In the news

The original sketch of the Publera logo. “Your ideas move stuff.”

Tuesday morning a few years ago, my phone did something amazing:

it didn’t ring. 

From before six when our daughter wakes up, to around 9:30ish finishing my breakfast: nothing. No peep, vibration, or beep. 

There’s a saying I don't think enough leaders really appreciate: 

“No news is good news.”

That morning, my phone didn’t ring because my client was NOT in the Times, not in the Journal, nor in any other news or industry rag. 

 Finally, around 9pm it buzzed with a text. “Thank you,” is all it said, and that was all I needed. It meant we were confident that the details of an easy-to-sensationalize problem had been made utterly, utterly boring.

Instead of a headline, it was routine and reasonable, and therefore no news at all.

“Sometimes,” the saying should go, “no news is great news.” 

Whether you value your privacy, or want to keep your teams focused without drama—or maybe you just have a lot to lose—the old quip “all press is good press” is total phooey.

The Usual Objections

I’ll admit, there are a few situations where it’s fun and worthwhile to be in the news. But I hope I can persuade you to mostly avoid it.

Over my last 18 years or so in executive comms, I’ve learned that privacy is not just a luxury.

Privacy is also a personal and organizational tool for success.

In the example above? My client’s company, team, and board of directors all just kept moving, forward, doing what they do. No detours for expensive public drama. Competitors sensed no blood in the water. Investors weren’t piqued with misleading reasons to worry. 

Today, it is one of the most common pieces of advice I give clients: almost everything you are trying to do as an organization will be easier if you just stay out of the news.  

First-time founders seem to hate this advice the most, but I’ve found pockets of resistance in all kinds of leaders. Here are the two main arguments I hear from them. 

1. “All publicity is good publicity.” 

My response? This is not true. Please stop saying this, and remember it was coined by PT Barnum. You may or may not be a circus promoter if you believe this line, but you are almost certainly short-term minded. I won’t go on. 

2. “Everyone else is doing it.”  

This is actually true, they are.  Want to tell the world about your Series A? Of course you do. Ten other people from your Stanford class just did too, and your investors are just as envious of their investors. 

This tends to backfire in two ways: first, raising money isn’t actually very big news, so journalists will inevitably “fill-in” the story of your fundraising with whatever narrative they wish. That could be a good or bad narrative, depending on the wind or how hungry they are or their daddy issues. Doesn’t matter: the core problem is that journalists are setting your narrative and not you. 

Second, this usually builds a reputation that you only care about journalists when you’re fundraising, which limits your power to tell and share real stories later, and is really annoying to reporters.  (And annoyed reporters can cause big damage if they are also smart ones, which most are). 

Wouldn’t you rather have the best journalists vying to do a story on you because they know how rare it is? How hard you are to get? How great they must be to have gotten you to say yes?  With patience, you get to choose.

A little press is okay, sometimes…

Now, I’m not a crazy person. Some good reasons to get a little limelight do exist, and these can be a tricky balance. Here’s two examples.

First, your employees.  An occasional great article about you can instill confidence in your teams and juice both your recruiting and sales. 

In fact, good leadership is merely “the work of helping people proceed through uncertainty.” That’s incredibly hard and nonstop work. If a glowing little piece in The Information helps you do that, so be it. 

The downside is when you depend on the press to build confidence in your employees and do your recruiters’ work. When that happens you’ve created two big weaknesses in your leadership and in your company. (What the media giveth, it doth gleefully take.) 

Instead, it’s better to develop strong leadership and recruiting skills that aren’t dependent on someone else’s platform or editorial taste.  You won’t always get leadership right, but if you lean on the media to do it, you will never get it right.

Second, a similar rule goes for investors. Good press can give them confidence to grant you more freedom, trust, or funding.  Even more, your investors gain real value when their LP’s see you in the news.

Good, shareable press is social proof. LP’s are happier about their investment, and more likely to write more checks again later.

That matters a lot. As a rule, this is the core communication challenge of venture capital. LP sentiment is on a short-term cycle while GP responsibilities and outcomes are on long term timelines. (Don’t believe me? Just search your in/outbox for the term “quarterly update”). 

It’s also no surprise that raising the next fund happens between these two timelines. So this is a genuine concern you might even discuss with your investors if you are VC-backed. 

This can be a hard balance. My best advice is find the right investors early. In my personal experience, I think there are actually many great GP’s who have earned enough trust from their LP’s to to survive a little silence from you. Especially in return for more tangible outcomes.  

Third, everyone has a boss of some kind and yours says you have to.

Maybe you’ve always agreed with me, and thought perhaps it might be better to be low key. Yet you have investors, or a PR firm, or your board of directors pushing you to be more visible. That's not uncommon.  

So to whoever you must make the case—yourself included—I’ll close out with my humble case to you.

The Best Press (For You) Is No Press.

Truth: if there is an actual choice in front of you to be in the news or not be in the news, that mere fact means you’re doing something important.  In my experience, you are on a mission. You have a vision. 

For people with a vision, and for teams on a mission, four taboo topics matter immensely to you.

1. Liability.

Here’s two neat lessons I’ve learned in my time working for, as, and with executives. 

Number one, the “C” in “C-Something” a.k.a., the “chief” in “Chief ____ Officer,” does not actually stand for what you are in control of.  Instead, your job is defined by what you are responsible for.

There’s dozens of other things, even people, that might be in control, even the weather, depending on your business. But you, at the end of the day, are responsible for whatever goes right or wrong. 

People who are not leaders and owners will never understand this fact.  In the meantime, the higher you climb, the more you are responsible for, and therefore the greater your liability. One small mistake can cost you an enormous amount of everything you’ve built—personally and professionally.  But the fact of great responsibility means it will also cost the investors, board, employees, family, and friends you serve.

The second neat fact I’ve noticed is that as any one person increases in stature or wealth or power, then not only does the target on their back grow, but increasingly, the last remaining weapon your detractors can use to hit that target is your own words. (This has gotten even riskier in recent years, as sensitivity to word choice can sometimes matter more than the idea you are trying to convey.)  

In this sense, deciding whether or not to be in the news, or to take an interview with a journalist, or to self promote publicly, just becomes a numbers game: The more words you say in public, the more chances there are that one of them could cost you something. 

2. Competitive freedom.

Here’s a memory.  In my early days at Facebook, Mark used to talk about keeping a low profile. While the world thought MySpace was trouncing us, the company’s existential risk, as we understood it, was drawing the attention of Google to what we were doing—which at the time was building an entirely separate part of the internet that Google’s search engines couldn’t crawl (or therefore sell ads against.).  

Which is exactly what we did. Without ever getting smooshed by Big G in the process, because they were too late to figure it out.

In fact, between  2009 and 2011, when Google finally launched its too-late salvo of a social network, there was only one major publication who sniffed out this story, writing about “Facebook’s Walled Garden.”

When that article was published, Google enjoyed 41% global share of ad revenue, a number which had increased every year since its founding and peaked only one year later at 44%.  

Meanwhile, as much as journalists and congresspeople enjoy hating Facebook, and as the global ad market continues to fragment across AMZN, MSFT, and TikTok, Meta’s market share of global ad revenue continues to increase. 

In our review of (limited) publicly available data, from 2009 to 2021 Facebook’s market share stolen from Google (because startup-FB made it past that critical hurdle of not getting smooshed) equals $166,355,900,000.00 in additional revenue. 

And I just think one hundred and seventy billion dollars is a perfectly okay reason to skip your next press opportunity.

Focus on your mission, achieve your vision.

3. Privacy

I am naturally shy, so this one has always surprised me.  But math is very basic: the more people who recognize you, the fewer options you have for places that you can comfortably go and enjoy yourself.

Most real celebrities will tell you the downsides fame, and they’ll tell you they do it “because the ups are great.” But remember, for celebrities it’s also their entire job to be seen. It is not YOUR  job.

In fact, I am 100% certain you have more important things to focus on.  (Or I I’m wrong, I’ve seen healthy disagreement on this.)

Instead, the more persuasive math I see people regret most often is when you are in the public eye, your kids are. 

Your friends. Their kids. Your confidants. Etc.  Unlike every other reason in this list, privacy is unique, because it is zero or one. There’s time when you had privacy, and then there’s everything after. You can’t go back. At some point it may inevitably the right time to forfeit your and your loved ones’ freedom of movement. You will have to choose when.

Just remember: media memories are very short (aka, press cycles). But digital memories are data sets. They last forever, and they live in AI models.

4. Power

The final reason to stay out of the news is actually the simplest. It’s also the least popular to talk about. So think of it like an engine: more power drives a vehicle further, faster, better.

Think about that: Further. Faster. Better.

If you have a vision, and you are on a mission (and they are good ones), then you have to admit going as far as fast as and best as you can probably matters a lot more than getting your picture in the paper or being the main character of Twitter. Most of the time.

If you would ever like to talk more about what keeping a low profile can do for you, I’m happy to chat. In the meantime, thanks for hearing me out!

I hope you do great things.