Monthly Archives: February 2026

Society is at risk from journalism cuts

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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

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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

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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

Why the Mandelson and Andrew footage is so compelling

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There’s something undeniably gripping about the recent clip of Britain’s former US ambassador Peter Mandelson being arrested and the Reuters photo of Andrew Mountbatten‑Windsor returning home from the police station. It isn’t just the shock of seeing two establishment figures caught in moments of acute vulnerability.

It’s the fact that Britain, a country that prides itself on discretion and due process, has stumbled into something resembling the American perp walk, that strange ritual where the accused is paraded before the cameras, handcuffed and flanked by officers, as if shame were part of the judicial process.

That’s not really the done thing in the UK. British justice normally prefers quiet corridors, closed doors and the gentle hum of paperwork.

But the sight of Mandelson being led away, or Andrew being driven along in a car with the unmistakable look of a man who has just spent several hours answering questions he’d rather not, taps into a deep cultural curiosity. These are people who have spent their lives insulated from scrutiny. Seeing them suddenly exposed feels like a crack in the façade of power.

The American perp walk is designed to send a message: no one is above the law, and the public has a right to witness accountability. It’s theatre, of course, carefully choreographed, often criticised, but undeniably effective.

In the UK, the legal system tends to recoil from such spectacle. Yet when it happens accidentally, as it has here, we can’t look away. The footage feels illicit, like we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to. It’s the contrast that makes it compelling: the grandeur of their former lives colliding with the spectre of legal consequence.

What these moments reveal is how powerful visual accountability can be. A written statement can be parsed, spun or ignored. But a man stepping out of a police station at dusk, shoulders tight, eyes fixed on the ground? That image lingers. It tells a story no press release ever could.

AI won’t kill corporate communications, it’ll make it impossible to ignore

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Those of us who work in communications hear a lot about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to eat our lunch by wiping out our jobs and taking over ‘everything’.

As is usually the case with sweeping statements like this, the reality is somewhat different.

It’s true, AI is rapidly reshaping corporate communications. But while it will take over some tasks, others are still up for grabs.

Yes, AI is going to take over low-value, labour-intensive activities, there is not much question about that. But it will drive communicators to more valuable, strategic tasks.

As automation takes over routine things, like drafting press releases, managing distribution lists, and carrying out a lot of template-driven work, communicators will be freed up to focus on higher‑value work, such as advising executives how to root communications in their values and business strategy, and focusing on driving stakeholder engagement and trust.

AI-driven content generation does make us more efficient. It speeds up everything from drafting press releases to optimising headlines and search engine optimisation (SEO). This also ensures messaging is consistently refined for maximum engagement.

At the same time, hyper‑personalization allows companies to move beyond broad, generic outreach. Communications can now be tailored to individual preferences, behaviours, and contexts, at scale.

Predictive analytics is becoming a cornerstone of modern reputation management. With real‑time monitoring and trend forecasting, organizations can anticipate issues before they escalate, shifting from reactive crisis response to proactive reputation stewardship.

AI also enhances operational efficiency by automating scheduling, reporting, and meeting summaries, freeing communicators to focus on strategy and creativity.

Global teams benefit from real‑time multilingual translation tools such as DeepL, which eliminate language barriers and support seamless cross‑cultural collaboration. And as audiences increasingly rely on AI-generated answers, visibility will depend on appearing in AI-powered search results, a step beyond traditional SEO.

What does all this mean for communicators?

It’s mainly good news. Communications teams will need fewer people. But the jobs on offer will be more valuable, more strategic. Human judgment, such as context, nuance, and emotional intelligence, remains irreplaceable, even as AI handles tactical execution. New skills will emerge as essential: AI literacy, data interpretation, and ethical oversight.

AI isn’t replacing communicators, it’s elevating us. Those who embrace this partnership will, I believe, lead the next era of corporate storytelling.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash