If you've worked in public relations, marketing or communications for any time, I am pretty sure you've had an experience similar to one I had recently. A local reporter expressed interest in covering a project I was involved in. I gave the reporter some background and a framework for the project and connected him to some of the principals of the project. The reporter talked with some of those principals and wrote his story.
The story, upon reading it in the newspaper, was not what I had hoped it would be. Some key facts were misstated or left out, pretty much everyone thought they were misquoted, and while generally positive in tone, the article did not portray the project in the way I would have preferred. I was disappointed.
But then I started talking to people. Several people told me that they had read the article. What amazed me is that every single person I talked with recited back to me the key message we were trying to get out. I thought the key message had been obscured in the article. Others involved in the project had trouble seeing past the minor factual errors that were in the article. We couldn't see the forest for the trees.
The casual reader, however, got the key message. Loud and clear.
I guess it was a pretty good article!
