Mar

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Interview with Matt Barnhart, Detroit Lions Director of Media Relations (Part 3)

Filed Under Career, Interviews 

Today is Part 3 of an informational interview that I had by phone with Matt Barnhart, who is the Detroit Lions Director of Media Relations. We spent nearly 45 minutes talking about public relations and the Lions so I decided to break it into multiple posts this week. In today’s post, Matt addresses the Lions’ 0-16 season in 2008 and dealing with blogs and rumor websites. Tomorrow’s post, which will be the last in this four-part series, will feature Q&A with Matt about career tips for the sports PR industry. If you haven’t read them already, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the informational interview.

1) In 2008, you guys obviously had a tough season going 0-16. As a PR department, how do you deal with something like that and what were some of the obstacles that you had to overcome during that season?

Well how we dealt with it was that we didn’t focus on 0-16. Just like the team, we were focusing week-by-week. We weren’t looking at how this is going to affect us long-term or what’s going to happen three weeks down the road. Our focus was to do what we can as a PR department to help this organization prepare and get ready for the next game. So you really narrowed your focus and as much as possible and kept focus on the upcoming game. Much like the team preparing each game, you were doing the same thing and working in concert with the same message and the same mission that they were doing. Obviously things didn’t turn out anywhere where we expected and it was a disappointment, but you’ve got to have that mindset especially if the team is moving in that direction. You need to make sure that you stay on that same message.

In terms of the challenges, it got very difficult at times for players to keep talking about what would happen if they went 0-16 and so forth. It was difficult from the standpoint that we knew our players and coaches were putting out a great effort and things just weren’t happening in our favor on Sundays. That was hard to do, and we had a lot of requests that focused on our season because of the historical nature of it. We had to really structure any types of those requests accordingly, and we made sure that we stayed on our mission and our message of working week-to-week and not let anything get sidetracked and that’s how we handled it. We didn’t set up any one-on-one interviews or requests. We just let reporters work within the confines of daily media access, and we gave our players a heads up about certain stories specific reporters were working on at the time. We couldn’t refuse access to league-mandated media sessions, but we didn’t have to fulfill special requests at the same time. I think this approach was effective.

2) You spoke with a few IU classes about the challenges you face dealing with blogs, especially ones that seem to really focus on rumors. What makes those blogs so challenging and what suggestions do you have for other PR professionals when it comes to dealing with these types of websites?

First of all, my suggestion to young, aspiring PR professionals is simple: remember you are the eyes and ears of an organization. That deals with traditional media, and now it’s dealing with more digital media, which can span the spectrum of blogs and rumor sites to social networking sites. So you’ve got to make sure you understand what’s going on at all times and keep track of everything. The reason for that is that it’s not necessarily what is being reported by some of those sites, it’s the reaction that is created by what they are reporting. What I mean is those sites have become very popular because they are read by the media. They are also read by people inside the league — executives and so forth – so if the media and leagues’ executives (when I say league, not necessarily the league office but just people around the league) are reading those sites then as a PR person you need to read what they’re reading.

What will happen is it may be a rumor and you may read it and it’s totally off-the-wall and you know it’s not true, but I know that there are reporters who are reading those postings who will, at some point, bring it up in their interaction with either our head coach or someone in our organization. You must make sure that you prepare your people to be able to handle some of those questions that come out of it. That’s very important. You want to eliminate, if possible, anything that may surprise your key persons of your organization who are in front of the media. It’s a challenge because you know a lot of that stuff isn’t accurate and it doesn’t really come to fruition a lot of times, but you have to make sure that you know what’s being reported when so the next time when your coach or somebody in your organization is available they are prepared the right way.

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