Fishburn Hedges

21.04.2010

The press love a good old-fashioned ‘travel chaos’ story (second only to the ‘extreme weather event’ in the news popularity stakes).  In most cases, these kinds of sagas always find themselves a good scapegoat – British Airways for failing to stop cabin crew strikes or local councils for failing to prepare roads for the Big Freeze.

However, aside from God and, I suppose, Iceland (although I doubt they would be prepared to put their PM up for a barracking on Newsnight), who is there to blame for the volcanic ash cloud and the havoc it has wrought?

Find the scapegoat…

There has been a certain sense of desperation, particularly on rolling news channels, to blame someone.  Meanwhile, it has become apparent that most potential interviewees represent companies that are actually doing a lot to help, rather than making the situation worse.

So any person or organisation that fails to jump on to the plucky Dunkirk spirit bandwagon à la Dan Snow, such as the Russian government which seems to have taken to holding visa-less Brits hostage in a hotel in Moscow, soon attracts the ire of UK news outlets.

Similarly, as soon as there is a hint of a suggestion that the flight ban was an over-reaction, as Richard Taylor of the CAA seems to have suggested to Channel 4 News this morning, we can be assured that this comment will not be glossed over and may provide the basis for Sunday paper analysis features.

Jump onto the news hook…

Equally, on the other side of the media entertainment spectrum, it would be remiss of me not to mention some of the opportunistic stories being issued this week to piggy-back on the #ashtag.

They range from ‘Volcanoes cause adultery’ to ‘National Trust offers free tickets to stranded foreign tourists’ and more.

Journalists may moan about the sudden surge of topical press releases flooding their inboxes, and many of them are using Twitter to do just that, but of course, they are all looking for ash-themed copy to fill their web pages.

The lesson for those of us working on corporate reputation briefs is that any story should of course have a clear business objective and not just be a name-dropping exercise.

… and Ryanair takes the biscuit, again

Unsurprisingly, Ryanair finds itself at the top of the Daily Mail’s wrath-o-meter with its refusal to pay hotel and restaurant compensation for passengers.

It would, no doubt, argue that it is sticking firmly to its brand values (with the emphasis firmly on value), in which case, it’s job done for the PR team.

Update: 23 April

An interesting take on Ryanair’s u-turn on the compensation issue from Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Perhaps if it wasn’t for the small factor of the law getting in the way, the airline would still be chanting the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ mantra?  Even so, this way they get to blame the insurance industry.