there like this old school, doing the media interview, you know, getting. Prepping the media interview, writing it down. But I use my own app, so it's like my own words were coming back to me. It was fantastic. And then I set up my sis. No my daughter's computer on an ironing board and had a great background. Oh, my gosh, my parents house, they have a much better background than I do in my own office. It looked fantastic. But that was one thing I want to point out. So members of my. Of my substack have access to that and other members. If you want to be a member of my substack when it launches in September, you're going to get specials on that. And then my podcast this week is about this topic that I want to talk about. Or two, let me talk about the first topic in the second topic. The first thing that I talk about in my podcast this week is about the summer scandal. Now, even though I still haven't really been working at home, I've been working. I've been working on two of my clients stuff. You know, dealing with client stuff. And one on TikTok, everybody was asking me about it, like, to comment on it, and, like, I can't because I get pulled into drama sometimes and I can't talk about it. But I have clients who are dealing with the very thing that I talked about in my podcast this week that July. If you work in comms, if you work. If you work in leadership, anything like that, and you're dealing with an issue and you think, oh, nothing's really happening. The press isn't calling. This issue's gonna go away. Like, this is real time for me with clients right now. I always say, oh, do not get comfortable in July. Do not get comfortable in July. Because reporters work over the summer. Now, one reporter who's not working is the one who's recovering from a knee surgery right now. He's an investigative reporter, and he is not working. So if you hear grunts and moans from the other side of the room, it's Gonna be him trying to move. Cause his nurse is here doing a subs deck live. But summer is the time that in newsrooms, it's skeleton news crews. You get a lot of back to school stories, you get travel stories, tourist stories, you get some politics. Like we had the New York mayoral primary stories like that was a big story. But you don't get news unless it's breaking news or disaster news or like weather news. Texas, you know, and after Texas flooding, we're going to get hurricanes. We're going to get more storms too. But a lot of reporters are prepping or finishing up the hit pieces that come up in September. September is the. Let me see what this. So Louise, I may able to. Oh, great, Louise. Thank you. September. So when it comes to issues management, risk management, crisis communication, July feels like the time to take it easy and to calm down. And honestly, I wish I could calm down this summer, but my client work is ratcheting up because clients are dealing with issues. And I know that a lot of these reporters are working on stories that are gonna hit September. So we're doing our stuff right now. So if you work in any type of strategic comms, you be the person that. It doesn't have to be a red flag, but just, just be on alert, okay? Because they're. Because that's when reporters work on these stories or they finish these stories. And the September, it just. And I mentioned in the podcast, like, does anyone remember all these September stories? And this is why I know about it, because not only does it come up in my work, but as a content creator who follows crises, I remember when they happen because they also intersect in my life at a time when it's super busy. Lizzo, Lizzo dropped in August of 24. I'm gonna get. Now I'm gonna conflate all my years. But that was August 23. 20. Damn. I think it was 23. But Lizzo, her and her lawyer came out with, you know, going against the dancers who filed a lawsuit. And because no news happens in August, it became the news story. Jimmy Fallon, the Rolling Stone hit piece, they worked on all that. They dropped it in September. 2020. Buzzfeed had the big hit piece about Ellen DeGeneres. Now that story came out in July, but only because it would have come out in September. But the only reason why it didn't come out in September is because Ellen DeGeneres show was premiering. I think it was the 19th season. I can't remember. It was her last season. I did multiple podcasts about Ellen DeGeneres, my goodness. But that hit piece, it kind of hit over that time. Joe Jonas, do you remember the Joe Jonas now that must have been 23, right? What is it? It's 2025, I think it was two years ago. Yeah, Kyle, Marissa Roth and I, we kind of tagged on this one. They tried to manage that divorce late August, early September over Labor Day. They tried to slip it in, thinking no one was paying attention. And that is a throwback strategy from decade because you know, when I, you, you guys hear me talk, especially if you're on TikTok, if you know me from TikTok or Instagram, you hear me talk about the Friday news dump. Stories get dumped on Fridays because they, they slide under. But this was a time before social media because news proofs, just like in the summer, people are paying attention. The news viewership, really, readership, it's about newspapers. That's really where it originated. Kind of drops off everything's skeleton and then people bury them on Friday press releases and everything so that it' gotten by Monday. So something comes up. But you can't Friday news dump anymore. You really can't. Because social people are on social media. So that's why it doesn't work. And it didn't work for Joe Jonas for that very reason, because everybody on TikTok said we are not going to discuss that. So now, speaking of not slow news is the podcast that I'm working on for next week. I just wrote it right now and I will say I'm recently now. I just started partnering with Muckrack. It's a pr. It's like a media database and I use it. Why I love using it is because I can get all my news stories now. I can just do quick searches and I can just get all the sourced material. And one of the reasons why I chose the Texas flooding, because one, it is absolutely tragic, it is a horrible story. It is a massive news story. And the reason why it's such a big news story too is because there isn't other news in July. There's nothing else going on in July. Usually July, August, September. I used to work for fema. That's when we were preparing. I was doing hurricane preparedness in May because I knew in late summer and in early fall is when all these big news stories or all the disasters happen, particularly hurricane season. But now we have flooding and with the flooding story, it's going to dominate. Now the flooding story has. Wait, do I need muckrack? Louise, do not Google Muck rack until I give you the link to Muck Rack. Okay, Louise, get my Molly link to Muck Rack. Yes, you and I, because you're a member on Substack, I will talk to you how to use Muck Rack in a great way. So I promise you. But this Texas flood story, it is incredibly tragic. I was on vacation when it was happening. I don't know if you guys saw this video, and it's not out there anymore, but, like, when you see people in the white cabin go down the water. And when it first happened, too, the craziness of that story is not. A few months ago, I was in San Antonio, I was speaking in San Antonio, and I. And I hiked right next to that river. So normally I would have no idea where that river is. And I thought, damn, I know exactly where that river is, because I hiked where everybody kind of camped on. Like, I got that. And Miss New England, Miss Northern Hemisphere, like, cold Northeast person, upper Midwest girl, it was so damn hot down there. I thought I could not possibly be in a tent. I mean, that's why I remember spending so much time thinking about this. Like, these people are camping down here. Like, this is so hot. But that's where it happened, and it is so tragic. With that campsite now, what makes the story obviously even bigger are the girls at the mystic camp. It creates its own narrative because it's so sad and there's so much content and you see the names and you see the photos has that very 911 esque quality to it where when it first happened, people were looking like, if you know any information about this girl, I mean, it's. It's awful, a thousand times over. But even though I was on vacation, what I was doing, I was paying attention to the response. My first thought, and this is what I put in for my podcast next week. This is what I put into Muckrack. I wanted to find all of the pressers. My first thought was political, as someone who worked for FEMA still knows. People who work with FEMA have a lot of friends with fema. As many of you know, President Trump has vowed to disband it. He wants to remove power and make disasters come from a state response and not a federal response. That has been a charge of his from the very beginning. So back in January, I gotta go to my notes. So back in January, this is for my script for next week. I actually pulled a clip. So there was. So back in January, FEMA had a. Like a meeting. Like a. It was like a review of your review. Council, like, set up by the White House to review fema, which is really. It's kind of like setting up your fall, your downfall. It's like walking to the guillotine. That's what happened. And in this.