What Journalists Actually Want from You in a Crisis

When a story breaks about your client, the instinct is often to fight it. Dispatch the lawyers, craft a defensive statement, go quiet, or go hard. Investigative journalists at major publications say that instinct almost always makes things worse. At a recent media industry briefing in London, two senior journalists from a top-tier national UK outlet laid out, with unusual candour, how they work, what they respond to, and where companies consistently go wrong. 

The lessons are worth internalising before the call comes in. 

Investigations Build Over Time, And So Do Your Options 

The journalists were clear on how stories develop: rarely in one burst. Stories typically start with a tip, an anomaly in a company’s accounts, or an RNS or similar financial filing that doesn’t quite add up – and then grow as sources emerge, FOI requests land, and documents accumulate. One reporter described his team’s approach as “jumping in and out of the public domain,” using each disclosure to reach the next. His colleague noted he keeps a running list of companies he’s watching, waiting for the right moment of entry. 

This matters for communications advisors because it means there is rarely a single moment of exposure. There is usually a window – sometimes a long one – in which how you engage shapes the trajectory of coverage. The choice is between a series of incremental stories or one considered, comprehensive piece. Both journalists acknowledged that they make that call partly based on how a company responds to their questions. 

The Response Becomes the Story 

The clearest illustration from the briefing was a challenger bank’s reaction to coverage of its bounce-back loan performance during the pandemic. When reporting surfaced about high fraud rates in its loan book, the bank’s initial move was to send a legal letter to the journalist who had written about related issues. That letter was then passed to the newsroom and became its own story. As one of the journalists put it, “the story became the reaction.” 

The underlying issue – questions about due diligence standards during a government lending scheme – was newsworthy. The aggressive response extended the coverage, escalated the narrative, and generated what he called “a strife effect.” A direct, measured acknowledgement that due diligence processes were being reviewed would likely have produced a single story. Instead, the saga ran on. 

This is a pattern, not an outlier. One journalist cited a restructuring scandal involving a major bank – one he chose not to name – where legal advice to stay silent turned a manageable story into a 14-year reputational drain. The short-term cost of transparency was less than the long-term cost of appearing to hide something. 

What a Good Response Actually Looks Like 

Both journalists were specific about what they need from a response and what routinely fails. 

Generic statements – “we care deeply about our customers” – don’t just fail to stop a story. They signal evasion, which invites more digging. A response that doesn’t engage with the precise allegations being put to the company achieves nothing protective and may harden the journalist’s resolve to press further. 

The right approach, from the journalists’ perspective, is to address the substance directly, even when the answer is uncomfortable. One reporter’s method for right-of-reply is methodical: he takes his final copy, converts it into a set of direct questions, and puts every material allegation to the organization for response. His reasoning is straightforward – if a company can explain what happened, he has a professional obligation to reflect that. He gave one recent example where a detailed response caused him to pull a story entirely, because the company’s explanation persuaded him that, on the information he had, there was no story to tell. That outcome is only possible when the response engages with the meat of the story. 

The practical advice they had for communications teams: treat the statements provided to them as a negotiation over what appears in print. Lead with the two or three points you most need readers to understand, stated concisely and directly. Provide a fuller context in an annex that the journalist can draw from. A response that buries its strongest points in paragraphs of executive boilerplate will not be quoted. A response that leads with a clear, specific rebuttal is far more likely to land. 

Transparency Is a Tactical Advantage, Not Just an Ethical Posture 

One of the reporters made a point that communications advisors should consider for clients who resist openness: if a company isn’t telling him something, his instinct is that there is something there worth pursuing. Resistance creates inference. It signals that there is more to find. 

Transparency, by contrast, tends to reduce a story’s momentum. When a company is open about what happened and what it is doing to address it, the story has a natural conclusion. When it stonewalls, the story’s conclusion becomes the moment something eventually surfaces – often in worse circumstances and with less control. 

Crisis communications is not the art of preventing stories from being published. It is the practice of managing information under pressure in a way that preserves credibility and limits long-term damage. Done well, it gives an organization the best chance of being seen as one that faced a difficult situation honestly, rather than one that compounded it. 

At Montieth & Company, we work with organizations navigating exactly these situations – advising on when and how to engage, what to say, and how to build the kind of credibility with journalists that shapes coverage before a crisis, not just during one. 

One Practical Note on AI 

Both journalists raised the use of AI in crisis response – and both were sceptical. One reporter’s concern was accuracy: AI-generated responses introduce errors, and errors make clients look bad. The other’s was judgment: AI cannot stress-test what a company is telling you, and in a crisis, that stress-testing is the work. Using AI to draft holding statements in a low-stakes context is one thing. Relying on it to navigate allegations with legal and reputational implications is a different matter entirely. 

The value communications advisors provide in a crisis comes from understanding enough about the actual situation to challenge what the client says before it goes to the journalist. That requires human judgment, client access, and the confidence to push back internally.  

 

Learn more about how Montieth & Company approaches issues management and crisis communications.