Some rumors are true, many are false. The media will ignore many, and some are too big to ignore.

Governments, organisations, businesses and individuals have three options when dealing with rumors: Confirm, deny or ignore.

Some should be ignored because they are too silly. Others must be answered because they are too serious.

Anyone who has worked in public relations, politics or the media should know how to handle rumors, but it never ceases to amaze me how often people get it wrong.

Today, a journalist asked the South Australian Health Department if it’s true that swine flu cases have been confirmed in Mount Gambier.

Yes or no, that’s all the journalist wanted to hear.

Admittedly a “yes” answer would have prompted some follow-up questions, while a straight “no” would have killed the story.

Instead, she was given the run-around and after multiple requests a brief written statement came long after deadline that failed to answer the question.

I can’t recall the exact words, but it was some mush about respecting the privacy of individuals.

The journalist didn’t ask who had swine flu; simply if there had been any confirmed cases in South Australia’s second biggest city!

The Victorian Government last week released a statistical breakdown of swine flu cases in the state, based on municipal areas. No secrets there.

As I will point out in an editorial tomorrow, people’s decision making in respect to personal and group behavior will naturally be influenced by the immediate level of risk.

The rumors in Mount Gambier are remarkably consistent; that seven or eight cases of swine flu have supposedly been confirmed.

If this is true, people might choose to avoid going to places where large numbers of people congregate. They might stay at home with the kids instead of putting them into childcare.

People have a right to make those choices based on reliable information.

The South Australian Government is withholding that information!

In this example, the rumor should have been denied if it’s false. Simple as that.

The headline is unbelievably: “Councils oppose corruption”. Wow! Do they really?

It’s from the Local Government Association of South Australia. It would be more newsworthy, of course, if they supported corruption.

The introduction is nonsenical:

SA’s Local Government Association has expressed confidence in SA’s Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) but has asked the State Government for its views.

I think it’s about whether there should be an independent crime commission in South Australia.

It ends with:

“We have neither supported nor opposed an ICAC for South Australia. Ultimately that is not a decision for us – it’s one for State Government.”

So why did they bother to issue a media release at all? They’re against corruption, the support the current mechanisms and don’t have a view on forming an independent commission!

That’s a little surprising when you consider that journalists are writers. But when you think about it, we are craftsmen while novelists are artists. We ply a trade while they follow their creative spirits. We have responsibilities, they don’t.

Three good books about newspapers come readily to mind. PG Wodehouse wrote Psmith, Journalist in 1915; Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop in 1938 and Terry Pratchett published The Truth in 2000.

In Wodehouse’s classic, Psmith arrives in New York on a cricket tour and becomes involved with the home entertainment weekly “Cosy Moments” which he transforms into a hard-hitting investigative journal. He rides the bumps of organised crime and American politics along the way.

In Waugh’s story, scribe William Boot is mistaken by the publisher of the Daily Beast for a war correspondent. He is uprooted from writing country garden features to covering the civil war in Ishmaelia. Both novels are cleverly satirical.

Pratchett’s The Truth is a typically fantastic work from the author of the Discworld series. The hero in this case is William de Worde, who teams up with dwarfs to print the first newspaper in Ankh-Morpork.

As usual, Pratchett offers some tremendous insights into human nature. His observations of the newspaper profession are also very sharp, suggesting excellent research or personal knowledge. For instance, he offers a rare literary tribute to the unsung work of sub-editors.

I’ve just finished reading The Truth for the second time. I found the focus on hired assassins to be distracting and kept wanting the story to get back to the trials and tribulations of The Times.

There are some great one liners, like when the dwarfs make a typesetting error with the newspaper’s logo, which becomes: “The truth will make you fret”.

I related personally to the serial pest who kept coming into the office with remarkable vegetables. Anyone who has worked on a country newspaper will know there are people in most towns who like to show off their giant tomatoes or funny-shaped parsnips.

I admit it’s one of my long-term ambitions to write a satirical novel about newspapers. I started taking notes of strange but true incidents last year, like when one of my reporters disappeared while on the trail of visiting Mongolian detectives.

I have heaps of material; just need the time to write it.

I’m currently engaged on research into the effectiveness of “letters to the editor” published in national and local newspapers in Australia. I am particularly interested in the readership of letters to the editor, the extent to which letters raise awareness, whether they are a source of copy or leads for reporters and journalists, and whether elected officials and senior government bureaucrats take notice of and respond to matters raised in “letters to the editor”.

My response:

Interesting questions. We don’t have any research data, but these are my personal observations:

Letters to the editor in a country paper are widely read, probably by +90 per cent of readers. That’s because country people have a strong sense of community and like to know what other people think about local issues.

Letters are a real mixed bag. Sometimes they are used for political or PR purposes, but in my experience they are mostly genuine expressions of opinion. There are generally a few regulars, some of whom are nutters but usually they write interesting stuff.

I think elected officials take notice of letters if they consider them genuine (ie not written by someone who has a party affiliation or campaign to run).

We adapt letters into news leads occasionally, perhaps one letter in 20.

We all learn through living and working. There is no substitute for life experience. I found the five years in PR gave me a special insight into how people “on the other side of the fence” view the media.

PR consultants represent people who want publicity and those who don’t want publicity. It’s a case of trying to get the best value out of a good situation and the lowest level of exposure for a bad one.

Since returning to the press I’ve taken an interest in how organisations handle particular circumstances.

Football clubs never cease to amaze me with how badly they manage negative events. Collingwood’s handling of the Alan Didak saga was a case in point.

Firstly there was denial, followed by a half admission. Either the player was totally drunk or totally stupid; a classic no-win situation.

Having worked in the health sector myself, I’ve taken a special interest lately in how the Kalgoorlie Hospital has coped with its run of negative press. And believe it or not I have sympathy for those who are trying to work through the issues.

I’ve always believed that every country community should have confidence in its police, schools and hospitals. Without it, the fabric of the community starts to unravel.

Sadly, the education and health sectors in Kalgoorlie-Boulder are under intense pressure, predominantly through staff shortages.

As a media outlet I consider that we have a responsibility to report fairly and to give a voice to all stakeholders. It is sometimes hard to be as fair as we would like when organisations clam up and try to avoid commenting.

As a PR consultant I always recommended against that approach because I considered the best strategy was to be open and honest.

The media has itself partly to blame for bunker mentality responses, mainly because somewhere in the past or present there was a breakdown in trust.

That said, I dispute the claims made by two local doctors that media coverage of the hospital lately has been unhelpful. From what I can tell, the doctors acknowledge the system is stressed, under resourced, under funded, short staffed and operating with outdated facilities.

Whether that represents a definition of “crisis” is academic. The fact is we have a problem and any system under pressure is more likely to make mistakes.

Again asking readers to believe it or not, I would much rather have happy news about the hospital in the paper than a constant series of negatives.

Jim McGinty only has to pick up the phone to our office and announce the fast tracking of the hospital upgrade. I’ll guarantee him front page on that one.

However, I consider that we have a social responsibility to tell the story as the facts appear.

There was talk last week that dialysis patients would be sent to Perth for treatment. I wonder if the Kalgoorlie Miner’s recent coverage helped prevent that from happening for the time being?

Sometimes the day takes off and becomes an extravaganza like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. Sometimes they get big for a few years and then fade away, like Red Nose Day, although it’s making a comeback.

Make no mistake, these are marketing promotions. Often they have good intent to raise awareness about a health condition or to collect funds for a charity, but they are still marketing events and they are proliferating.

I’ve just about had enough. Some of them I find quite irritating.

Take Red Nose Day, for example. I recall working at Ceduna in the early 90s when this day was original and interesting. Normally sane people used to pay money to wear clown noses. I could live with that because the Rudolph gear usually came off at the end of the day.

What annoyed me was the people who plastered red noses over the front of their motor vehicles. In most cases they remained there for months afterwards. I used to cringe and curse every time I saw one on the highway. My affection for the campaign to stop SIDS was tested.

I feel the same today about head shaving promotions. They have become so common as to diminish the value of the currency.

When people started shaving their heads to raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation it was a novelty. It was news to see regular citizens remove their curly mops for a good cause. Today it is so passe.

The marketers will disagree with me because more people are participating and they are making more money. But my patience as a newspaper editor has worn thin. I have decreed the news value of such events to be almost non-existent and we will no longer photograph them.

It’s like the old story of dog bites man. Boring. Man bites dog is a story.

I was talking with a hairdresser about this and she persuaded me that my frustration with head shave promotions was justified. She is being approached by more and more people for free shaves at the end of the fund raising.

What irks her is that when the idea started people had to raise a certain amount of money to qualify. Today it is pretty much open slather.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t have to go the full monty shave. In the case of women participants they can just have a short hair cut or change the color of their hair.

And given there is more than one head shave day (Bluey Day is another example) I fail to see the news value.

Many of these days are organised by charities or not-for-profit organisations. I commend them for thinking outside the square, but challenge them to know when there has been too much of a good thing. Run your special day for a few years, learn when it has peaked and give it a rest.

The trouble is the groups come to rely on the money raised. If they become dependent on this money they risk a catastrophe when the general public decides enough is enough.

Like many newspapers across Australia, the Kalgoorlie Miner is pleased to help promote this initiative.

Our photographer went to a local school this afternoon to get a picture.

In doing so she was lectured by a well-meaning soul who insisted on particular requirements. These were conveyed in an official document headlined “2007 WSTSD Photography Guidelines”.

Among the rules were:

• If the child has a ball it should be in a string or plastic bag;
• Parent/carer and children waiting at/walking to a bus stop should be photographed well away from the road;
• Every pedestrian (adults and children) should be shown with head turned to right or left, looking, listening and concentrating on crossing the road, rather than smiling at the camera; etc.

A PDF copy of the document is here (379kb) . These guidelines were obviously designed by the central office for local co-ordinators and were not intended to be presented as rules for the media.

I do wonder though at the necessity of such instructions. Surely commonsense can be allowed free rein.

In our case, to satisfy the cultural diversity clause, a disabled boy was roped in and disrupted proceedings, making the whole scene rather farcical.

Margot Olive McKay was the principal of a firm that worked for Aristocrat Leisure. She bought $148,000 of Aristocrat shares through relatives after proof reading positive company reports and sold later for a profit of about $70,000.

The crime seems to be at the lower end of the scale and there are mitigating factors. Also, I’ve seen the market react adversely to positive announcements, so McKay could not have been certain of a commercial gain.

It made me think though about my own consulting experience and whether I ever came across information that was potentially market sensitive.

At least one occasion comes to mind from when I was working for Pauls. They were negotiating a deal with a small boutique dairy brand and I authored a draft media release. The talks fell through and the media release was never issued.

If I had bought shares in the small listed company, in anticipation of the deal, I would have been guilty of insider trading even though I had no idea how the market would respond. I was aware of this at the time.

I handled a number of commercially sensitive issues for Pauls, who are not listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Fortunately I was never tempted to buy shares offshore in the Italian parent company Parmalat, which collapsed amid the rubble of a corporate fraud disaster.

Here's the entry I wrote the day after they were born.

Jim and Maggie aren't old enough to understand it's their birthday, but they know it's a special day because of the presents they received and the party we had with friends.

Jim received a fire truck, fireman's hat, fireman bear and a book about machines. Maggie received a Dora the Explorer doll, Dora bag and a book about cats, reflecting their respective interests at this stage.

• The Nats defied doomsday predictions and retained party status.
• The Liberals and Greens failed to increase their primary votes.
• The media darlings (Greens) won't win a lower house seat.
• Labor no longer holds any seats in Gippsland.
• The Labor primary vote in Mildura was just 6.53%. Has the ALP ever polled that badly in any seat anywhere?
• The winners: Steve Bracks and Peter Ryan.
• The losers: Ted Baillieu (despite his bluster) and the Greens.