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Northern Rock: Handling a media storm
By Ronel Lehmann, chief executive, Lehmann Communications
When Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, broke a story on News at Ten on Thursday 13 September about Northern Rock being offered financial support by the Bank of England, the mortgage lender should have snapped into action.
Faced with an entirely predictable media storm and an explicit need to ease customer anxiety, any public relations adviser would have hoped to be able to turn to a carefully drafted crisis communications plan and push the button to get the ball rolling.
If Northern Rock had such a plan in place, the evidence was nowhere to be seen. The day after the news broke, the bank’s chief Adam Applegarth told the BBC that it would be “business as usual”, even if there was a run on the bank. Before long, customers were queuing outside branches in a rush to withdraw savings and close accounts, and business was anything but usual.