How to rehabilitate the reputationally ruined

Posted on by • Posted in Uncategorized • Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

As a communications advisor, I’m frequently asked how an individual or an organisation can repair their reputation after a public relations disaster.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Time is a healer for some, but not all. Humour is always a good bet, but not immediately and certainly not for all. You can smirk at corporate missteps but laughing at criminal convictions would be a tough gig.

Photo shows typewriter with the word 'crisis' typed on a piece of paper

British retailer Gerald Ratner can finally joke on X about ‘that speech’ when he told the UK Institute of Directors in 1991 that some of his jewellery products were ‘total crap’, leading to the company’s near collapse. If it takes three decades to see the funny side, there’s probably a quicker strategy.

Oops. My bad

Fast food company KFC ran out of chicken in 2018, forcing 600 of its 900 or so UK outlets to temporarily close. After recovering, it published adverts in a number of British newspapers, scrambling its initials to say ‘FCK’. Funny for some, offensive for others, maybe.

Full-on apologies do usually work. To err is human, after all. Hands up the last corporate communications team that allowed an intern to leave with all the passwords for its social media accounts?

The challenge for individuals who transgress personally rather than professionally is much tougher. I’m prompted by the launch this week of a substack (blog) from the disgraced BBC newsreader Huw Edwards. No, I’m not linking to it.

Edwards was so much a part of the BBC furniture that he was the man entrusted with telling the nation that the Queen had died.

Edwards pleaded guilty in 2024 to making indecent images of children. Up to now he has been living a relatively reclusive life following the resulting scandal.

On his substack he describes himself as a ‘journalist, political commentator, mental health campaigner’.

The reaction in the media to his new blog was predictable – ‘How dare he?’; ‘Has he no shame?’ and so on.

Edwards may feel he has ‘something to offer’ as a former journalist and commentator. While he may think so it seems few in his prospective audience can yet see beyond his disgrace – especially while the BBC complains they haven’t had any of the money back that he was paid between the date of his arrest in late 2023 and his conviction the following year.

So how could an individual who has fallen from a great height rehabilitate themselves? Well, contrition and regret will need to be front of stage in any such effort.

Are some people beyond rehabilitation?

That’s why there’s no prospect of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor being rehabilitated. He denies any wrongdoing, I have to say. But public opinion has another view and he’s in disgrace following the fallout of his relationship with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his own disastrous Panorama interview with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis.

Mountbatten Windsor is not the role model here. John Profumo, ex Secretary of State of War, might be. His political career ended after he admitted he had lied to the UK House of Commons about his relationship with a 19 year-old model, Christine Keeler.

Profumo spent decades working in the East End of London for charity and declined to comment on his previous life or on the scandal that cost him his career. His charitable work helped restore his reputation and he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1975.

Keep out of the public eye, Huw…

Similarly, Edwards needs to find something to do that does not require him to be in the public eye. There is not much appetite for hearing the views and opinions of a convicted sex offender, after all.

A charitable endeavour of some sort beckons. Edwards says he’s a mental health campaigner. Maybe that’s the cause to embrace. But it will take some genuine self-reflection by him to be convincing in this role. And a charity willing to take him on. Neither seems too likely at the moment.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

NCP collapse: why the parking giant’s failure has provoked mirth rather than upset

Posted on by • Posted in Business & Money, Media & Communications • Tagged , , , , ,
Photo shows a multi-storey car park with the NCP logo on the side

The German language has a great word to describe the public reation to the collapse of NCP, once the dominant name in British parking. It’s Schadenfreude, literally ‘the satisfaction one takes in the misfortune of others’. The failure of NCP has triggered a wave of such satisfaction.

For many people, the company’s fall into administration feels less like an unfortunate casualty of shifting commuter habits and more like the inevitable consequence of a corporate model that pushed customers to the limit for too long.

For years, NCP symbolised a kind of unavoidable urban frustration: high charges, confusing tariffs, aggressive enforcement, and the sense that convenience came at whatever price the company felt it could get away with.

I should declare an interest. My partner received a stiff fine for overstaying her welcome in a London multi-storey run by NCP by five minutes. Her defence was the presence of two very drunk aggressive men sitting on the floor by her car. She didn’t feel safe walking alone to her vehicle. There was no one in the ticket office who could help, and although a random passerby did step in, NCP still issued a penalty and rejected her excuse as ‘groundless’.

So being worried about your personal safety is not a defence. Good to know.

This is why, as the administrators were pointing to structural losses such as ‘inflexible leases’ on some NCP sites plus the long tail of the pandemic, the public conversation has focused on something basic: trust. Or rather, the lack of it.

Convicted in the court of public opinion

When a company becomes shorthand for overcharging, it loses the reservoir of goodwill that might otherwise soften the blow when times get tough. Instead of rallying behind a familiar brand, many people have responded with a shrug or, worse, a sense of poetic justice. The comments section of today’s NCP story on the Daily Mail website, that well-known barometer for public opinion, is full of posts that start ‘Hahahahahaha’. That reaction may feel harsh, especially for the 682 employees now facing uncertainty, but it reveals something important about how consumers judge corporate behaviour.

People are increasingly unwilling to support businesses that treat customers as captive revenue streams rather than partners in a long‑term relationship. In an era where alternatives are only ever a few taps away, loyalty has to be earned, and pricing is part of that. When companies push too far they sow the seeds of long‑term vulnerability.

NCP’s collapse is a reminder that public support is not a given. Once it’s lost, it cannot be summoned back in a crisis. It’s a timely reminder for everyone in corporate communications.

Photo credit: Uran Wang on Unsplash

Society is at risk from journalism cuts

Posted on by • Posted in Homepage, Media & Communications • Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Journalism is shrinking in plain sight and the scale of the collapse is far larger than most people realise. In the UK and US alone, more than 3,400 journalism jobs disappeared in 2025, according to the journalists’ trade magazine Press Gazette.

Entire newsrooms have been hollowed out, with January 2026 alone seeing nearly 1,000 layoffs.

These figures capture only the cuts large enough to be publicly announced; the real number is almost certainly higher. And the trend is not confined to digital‑only outlets or small local papers. Legacy broadcasters, national publishers, and global news organisations are all shedding reporters, editors, photographers, and producers at a pace that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The Washington Post’s decision to lay off more than 300 journalists, nearly a third of its newsroom, shows how deep the crisis has become.

A paper once defined by its global reporting and local accountability is closing its sports section, shrinking its metro desk, cutting international bureaus, and eliminating its daily news podcast. Entire teams were dismissed in minutes, including even correspondents reporting from war zones.

Leadership framed the cuts as a “necessary response” to falling traffic and a changing media landscape, but the result is unmistakable: fewer reporters covering fewer stories for fewer people.

What’s being lost is not just jobs. It’s the infrastructure that allows a society to understand itself. When local reporters disappear, corruption grows in the dark. When international bureaus close, global crises become remote, abstract things.

When investigative teams shrink, powerful institutions face less scrutiny. And when newsrooms are forced to chase scale rather than depth, public debate becomes thinner, louder, and easier to manipulate.

The damage is cumulative and largely invisible, until it isn’t. We may not feel the loss of a laid‑off reporter today, but we will feel the consequences when misinformation fills the gaps, when communities lose their watchdogs, and when democratic institutions weaken without anyone noticing.

Journalism is not just another industry in decline. It is a public good, and its erosion is a slow‑moving crisis that affects all of us, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Photo by Marek Pospíšil on Unsplash

Olympic boss’s threat to PR team: not a good look

Posted on by • Posted in Homepage, Media & Communications, Sport & Leisure • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kirsty Coventry, President of the International Olympic Committee, appeared to threaten a member of her public relations team with the sack mid-way through a post-Winter Olympic Games press conference after being blindsided by journalists’ questions.

IOC President Kirsty Coventry seated at a lectern featuring the Olympic rings
IOC President Kirsty Coventry

The awkward moment came after two questions for which she appeared unprepared. First, a reporter asked the IOC President if she had any comment about the reluctance of Germany to host the 2036 Olympic Games because they would take place in the centenary year of the Nazi-era Games in Berlin.

Coventry said she was unaware of any comments by Germany around the 2036 Olympic Games, adding: “So I don’t really have an opinion on it.”

A later question, about what the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the IOC knew of doping in Russia around the Sochi Games led to another pause. Coventry said she was not across that story either, and remarked, “OK, I’m really looking at my team and maybe someone needs to be dismissed because I’m not aware of that either. But I would be very interested to find out more about it.”

There was no need for this answer. In such situations, it’s always acceptable for a senior executive to say “I don’t know”. No one can be expected to have read every press report or have heard every story about an issue and to be able to answer questions about it.

The best response is to promise the journalist a call back later once the executive has had an opportunity to find out more.

“I’m sorry I can’t answer your question right now but I promise I’ll go and find out more and come back to you later today with a proper answer,” would be the model response in this situation.

Publicly throwing your PR team under the bus? Not so much.

Full disclosure, I worked at the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 2011-2013

How AI can’t be the friend you need in a PR crisis

Posted on by • Posted in Media & Communications • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s 6pm on a Friday. The mobile phone rings and there’s a journalist waiting to speak to you, armed with a story that can shred your company’s reputation as soon as it’s published on Saturday morning.

Is that when you reach for ChatGPT to give you an answer to the reporter’s questions or when you ask your trusted communications advisor to provide a response that helps head off a potential crisis?

In a business landscape where crises can ignite in minutes and spread globally before leaders have even gathered in a room, it is tempting to believe that AI could one day manage the response.

But the truth is that crisis communication remains an inherently human discipline.

Technology can support, accelerate, and inform, but it cannot replace the judgment, empathy, and contextual awareness required when an organisation’s reputation is on the line.

Crises are not just information problems; they are emotional, social, and ethical challenges. They involve fear, uncertainty, conflicting interests, and rapidly shifting expectations. Only people can navigate that terrain with the nuance it demands.

AI excels at processing data, drafting language, and monitoring sentiment, yet it lacks the lived experience that allows communicators to read a room, understand cultural sensitivities, or anticipate how a message will land with different audiences. In a crisis, the difference between reassurance and escalation often comes down to tone, timing, and the subtle signals leaders send.

Those decisions require intuition shaped by years of navigating organisational dynamics and public expectations. They require the ability to weigh legal risk against moral responsibility, or to advise a CEO when silence is more damaging than an imperfect admission. No algorithm can fully grasp those trade-offs. (Not yet, anyway!)

Crises also demand trust, and trust is built through human presence. Employees and customers want to hear from leaders who sound accountable, empathetic, and real, not from automated systems. When people are anxious or angry, they look for signs of sincerity and care. They want to feel that someone is listening, not simply generating responses. AI can help craft these messages, but only humans can embody them.

The future of crisis communication will be shaped by technology, but I believe it will be led by people. The organisations that navigate crises most effectively will be those that use AI as a tool, not as a substitute, and that continue to rely on human judgment to guide the moments that matter most.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash