Francois Gossieaux alerted us to this online story from USA Today which posted this morning.
Read the article before moving on through this post. It's important.
It seems the paper ran a story on Monday about Larry Twombly, the CEO of a company called Hat Trick Beverage, who overcame hardships early in his career and went on to start his company. Today's article by Stephanie Armour, however, says the original story from earlier in the week was a little light on facts.
Unfortunately the way today's article is written gives readers the impression that Hat Trick's PR firm, Emerson Gerard Associates is responsible for the ooops that ran in USA Today on Monday:
"We were misled and apologize for any misunderstandings," said Jerry Jennings of Emerson Gerard Associates of West Palm Beach, Fla., the public relations firm that represented Twombly. "We have no reason to doubt our clients."
But wait....Isn't it actually the newspaper's responsibility to check its facts prior to running a story? Why wasn't that done? Again from today's article:
"After Monday's story appeared, USA TODAY learned of inconsistencies: The National Hockey League, the Providence Bruins and an online database of hockey statistics called hockeydb.com have no record of him playing in the minor leagues."
Someone please let me know if I've got this wrong (and maybe it *is* just me): does it look to you as though USA Today is trying to spin out of its responsibility to check the background of someone they profiled before they ran the story? Certainly the level of background detail they went into for today's story is impressive. Why wasn't this level of reporting done prior to Monday's article?
It seems odd that USA Today would throw Emerson Gerard Associates under the bus for what looks like a lack of follow-up on the part of the paper. I guess a follow up question to the PR community should be something like: do we as PR folks have to start looking at our clients with a skeptical eye?? Jerry from Emerson said "We have no reason to doubt our clients."
Wow--where do you start with this one? It'd be great to hear from USA Today about this, too.