The PR Firm That Stopped Spinning and Started Calling Things Out

There is a particular sentence in every corporate crisis statement that the writer hopes nobody examines too closely. It is usually smooth, abstract and strangely uninhabited. Lessons will be learned. Values remain unchanged. The matter is being taken seriously. Eric Starkman made a business of finding that sentence before a reporter did. The oddity was that he had once been the reporter.

Before STARKMAN became a communications firm, its founder worked in the newsrooms of the Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Detroit News, American Banker and The Wall Street Journal. That history mattered less as a line in a biography than as a way of reading. A financial reporter learns to ask who benefits, what the number is being compared with and why the executive answered a different question from the one asked. A crisis adviser can use exactly the same reflex in reverse.

The firm opened in 1999, then called Starkman & Associates, with two finance assignments: a major Canadian bank and a money-management firm. It expanded into technology, healthcare and professional services. The unusual part of its account is how the introductions arrived. Starkman says many came through reporters at major North American newspapers. In an industry organized around persuading journalists, the firm grew because journalists vouched for the persuader.

A hostile reader, hired in advance

STARKMAN's menu looked familiar: corporate communications, media relations, internal programs, reputation management, brand development, content, SEO and crisis work. Its customers ranged from Fortune 100 companies and national nonprofits to financial firms, startups and prominent individuals. Public records connect it with CareLinx, Heidrick & Struggles, Munder Capital Management and Audit Integrity.

But a list of services misses the thing being bought. The client was renting an adversarial imagination. What would an employee notice? Which adjective would irritate an investor? What fact would a journalist place in the second paragraph, immediately after the company's denial? In calm periods, this is message development. Under pressure, it is a simulation of the next twenty-four hours.

The method put STARKMAN close to combustible people and institutions. Eric Starkman advised Richard Grasso, the former New York Stock Exchange chairman, for four years after Grasso left amid a dispute over his $139.5 million retirement package. A congressional-record exhibit on financial-crisis publicists listed former Merrill Lynch chief Stan O'Neal, Shana Madoff and her husband Eric Swanson among Starkman's prominent clients. This was not publicity for a new sneaker. It was the business of speaking when every noun carried legal, financial and moral weight.

“I never lied in all the years I practiced PR.”Eric Starkman, writing after leaving the agency business

When the client wants an alibi

Crisis advice contains a quiet bargain. The adviser promises discretion, speed and judgment. The client promises, though rarely in writing, to prefer an unpleasant fact to a pleasant fiction. Starkman eventually decided that bargain was fraying. He has said he left because companies and chief executives increasingly wanted publicists who could make wrongdoing look inconsequential.

That is what changed his mind. It also identifies what failed first: not the press release, and not the media relationship, but the premise that counsel could remain candid while leadership treated communication as camouflage. A statement can be polished. A contradiction cannot. When executives want the appearance of accountability without its cost, a skeptic in the room becomes an inconvenience.

The exit did not abandon the old method. It removed the paying client. Starkman Approved, the publication he now runs from Los Angeles, applies the same suspicious reading to automotive companies, hospital systems, banks, media organizations, technology firms, restaurants and politics. The site says it takes no payment for posts and discloses conflicts. Its categories include business and media, but also dogs, fitness, stores and travel. The corporate critic and the impossible restaurant customer are, in this arrangement, the same person.

There is continuity even in the name. A friend once told Starkman that an endorsement from him meant more than a favorable guidebook rating because he was so difficult to please. The friend's preferred burger place, Starkman notes with dry satisfaction, later went out of business. “Approved” is not a promise of cheerfulness. It is a claim that the object survived inspection.

Make skepticism a production process

The portable lesson is not to become professionally cranky. It is to give dissent a place in the workflow. Draft the statement in plain language. Strip out every unsupported intensifier. List the constituencies who know more than the communications team wishes they knew. Assign someone to ask the question that would make the chief executive end the rehearsal. Then answer it with a fact, an action and a date.

This works when leadership has room to change a decision, when facts can be established quickly and when the adviser has direct access to the person accountable. It also suits organizations whose reputations depend on sophisticated audiences - investors, employees, regulators, journalists - who recognize euphemism on sight.

It does not work when the organization wants certainty that only advertising can buy, or when the communications team is summoned after every consequential choice has already been made. Media relations cannot manufacture editorial control. SEO cannot bury a fact that keeps generating new evidence. A clever phrase cannot compensate for a company that continues the conduct being apologized for.

STARKMAN fits in the market as a small, senior-led alternative to the large integrated agency: less bench, less global machinery, more dependence on the judgment of a few people. That structure is useful in a confidential crisis and difficult to scale. Judgment is the inventory, and the founder can only attend one decisive meeting at a time.

The press release was never the point

The most revealing fact about STARKMAN is not that a reporter became a publicist. Plenty do. It is that he later became a critic of the compromises built into publicity. The three roles form a loop. The journalist detects evasion. The adviser anticipates detection. The critic explains how the evasion was constructed.

That loop makes the firm's history useful even to someone who never hires a PR agency. Every organization eventually writes a sentence it desperately wants believed. Before publishing, it can ask whether the sentence is true, whether it is complete and who will know the difference. The expensive crisis adviser and the irritating reader are performing the same service. They are refusing to be hurried past the interesting part.