TJ Walker apologizes for accidentally sending an outdated newsletter to 12,000 subscribers. He finished it Tuesday evening for Wednesday morning delivery, then learned about Brian Williams' NBC suspension and tried to fix it at 5am, but resent last week's version instead. He explains the timeline and why owning the mistake matters.
Questions this video answers
February 13, 2015
Approximately 12,000 subscribers
6:00 am
7:00 pm
About 14 hours before the planned Wednesday morning distribution
Chapters
Okay, it looks like this is the week for people making major blunders in the media and getting caught and punished. Well, I made some mistakes this week. I want to apologize to you and be fully transparent. Look, we all make mistakes folks. It's not often whether or not you make a mistake, but how you handle it, how you react and what your intentions were. Now we've all seen what happened with Brian Williams this week. He essentially lost his whole career over mistakes about fabricating experience in his life. Now number one, I'm not as famous or as important as Brian Williams and number two, it's a different situation, but I made a big blunder this week, at least a medium sized blunder. I accidentally sent you a newsletter earlier this week that purported to be all the news of the week and 9/10 of it were old news from last week. Was I trying to fool you? Trick you? Pull one over? No, it's not quite like that. Here is what happened. As many of you know, I send out a newsletter to all of you and it's about 12,000 on the list every Wednesday morning. So it's something regular. You know it's coming, it's follow up tips, it's analysis of media training and presentation training tips in the media. And I try to do this on a very regular basis. Well, this Wednesday I had a training at the United nations and I knew I would be leaving my home at 6am There wouldn't be time to put it out that morning. So I finished it at 7pm Tuesday night. Well, my lead story was about Brian Williams, but this was before NBC had suspended him. I didn't find out about that until 9pm so at 7pm I finished the newsletter, put it on an automatic setting to be distributed on Wednesday morning some 14 hours later. Well, at 9am I realized I was going to have to change it because it was now dated. It didn't make any sense the commentary I had because it was under the assumption that Brian Williams might be back on the air in a week. So I decided to do a new commentary. Well, at 5:00am Sort of bleary eyed. Before I had to leave for my training I created a new video. I then took what I thought was the old newsletter, put the new video on, hit it, programmed to go out. But what I had forgotten is the headline about Brian Williams in trouble at NBC from the newsletter I wrote this week. Tuesday was essentially the same headline as the newsletter from a week ago. So I erroneously pulled the newsletter out from a week ago, put the one news story on and sent that out. Some of you were nice enough to comment and say, hey tj, enjoy your newsletter, but I don't know if you realize it, every story was exactly the same except for the first one. Now those of you who pointed that out, I do appreciate it. For those of you who were too polite to mention it and you noticed it, while I appreciate you being polite, please feel free to let me know when I've blundered. So I apologize. I try to give you timely information and I don't want to sound grandiose, like I'm as important and trusted a figure as a network anchor on NBC News, but I do value my relationship with you. Most of you are past clients have been to my trainings before, so I don't want to appear incompetent or like I'm trying to fool you. So that's why I am putting this out. It's Friday morning and I'm sending it to you this week as a little apology. And I'm giving you all sorts of other news commentaries, things that were supposed to be in the newsletter this week, plus new ones since then. So my little bit of apology and I'm hoping that the other lesson here is if you do screw up, just tell people and let them know what happened. Most of the time they'll say, okay, there was no malice there. I wasn't obviously trying to line my pockets in some nefarious way, and I think most people will just forgive and forget. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for being a regular, at least semi regular viewer and reader of this newsletter.
