Bon's Mots

Last week the bl­o­gos­phere picked up a story about a PR Newswire em­ployee who was fired for slug­ging a re­lease in­ap­pro­pri­ately. (If you are un­fa­mil­iar with the in­dus­try, a “slug” is a short la­bel which helps ed­i­tors fig­ure out at a glance what the story is about (CP Stylebook). For ex­am­ple, “Leafs-win-Cup” would be a slug for a story about the Leafs win­ning the Stanley Cup (like that would ever happen).

Anyhow, this em­ployee was for­mat­ting a re­lease about a rally tak­ing place in Philadelphia to raise po­lit­i­cal aware­ness of men­tal ill­ness and home­less­ness. She slugged the re­lease “loony-bin-rally”. 

Something like this would typ­i­cally go un­no­ticed by the pub­lic, since a news re­lease slug would only be seen by the news me­dia in their wire ter­mi­nals. However, one in­tre­pid re­porter spot­ted the in­sen­si­tive slug and no­ti­fied PR Newswire about it. And it must have been a slow day in the news­room be­cause he then wrote about it. And like all good sto­ries about com­plete and ut­ter stu­pid­ity, it spread like a virus.

PR Newswire re­sponded with an of­fi­cial pub­lic apol­ogy and the em­ployee was ter­mi­nated for ex­hibit­ing “very poor judge­ment.” (Ya think?) Personally, I think they han­dled it the only way they could. Keep in mind that PR Newswire dis­trib­utes thou­sands of news re­leases a day and it would be lo­gis­ti­cally dif­fi­cult to vet each re­lease be­fore it is sent out. They must rely on their em­ploy­ees to prac­tice good judge­ment and this comes from hav­ing faith in their staff and hir­ing prac­tices. However, it just takes one bad ap­ple to spoil the en­tire bar­rel. And in this case, they got rid of it.

This wasn’t a case of some poorly-trained em­ployee mak­ing a small mis­take. It was an act of pure ig­no­rance and in­sen­si­tiv­ity. If some­one be­lieves it is per­fectly ac­cept­able to re­fer to the men­tally ill as “loonies” it wouldn’t be a huge as­sump­tion to think this same per­son would as­cribe of­fen­sive la­bels to other mi­nor­ity groups. Could they have given the em­ployee a sec­ond chance? I wouldn’t. Having worked in a newswire ser­vice, you can train a per­son on where a slug is placed but you can­not train them on what to put in there. That comes from com­mon sense. And that, my friends, is in­cred­i­bly hard to teach.