Reputation Town

For the first episode of 2024, we are very happy to be joined by a special guest: US-based crisis and PR expert Molly McPherson. In this episode, the panel does a deep dive into some of the more compelling issues, crisis and reputation stories in the news recently, including Boeing's lingering safety woes, the viral HR stories from Kyte Baby and Cloudflare, the ongoing war between Bill Ackman and Business Insider and the ethcis controversy around Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's recent vacation. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy this episode! 

This week, John and Warren look at some of the recent PR stories in the news, including the speculation of CBC paying bonuses to execs despite laying off 10% of its workforce, the abysmal testimony of three ivy league university presidents earlier this week, Sports Illustrated gets busted using fake/AI personas and some final thoughts on the Chicago Blackhawks/Corey Perry situation. 

In this episode, John and Warren ramble on about a few recent stories, including the massive severance package to Texas A&M's outgoing football coach, a sports radio personality who made a bold promise on-air only to back out of it, the off-duty pilot who tried to crash a plane full of people, Bud Light's hail Mary partnership with the UFC and two stories about Mr. Beast one in which he's suing the company behind his Mr. Beast Burger and the other where he's getting some hate for building 100 wells in Africa. We hope you enjoy this episode and if there's a story you'd like us to cover, be sure to send us a note. Thanks for listening. 

In this episode, John and Warren ramble about the new contract the Maple Leafs signed with Auston Matthews, how to create a legacy in the style of Buddy Guy, the latest social media posts from Tiffany Gomas (the plane lady) and the strategy behind Donald Trump's sit-down with Tucker Carlson. The podcast wraps up with a discussion about working with reporters and what preparations spokespeople can take to prepare for the admittedly small percentage of journalists who might be a tad unethical or unprofessional. 

In this episode, we break down some recent stories including Bell Media firing 1,300 people, the PR fallout from the LIV/PGA merger, author Elizabeth Gilbert's self-cancellation of her upcoming book, RFK Jr's end run around mainstream media on the podcast circuit, when should the crisis management firm become part of the story (if ever) and why running away from a media scrum is a bad look. Thanks for listening and if there's a topic you'd like to hear us chat about on the pod, please let us know. 

In this episode, John and Warren discuss Harry and Meghan's nearly catastrophic car chase, the NYT puff piece on Elizabeth Holmes as she prepares to go to prison, the anti-capitalist coffee shop that nearly went out of business in Toronto, the ongoing Bud Light controversy and what do you do as a comms person when you work for a CEO like Elon Musk?

This week, John and Warren ramble on about the mishandling of the Bruce Boudreau firing in the NHL, Tim Horton's responding to a class action lawsuit about privacy violations by offering customers a coffee and a donut and Loblaws, the self-confessed 'face of food inflation', making an awkward attempt at authenticity on Twitter.

This week, we John and Warren touch on a number of stories with reputational implications, including Prince Harry's book, Bell's decision to change the structure of its annual mental health initiative, VIA Rail's very slow communications response to its recent operational woes during a major winter storm and a story about someone who may have bought and deleted the online archive of a community newspaper in order to delete negative media coverage about himself. As always, thanks for listening! 

This week, we're fortunate to have Molly McPherson join us to chat about some notable crisis management stories of the week. Molly shared her own story about being pulled into a social media kerfuffle and how she handled it. We also talked about the silence from grocery chain Sobeys while it deal with an ongoing data breach, the reputation elements of this week's crypto flameout and, of course, the ongoing controversy around Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and some of the related business moves. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy this episode! 

We're very fortunate this week to have an exceptional panel of crisis communicators with us to break down the Hockey Canada scandal. Joining John and Warren this week are Alberta-based media trainer Grant Ainsley, Alberta-based crisis expert Shawna Bruce and US-based crisis expert podcast host and TikTok celeb Molly McPherson. We hope you enjoy this conversation!