BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

The generally-accepted rules of crisis communications state that stories such as "Plane Lands Safely" are not the stuff of headlines. But this week, the Air Transport Association proved that adage wrong when it announced that for the first time since jets started flying, U.S. airlines have gone two years without a single passenger fatality.

The story was run by major news sources including USA Today and CNN, as well as numerous blogs. And when reporters solicited third-party commentary from experts like Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Arnold Barnett who praised the airlines for keeping "threats at bay" in an industry that rarely gets a pat on the back from the media was finally enjoying some well-deserved kudos.

At a time when the image of a charred Continental Airlines fuselage sitting on a Denver runway is still fresh in many people' s minds, this was a great way for the ATA to garner some positive attention for the much-maligned airline industry.

But while the ATA has provided us with proof-positive that the media will report good news from time to time (as a PR veteran myself, I want to be the first to thank the ATA for this all-too-rare affirmation), it has also offered a reminder that you can' t put good news on auto-pilot once the media takes the bait. You have to fully employ your own communications channels as well.

When I went to the ATA website to learn more, I didn' t find a single related news release, article, landing page, or blog post - and I had to search three pages deep just to find a copy of the report that detailed this historic achievement.

At a time when more Americans are getting their news from the Web than from traditional sources, optimizing good news on an organization' s website is the best way to transform a nice story into an all-out communications coup. It' s where bloggers are looking. It' s where traditional journalists are looking. And it' s the one place in which you have total control to shape and mold a story as you see fit.

The ATA did a good job of generating some positive press for an industry that really needs it. But one can' t help wonder how much bigger the story could have been - and how much more traction the ATA could have gotten out of it - if it had been highlighted in the one venue that increasingly matters most.