ESPN’s decision to fire Hank Williams, Jr. took the better part of last week -- the story broke on a Monday and he ultimately was let go on a Thursday. THE DAILY's editorial team sat down with a roundtable of sports PR execs on Friday, including ESPN VP/Communications Mike Soltys and NFL VP/Communications Brian McCarthy, to discuss how the company came to its decision and what the fallout from the decision has been like.
Q: Take us through your crisis PR plan once the Hank Williams, Jr. story broke.
Soltys: He made his comment on “Fox & Friends.” Nobody really noted it. Huffington Post then pulled the video several hours later. That’s when we became aware of it. That was when the Twitterverse became aware of it. It just exploded from there. It’s a good example of how issues today evolve that didn’t happen in the past.
Q: It blew up on Monday. You decided to pull the open on Monday night. Then it took three days, which is 80 years in Twitter time, to let him go. Why the delay?
Soltys: The difficulty with Twitter and its influence is that there’s an expectation that everyone’s going to react as quickly as the Twitterverse reacts. When you’re dealing with personnel issues or important issues that come up, you want a little more time. The Twittersphere is very unforgiving on the time scale. They want action quickly. With it happening on Monday, and we have “Monday Night Football,” we realized we needed to do something at that point. But he’s been doing this for 22 years, it was a very important part of “Monday Night Football” for a long time, we didn’t want to react too quickly. We wanted to take the time to have a careful decision.
Q: Brian, how much input did the NFL have?
McCarthy: We didn’t have any input. We were kept up to date. As soon as it happened, we received e-mails and phone calls from members of ESPN’s staff. The evolution of public relations is making sure that everyone is on the same page. We were aware very early on of ESPN’s decision to pull him.
Q: Is there a different scenario, or a different media landscape, where it would have been possible for him to stay on with you?
Soltys: Twenty years ago, I don’t know if we would have even been aware of it. We learned of it through the Huffington Post. From a PR end 20 years ago, when an issue would break locally, we would just hold our breath that the local AP reporter wouldn’t notice it. Then it became, would SBD notice it? That has evolved to now where you know everything is going to be noticed. As soon as we saw the Huffington Post thing -- even though it wasn’t connecting it to ESPN -- we knew that we had an issue to deal with.
Q: What are you doing going forward with the opening to “MNF?"
Soltys: In the short term, there will be more of a focus on the game and previewing the game. Next year, we have no idea yet.
Q: Did you have everything produced for the season?
Soltys: Yes. Most of what Hank does, he does in one big shoot in the summer. That happened again this year.
Q: How involved is the communications team in making an ultimate decision about what to do?
Soltys: We’re an important part of the conversation, monitoring what the public is saying, both through the traditional means of contacting ESPN and what’s going on in the social space. We serve as a sounding board for what organizations are paying attention to this, what the media reaction is, how it’s going to play. From Disney on down, there’s a recognition of the importance of a PR function.
Q: How have the lines blurred between traditional and alternative media?
Soltys: The title of “traditional media” is a misnomer at this point. On the Hank Williams story, Michael Hiestand’s piece on USA Today’s “Game On” blog was a lot more impactful to the story than whatever he wrote in the newspaper the next day. I don’t know which readership had a greater audience. But because of the timing, he was the first one that I saw to connect the dots between Hank saying this on Fox and “Monday Night Football.” That, then, sped up the news cycle. Ultimately, what he wrote in the newspaper had an audience in itself. But by the time anybody was reading that story, the story had been told. The first things into the marketplace helped dictate it.
