Crisis management in reverse: Kamloops This Week’s reaction to the shutdown of The Daily News was handled very carefully

ARMCHAIR MAYOR SAYS — The byline of Cam Fortems appears in today’s edition of Kamloops This Week. After close to 20 years of seeing it in The Kamloops Daily News, it seems out of place.

But it’s good to still see it in print. Cam, Catherine Litt and Adam Williams, all former Newshounds, started Monday at KTW.

They’re part of KTW’s response to the closure of The Daily News. Much is taught about crisis management — what companies should do when things go wrong — but not nearly so much about how to react to unexpected opportunities.

For the most part, KTW’s reaction to Glacier Media’s shutdown of the KDN should go down as a textbook case of how to do it right.

There are many reasons for KTW to welcome the demise of the opposition, but the situation called for great care, as well as speed.

While competition is healthy, it can be too much of a good thing. In a market that included a daily newspaper, a bi-weekly, a good downtown coffee-shop paper, another one on the North Shore, a seniors paper, a TV station and several radio stations, advertisers had much to choose from in traditional mainstream media.

The death of the KDN not only guarantees the immediate survival of KTW and its staff their jobs, but it has provided a golden opportunity to expand.

KDN and KTW, truth be told, haven’t always been friendly competitors. The sales teams have gone at it hammer and tongs. While some of the editors and reporters have been on friendly terms with their competitors, and have even respected each other, in other cases not so much.

A profitable newspaper is able to invest in good journalism. A struggling newspaper usually retracts. With the return to three editions per week and the expansion of its newsroom, KTW’s editorial product should significantly improve, though there’s little evidence of it yet. In the grand scheme of things, the menu of news for readers will still be reduced, but KTW benefits.

So it would be easy for KTW to celebrate the fall of its biggest competitor and come off as taking pleasure in it. It would be entirely possible to turn an opportunity into a public-relations disaster.

But by staying in sync with the community’s shock and disappointment at the loss of the KDN, KTW has avoided looking ungracious. And, at the same time, it has reacted with lightning speed to take advantage of the opportunity presented.

When the KDN’s closure was announced Jan. 6, KTW publisher Kelly Hall said he was surprised, and that it was unfortunate for the industry, which is just what he should have said.

Within hours, KTW was announcing it would go back to three editions a week and expand its product in order to serve the community. Either KTW was really on the ball in lining up printing and scoping out its editorial and sales needs on short notice, or it had a contingency plan already sketched out based on the possibility that such a day would come.

Either way, it’s smart business.

They were interviewing and hiring KDN staffers before the last KDN edition even hit the press.  Those hires will boost the quality of KTW’s writing and news coverage significantly.

In keeping with the sympathetic approach to the KDN’s shutdown, KTW editor Christopher Foulds turned out an excellent, sensitive column headlined “May staffers at Kamloops Daily News start the press again.”

It hit the right note. “When the Kamloops Daily News announced it would stop publishing, it was like a hard punch to the deepest recesses of my gut,” Foulds wrote.

Meanwhile, KTW reporter Tim Petruk, who interned at KDN before finding a job at KTW, did fairly well in following the key messages but stumbled with a tweet that said, “The @Daily News is closing. Our editorial side is silent and sales sounds excited.”

It was the first hint coming from that office that any emotion but sympathy was being expressed.

When challenged on Twitter by theMediaHub run by TRU journalism prof Shawn Thompson and his students — who said it sounded as though “you’re rejoicing” — Petruk quickly backed off, writing that “there were excited-sounding noises coming from over there. I wasn’t implying.”

KTW reporter Dale Bass jumped to Petruk’s defence: “Nobody is celebrating anything. It’s a blow to our industry.”

Keep to the high road.

Bass, though, followed up today with an “aren’t we wonderful” type of column about how KTW is “bucking the trend.” She insists “there is no void.”

The other stumble came in Tuesday’s front-page headline that read “Welcome to a new era of journalism in Kamloops.”

Sorry, I’m calling bullshit on that one. Here’s the situation: KTW picks up some very good news staff. It expands its publishing schedule to three days a week, half as many as the daily published. It gets the New York Times crossword that used to run in The Daily News and it gets a wire service. Some of its low-echelon comic strips will be upgraded, hopefully with some of the top-rated ones the KDN published (if they start running Zits I will be thankful). KTW will become more of a “real” paper.

That’s good. But a headline grandly declaring a “new era of journalism” seems a bit much. Something like “Welcome to a new era at Kamloops This Week” might have been more palatable.

Nevertheless, KTW management and staffers have, in the main, sounded appropriately sympathetic, and have exhibited remarkably swift reaction to claim the gap in the market.

Despite those couple of minor stumbles, I’d give KTW a B+ in its handling of what is both a business opportunity and a sensitive PR issue.