When their crisis becomes your crisis...

Client companies must be laughing these days, mustn't they? Back in the day, when the shit hit the fan because they's cocked up, they used to take the fallout. But not anymore. In today's PR-savvy world, when a business gets in trouble it's no problem...attention immediately falls onto the bunch of PR flacks hired to deal with the issue rather than on the issue itself.

Witness the City Diary in today's Times...more interested in the PR puffery spewed by Hill and Knowlton's MD of Issues & Crisis (Crises, surely?) Tim Luckett than in the potential epidemic of bird flu released from Bernard Matthews' farm.

Mind you, with Luckett stating that there's a "brand recovery strategy to be implemented" perhaps the Times is well within its rights to take the piss...and now he's not returning calls.

That'll get worse before it gets better...