Risk management for individual business areas is standard operating procedure for measuring risk/return profiles within corporations. Unfortunately, corporate communications departments have long been challenged by the effort to determine risk.

In practice, corporate communicators often rely on intuition when assessing the potential damage of a news story, but the business world values¹ numbers — pitting "gut feelings" against figures in a world where numbers typically rule.

To answer the desire for figures, corporate communicators have turned to various risk matrices that attempt to quantify the risk that publication of a news story has on reputation. However, before assessing risk, it is important to consider how events become news. Is it simply a matter of the combination of common news values¹ such as prominence, surprise, cultural proximity, economic proximity, and matter of fact? Is it presenting information in a pre-formatted way: problem > causes > solutions > actors?

Corporate communicators often rely on intuition when assessing the potential damage of a news story, but the business world values numbers — pitting "gut feelings" against figures in a world where numbers typically rule.

Neither of these is enough to explain how an event becomes news. Stories that score low on common news values frequently still become news, while many events with these values never do. What's more, neither the news value approach nor the problem/solution approach accounts for how a reporter or editor reacts to the information and makes decisions.

The likelihood of an event becoming a news story can be more accurately determined by framing — creating a framework for interpretation. An event becomes interesting to the media if it fits into their existing frames. Framing and news values, taken together, can provide a solid basis for modeling and measuring risks to reputation from potential news stories. Two key questions for communications managers to consider are these:

• How do the reputational scenarios in your company fit into current media frames?
• How intense are the news values in the reputational scenarios of your company?

The answers to those questions will determine the level of reputation risk associated with a given scenario — in a format that can be expressed in figures. Corporate communicators and their top management can then consider multiple ways of dealing with each potential risk.

But those precisely charted risks may never be realized. And much time and resources would have been wasted preparing for them.

The solution to managing reputation risks related to media? Rather than thinking in terms of figures vs. "gut feelings," the best approach is figures plus "gut feelings."

Dr. Frank Herkenhoff heads the media relations department at the Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchange Deutsche Börse AG. Previously, he was a consultant at Pleon focusing on the financial business sector. He is also a lecturer at Leipzig University in the field of public relations. Dr. Herkenhoff holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in mass communication.

¹ In Europe, the news value theory was primarily developed by Einar Östgaard (1965), Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge (1965), Oystein Sande (1971) and Karl Erik Rosengren (1970), and was subsequently reconceptualized by Winfried Schulz (1976). Reputation Capital: Building and Maintaining Trust in the 21st Century, p. 199.