Valley PR Blog

Being human, what a concept

By Dan Wool on September 16th, 2008 In Advice

Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell

She was our first link to that tragedy. And her tears confirmed for me our shared humanity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Denise Tyrrell this week and naturally, I’ve been wondering what I’d do in her shoes. Denise is the spokeswoman for L.A.’s Metrolink, which of course had a horrific crash (near my former house in whe West San Fernando Valley, actually). This was an accident that took the words and breath away of experienced rescue personnel, let alone the spokesperson for the alleged responsible party.

L.A. Times columnist Sandy Banks wrote about her today and I couldn’t have said it better myself. Keep this article in mind if you’re a spokesperson.

Comments

I saw her comments Friday. It was like, “This is a terrible accident.”

Then she was the first one to announce the engineer ran a red light, before it was announced by NTSB. Had she never learned, “I don’t have all the facts yet. What is your deadline?”

She made ALL PR practitioners look bad. It is part of our field’s quality decline in the past 15 to 20 years.

Thank you for sharing this article which I otherwise would not have read. Indeed our lives are fragile and tragedies like this are hard to understand.

bravo on this piece.I am reminded of a spokesperson for Taser a few years, responding to a Taser death: “only one person was killed.” Only? Tell that to the family. PR people often are compassionless, due in great part, to CEO’s and lawyers who instruct them to be void of emotion and treat tragedy as a bad stock dip.It appears not only did she have good training but the support of management who told her: be human.

Thought I would share that Denis Wolcott lives in Los Angeles and is the Western District Chair of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). As a PRSA rep., he was asked by a local TV station to comment about Tyrrell’s sudden resignation. See http://prsawestdist.blogspot.com for more information.

Thank you,
Felice Appell, APR
President, PRSA Phoenix

Richard there are two separate issues going on here:

(1) Her — what I believe to be excellent –response to a horrible accident. My point being that tears aren’t unprofessional - quite the contrary - they humanized the organization to a great many people who needed their compassion not corp-speak or spin.

(2) Her subsequent resignation. Why? Her CEO *approved* for her to reveal that the engineer ran a red light *before she made the statement* then, he got spineless about it in front of the Board. She seems to have been professional the whole way through.

[...] from someone in a profession that thrives off of making it to the top. As Dan Wool advised on his Valley PR Blog post, “Keep this article top of mind if you’re a [...]

Thanks for sharing this, Dan. I completely agree with you.

Tyrrell’s tears showed her humanity—something that is not often viewed as a good thing for corporates like Metrolink. I worked at a social and human services non-profit for five years and am currently a PR specialist for Banner Health, so I understand and value and importance of “being human” in our industry. More of my thoughts on my blog post, “The humanity of PR.” http://rarmendariz1.x.iabc.com/

-Becky

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