Without the benefit of a transcript, it’s hard to be 100% sure but your humble e-scribbler heard Jennifer Guy - Eastern Health’s vice president of partnerships and strategic communication - claim that information everyone is in a tizzy about was a mere one inch from the top of the news release under scrutiny.
One inch?
Let’s check.
The information in question is simple enough to find: there were 38 additional patients who’d met the criteria for breast cancer re-testing.
One only has to look 6.75 inches down from the top edge of the page or 4.75 inches below the headline to find it.
One inch, Jennifer?
Hardly.
The actual number “38” is one inch from the top of the paragraph containing that information but that paragraph starts three and one half inches below the headline.
That “38” appears, incidentally, in the the fifth paragraph of the news release.
Normally, releases should put the most important information at the front. As one scans down the page, the information becomes relatively less and less important. That’s how reporters scan them and that’s how people working in communications normally write them.
Well, at least they ought to write them that way.
Using that approach, the most important information in this release is that “Eastern Health would like to inform the public that it is moving forward with the implementation of recommendations from the Cameron inquiry report.” [PR writing hint: “would like” is a terrible phrase since it suggests that you would like to do some but won’t or can’t. in this case it seems to be an accurate use of the phrase but ordinarily it’s a meaningless cliché, at best.]
Then there are two paragraphs telling that a working group “has been established” that will meet bi-weekly (is that twice a week or every two weeks?) and figure out which recommendations to implement in what order. [PR writing hint: The passive voice is bad. Active voice is infinitely better. In this case, we should have seen a release that told who did what, as in: “Interim CEO Louise Jones today appointed…”. If she did it in consultation with her successor, all the better. Mention that somewhere. If nothing else, this approach makes it plain that someone is actually responsible for taking action. That would seem to be important in this case from all that has gone on. Use of the passive voice makes it look like the whole thing is happening as if by some unseen and mysterious force.]
There will also be a “steering committee”, we are told, but what it does remains a mystery.
At paragraph four, there’s more of the “would like” stuff and here’s where we get into the problem.
Paragraph five, which has the real information in it, starts out by giving all the background bumpf about “challenges” in internal information systems and how some organization had been “engaged” to help out.
In short, before we get to the news here, someone first wanted to give the explanations that sound more like excuses again.
Then there’s the bit about the patients and retesting.
This is a lousy piece of work, by any measure. if all the rest weren’t true, it is unfocused in that it draws together a raft of different elements and crams them in the one place.
The second last sentence commits Eastern Health to “full disclosure” of the results of the retesting process. That sounds like a pat phrase that someone figured might be good but that really doesn’t convey the accurate information; “full disclosure” suggests that Jane Jones will have her test scores posted to the web along with her medical records and the complete details of how her case got lost. Well, Jane and her 37 sisters in re-testing.
This was pretty much a bad release, badly handled and as it turns out since the thing became a controversy, badly handled yet again.
If we measured Eastern’s progress on implementing changes by the same standard the new vice president used today in measuring a news release from her department, we’d find ourselves moving backwards rather than forwards.
-srbp-
