James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at Ketchum, calmly frames a discussion of crisis communications strategy by Toyota, BP and Goldman Sachs in The New York Times this weekend. Donnelly takes care not to focus on the actions of a particular company, displaying respect for the work of other people and organizations. I sometimes see the opposite behavior from consultants, a desire to profit and self-promote at the expense of others.

A recurrent theme in the Times story is conflict between lawyers and communication strategists, shown in the excerpts below. The journalist, Peter S. Goodman, may actually be siding with the strategists. The story raises a question worth further discussion among friends in these professions: How can attorneys and communicators best work together in these scenarios? If this conflict is built-in from the start, rather than one side ‘winning’ against the other, how can it be resolved on behalf of the organization — which both teams are responsible for defending?

UPDATE: James Donnelly encourages communicators, attorneys and interested observers to participate in a poll on this question on his crisis management website, JamesJDonnelly.com.

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“‘Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,’ says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum, who — like many practitioners contacted for this article — required elaborate promises that he would not be portrayed as speaking about any particular company. ‘There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on. The good crisis-management examples rarely end waving the flag of victory. They end with a whisper, and it’s over in a day or two.’ …

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“In times of crisis, communications professionals and lawyers often pursue conflicting agendas. Communications strategists are inclined to mollify public anger with expressions of concern, while lawyers warn that contrition can be construed as admissions of guilt in potentially expensive lawsuits.

“For BP, this tension burst into view in May, when executives went to Capitol Hill with officials from two of its contractors: Transocean, which owned the offshore rig that exploded, and Halliburton, which aided BP in drilling. Executives from the three companies each disowned culpability while pointing fingers at one another.

“‘What that screamed is the lawyers are in control,’ says Eddie Reeves, a former vice president for media relations at Merrill Lynch. ‘All it did was get everybody all the more peeved at them.’ …

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“‘Toyota blew it,’ says Brad Burns, who ran communications at WorldCom, the telecommunications giant leveled by a 2001 accounting scandal. ‘It’s been the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. They knew they had problems long ago, whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error, but they knew they had an issue they had to deal with. And rather than put public safety over profits, they appear to have listened to the product liability lawyers and they totally lost it. It’s brand damage.’ …

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“Above all, crisis management is conducted with stress and sleeplessness layered atop the usual factionalism and politics afflicting any big organization. Eric Dezenhall, a communications strategist in Washington who worked in the White House for President Ronald Reagan, is amused by crises as glimpsed in movies, where people sit at banks of synchronized computers, speaking calmly into headsets.

“‘The reality is absolute chaos,’ he says. ‘Nobody knows what the facts are. The lawyers are trying to get the P.R. consultants fired and the P.R. consultants are criticizing the lawyers. Everybody despises each other. It’s a totally unmanageable situation. A corporation in crisis is not a corporation. It is a collection of panicked individuals motivated by self-preservation.’”

It started with a newspaper article, that impersonal medium seeming personally addressed to me – two American women living in Istanbul were looking for submissions for an anthology. I read twice to make sure I understood the Turkish completely.

I was living in Çanakkale, home to Troy, the birthplace of literature and Gallipolli, the end of the Ottoman empire. Both have a constant stream of visitors, but few stay for more than a day or two, blown on by the incessant wind. Though there are a few expats, there is no expat community and I was lonely.

After two years in Turkey I was not put off by the title “Tales from the Expat Harem.” I knew it was more than the seedy stereotype known outside of Turkey. The harem was the centre of the Sultan’s household, the domestic powerbase that supported him. Girls were brought to the harem from throughout the Sultan’s realm, many from outside the borders of modern Turkey.

Thrown into a new culture and new language, I shared some of their bewilderment and loneliness. Though the harem bore little relation to my life in Turkey, the desire to link to a community of women in a similar position was overpowering. Letting my 9-month-old oversleep, I wrote a raw piece about my first arrival to Turkey and hit send.

It was rejected.

The editors, Anastasia Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, asked if I could write another piece, more relevant to life within Turkey. ‘The Food Factory’ was about my acceptance of my place as gelin, bride, within a typical Turkish family. Through months of back and forth editing my imagination was alive with thoughts of the book’s launch. I would travel to Istanbul, meet these unknown friends, live my 15 minutes.

It didn’t happen.

By the time of the book’s Turkish release in late 2005 I was over eight months pregnant, and the six-hour commute with a toddler was too much. The official launch was a week after my son’s birth; 15 minutes of sleep was the limit of my ambition. Needless to say I missed the American launch the following spring.

Lines of communication sprang up with other contributors. E-mail exchanges of writing, Facebook friendships and Twitter conversations expanded my circle.

Three years later Anastasia announced her ambition to refashion the website as a global niche, a hub around which expats, travellers, the culturally aware could interact. Launched in October 2009 the expat+HAREM has sparked conversations on topics as varied as motherhood, language, archaeology and the dangers of smiling. Contributors, both male and female, are geographically spread from Taiwan to Turkey, New York to Moscow and represent half a dozen nationalities. Rose Deniz, spurred on by Tara Lutman Ağacayak, developed Dialogue2010, a place to talk about art, culture and the hybrid life of the expat.

In the last eight months I finally made it to Istanbul and met Anastasia. I participated in a global phone conversation with nine other expats. I’ve set up my own business. I’ve expanded my blog.

Being surrounded by a dynamic group has ignited my drive. Friendships made with inspiring, creative women, linking up through social media, interacting in a real sense, having real conversations.

I’ve found my community without stirring from my desk chair.

2007 photograph of the Harem at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, © Catherine Yiğit.

Catherine Yiğit runs a language-editing business Skaian Gates English, blogs at the Skaian Gates and tweets with an ever-expanding circle of expats, writers and the culturally aware from her home in northwest Turkey. She holds a degree in geology from Trinity College in Dublin.

Like many travelers who have spent time in Beijing recently, I read Andrew Jacobs’ piece in The New York Times on the demolition of Gulou, an ancient neighborhood near the Drum and Bell Towers. Photojournalist Matthew Niederhauser writes about the logistics of the video story behind the story on DSLR Newsshooter, the website of Guardian photojournalist Dan Chung.

Amazingly, this was Niederhauser’s first video project for the Times.

Photo of Matthew Niederhauser from DSLR Newsshooter.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, speaking with James Fallows in ‘How to Save the News,’ an article published in the June 2010 edition of the Atlantic:

“‘It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort. Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads.’

“This vision, which Schmidt presented as utopian, helps illustrate the solution Google believes it will find; the problem it knows it can’t solve; and another problem that goes well beyond its ambitions.

“The solution is simply the idea that there can be a solution.”

Photo of Eric Schmidt at the World Economic Forum 2007. Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) and swiss-image.ch. Photo by Severin Nowacki.

Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, speaking on Tuesday 1 June 2010 at the D8 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.:

“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press. Some of these newspapers and the news gathering editorial organizations are really important. I don’t want to see ourselves descend into a nation of bloggers, myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now. So anything that we can do to help The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations find new methods of expression so that they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their news gathering organizations intact, I’m all for. What we have to do is to figure out a way for people to start paying for this hard-earned content and so this provides us with a potential opportunity that provides even more value than just a web page, and start to charge a little bit for that. I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charged traditionally for print, because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery. And to charge a reasonable price and to go for volume. Because I think people are willing to pay for content.”

Responding to Jobs, John Battelle of Federated Media points out correctly that the United States started out as a nation of bloggers — pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. But I believe Jobs is speaking about the need for trained news media. Half a dozen self-branded, self-monetizing bloggers and journalists per city cannot keep tabs on city, county and state government; health departments; the school board; the police, sheriff’s and state highway departments; municipal, local, state and federal courts; chemical plants; regional real-estate development, and other society-shaping organizations. A credible news source like The Economist requires a disciplined, well-trained community of journalists. As citizens, we need full-time professionals to monitor these processes on local, state, federal and global levels.

Video clip from the D8: All Things Digital conference.

Above, photograph of Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal and Steve Jobs of Apple from the Flickr photostream of Minami Kazuya.

If you don’t already read technology columnist Andy Ihnatko, you should. Today he wrote a careful dissection of a Gizmodo story on what is probably the next generation of the Apple iPhone. Ihnatko writes a spot-on description of website competition, journalistic motivations, corporate motivations, his own motivations, and the processes behind publishing stories. In addition to having integrity, he’s funny.

A four-minute feature on migrant children in Beijing shows how photojournalist Dan Chung can create evocative news videography with minimal equipment.  I’ve written previously about Chung’s work in digital video, including a short feature on a summer night along the city’s Nan Luogu Xiang street, shot with a Canon EOS 7D camera.

On 15 March, Chung and correspondent Tania Branigan of The Guardian reported on the children of immigrants who move to China’s large cities in search of work, and the complications of the hukou system. This household registration process divides citizens into urban and rural dwellers and assigns rights and access to educational, health and social services. Migrant children inherit the same — lesser — rights.

On this project, Chung used a Canon EOS Rebel T2i digital SLR, which at $800 is half the price of the 7D. Chung writes that equipment is no longer a barrier to creating news videography. The obstacles are learning digital SLR skills, coupled with old-fashioned journalism.

Above, a still image from Dan Chung’s 15 March piece on Chinese migrant children in The Guardian.

A documentary project on the consequences of global climate change shows one way to maintain high journalistic standards: pay for them yourself.

When stories generated by amateurs and professionals are lumped together under the category of “content,” consumers of online media can easily become accustomed to a low common denominator. But sometimes we come upon personal projects created by storytellers working at the highest levels of their craft, and the difference is astounding. “Consequences by NOOR” is one of these projects.

Operating on a compressed, three-month production schedule, nine photographers from the Amsterdam-based NOOR photo agency created the exhibition for the United Nations Copenhagen environmental summit in December 2009. On a planet dominated by YouTube videos and Flickr photo streams, their documentaries almost exist in a different solar system. Images, animation, language and rhythm make them rise to the level of poetry.

The agency Design for Social Good built a blog to showcase the work of NOOR photographers and produced nine video portfolios that were shown online and around the clock in an exhibition hall at the Copenhagen summit. The online gallery continues to attract thousands of visitors each month, now coming from more than 160 countries. Debbie Mitchell Price wrote and produced the documentaries, working with Najlah Feanny Hicks, a former Newsweek contract photographer and founder of D4SG, and Doris Yee and Pasquale Chieffalo, also of D4SG.

Support for the project was assembled from a mixture of companies, agencies and non-governmental organizations. Important because of changes in the business model for photojournalists, they include Nikon Europe, Oxfam International, Greenpeace International, Russian Reporter Magazine, and several Danish organizations: the news Web site “Information,” Dask Gallery, the Reputation advertising agency, and the Press Photographers Association of Denmark.

Debbie recently described the project.

Q. These are powerful stories. How did the experience of creating them affect you?

Debbie Mitchell Price

I am proud and happy to have a small role in showcasing them. They made me and my husband, Larry C. Price, long for the days when we were doing this kind of journalism. What we were doing in the ’80s and early ’90s is now being carried forward by freelancers paying their own way or subsisting on grant money. With the exception of The New York Times and The Washington Post, traditional newspapers are no longer doing these very expensive and important stories. And that is a tragedy.

Q. How did you approach the assignment? Your own voice appears to be deliberately understated.

I saw myself as a conduit and facilitator. Essentially, these weren’t my stories. I was just helping each photographer present his or her work to its best advantage. I tried to bring some form and logic to the storytelling and emphasize the drama while using photographs, audio interviews and a few strategic text frames to present the main points.

The photographers submitted raw portfolios — somewhere between 60 and 200 images each — in no particular order. My job was to organize and sequence the photographs to tell the story and explain the issue.

With help from a former colleague at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Libby Afflerbach, a really great editor, we researched the subjects. Then I storyboarded the photographs, edited the audio interviews and filled in the narratives with key text frames. The video production team, headed by Pasquale Chieffalo, did the brilliant work of putting the audio and photographs into seamless videos — working under an incredibly intense deadline.

For example, with Kadir Van Lohuizen’s portfolio, “Brazil’s Range War: Assault on the Amazon,” we had a vast number of photographs to work with. I started with overview shots and haunting opening images of a denuded and destroyed Amazon for immediate impact and shock value. When we think of the Amazonian forest, we think of lush, green trees — not this burning, barren wasteland. Kadir’s audio also was excellent. He was a really good interview, knew his subject inside and out and had prepared his points. That made the job easy.

From overviews of the barren land, we moved quickly to shots of people and cattle — the causative factors. We went from macro to micro to bring the issue into sharp focus. Then I backed away again to develop the three basic points or sections — the deforestation, the burning of the cut wood to make charcoal, and the ranching.

I used text frames to present facts that people really need to know to understand the seriousness of the issue. For example, “The Amazon rainforest produces 20 percent of the Earth’s oxygen.” The text frames also break the video into discreet sections. The section on ranching starts with a frame telling viewers that the Brazilian cattle industry is responsible for 70 percent of current deforestation.

And of course, I sequenced Kadir’s comments with pertinent photographs, so that when he is talking about burning, we see burning, cattle, we see cattle. That’s pretty basic. We ended the video with a call to action. Kadir reminds viewers that pollution and deforestation are a result of global consumption. That point brings the video full circle and reminds us of our role in this drama.

Q. Consequences by NOOR has contributions from many continents. How did a globally distributed project team affect the work process?

Most of the contributors are in Europe, Africa and Asia. The manager of NOOR, Claudia Hinterseer, is in Amsterdam, as was one of the photographers, Kadir van Lohuizen. Most of the photographers were traveling and a few were still completing their stories. Stanley Green (who photographed Greenland) was in France. Jan Grarup was moving between Denmark and Africa where he was working on another story. Yuri Kozyrev was in Russia. Philip Blenkinsop was in Thailand. Nina Berman and Jon Lowenstein were in the U.S. Francesco Zizola, who photographed the Maldives, was traveling between Italy and other assignments. Pep Bonet was also traveling between the U.S., Spain and Africa. (Bonet, Grarup and Lowenstein are now in Haiti.)

We used Skype to interview and record the audio, which worked very well. Because of the time differences, I was working around the clock to reach people for the project. We also had some difficulty with Internet and phone connections, particularly with Jan Grarup in Africa.

Yuri, whose English really is very good, was insecure about giving an interview and so he taped his first interview and sent it in. The audio, however, was really poor quality, so at the 11th hour, we had to re-do the entire thing. I was interviewing him on Skype at 5 a.m. here in Ohio. It actually turned out a lot better. His video is one of my favorites, and it contains two stories.

We transferred the photo files (which were enormous) using FTP servers. I had to upgrade my personal Internet connection to handle the files. And I learned how to use Photo Mechanic to edit and arrange the portfolios into stories — with a lot of help from Larry, I have to say.

Our deadlines were almost impossible. We had less than 30 days to produce everything — and we had a great deal of difficulty getting the material on schedule from the photographers, largely because most of them were still in the field. It was an around-the-clock, crazy operation. We did most of our communication by email. When it was over, I had more than 3,000 NOOR-related emails in my inbox.

Q. You started as a print journalist, writer and editor, and came to video production later in your career. How do you view the differences of working in audio and visual imagery?

As a writer, I always look for the good parts — what’s interesting, what will get people’s attention, what’s important, what catches my eye, what do we need to tell the story. After being married to Larry for almost 30 years, I’ve learned a little about photography by osmosis and have his eye also to guide me.

Words need to be kept to a minimum when you’re working with great pictures. Also, as a writer and editor, I’ve learned to organize and edit, avoid repetition, develop transitions, etc. and those skills come into play whether you’re working with words or pictures.

With video, you’re writing for the ear and not the page. So the words must be to the point and memorable. There’s no time for blah, blah, blah, beautiful description, blah, blah, blah, more beautiful description, big word, big word, blah, blah.

You also don’t want to waste time telling people what they’re seeing. It’s important to look for information that supplements the image and provides context or background.

I still have a whole lot to learn about video production and am interested in acquiring more technical skills.

Q. What’s it like to be the minority writer in a sea of photographers?

The elements of good story telling don’t really change, even though the medium may be drastically different. As a writer, it was my job to look for a logical progression and present the issues cogently and with maximum drama. Libby Afflerbach and I did a lot of research to find the right nuggets of information. I also looked for strong material that we could attribute to recognized and reliable sources. I applied the same standards to single-sentence text frames as I do to long magazine articles — meticulous sourcing, fact-checking, etc.

We also knew that the exhibition hall would be loud, making it difficult for viewers to hear the audio. So, we wanted to include strategic text frames that gave the essence of each story. We were also limited by time — each video was supposed to be three to four minutes, although a couple ran a bit longer.

Above: Yuri Kozyrev photograph of a reindeer herder from ‘The Yamal Peninsula: A Land and People Threatened,’ one documentary in the ‘Consequences by NOOR’ exhibition.

Chinese news media are skeptical about whether a vocational school known for training bulldozer operators is responsible for hacking Google. If a story published on 18 February by The New York Times is true, rival Microsoft should send recruiters immediately to the Lanxiang vocational school in Shandong Province and compete against Chinese search engine Baidu for value-priced graduates.

Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog translated a 21 February story from the Qilu Evening News, a newspaper based in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province. One parody of a Lanxiang commercial, quoted by the Qilu newspaper: “Which is the best place to learn to operate an earth extractor?  Come to Lanxiang in Shandong, China.” The new version: “Which is the best place to learn to become a hacker?  Come to Lanxiang in Shandong, China.”

A Jonathan Stray story from Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab cites the Qilu report as one of the few pieces of original journalism filed on the latest Google hacking story.

Above, the scene in which King Arthur’s knights face off against the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Conclusion to a story on Vancouver luge track design in the 17 February edition of The Wall Street Journal:

“As often happens during Olympic controversies, numerous committees and federations are involved and it is often unclear who bears ultimate responsibility. The IOC and Vanoc have both said they aren’t responsible for the tracks because they essentially subcontract technical specifications out to the luge and bobsleigh federations. Within a few hours of the accident, those two groups declared their work flawless and blamed the Georgian athlete.”