They say that three’s the charm. Not for Australia’s Qantas Airways. Three widely reported safety incidents in as many weeks have passengers and Qantas employees concerned and Australian safety authorities on alert. Qantas is actually among the world’s safest air carriers, with not a single fatal accident in almost 90 years of commercial operation. But that was yesterday. Now, with three emergency landings one after another putting Qantas in the news, outgoing CEO Geoff Dixon admits ... Read More

The latest wave of disappointment in Apple’s iPhone 3G saga came with the launch of MobileMe a few weeks back. As users reported server outages and lost e-mails, Apple remained quiet – issuing a terse, one-sentence statement online and eventually sending an apology e-mail to subscribers a few days later. To date, the company still has not answered the increasingly angry demands for information from its loyal customers and has stiff-armed inquiring news media. As a ... Read More

With serious consumer-product recalls occurring in the United States seemingly every day, Congress is passing stricter regulations on everything from children’s toys to grandma’s walker, along with the toughest penalties in history for companies that violate them. The House and Senate are poised to approve the bill and President Bush is expected to quickly sign it. The measure bans lead in toys and requires the Consumer Product Safety Commission to hire more workers. The CPSC will ... Read More

As anyone who has been following the presidential campaign this year already knows, there is no bigger media superstar than the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. While Obama’s superstar status may not translate into an election-day victory – John McCain played the role of media darling in 2000 and it didn’t help him beat George W. Bush – it is odd that on the same day the McCain campaign was complaining about press coverage, a feature ... Read More

A reality of the Information Age is that industries not previously thought of as media targets must also be prepared to deal with communications crises of all shapes and sizes. In a recent issue of the National Parking Association’s PARKING Magazine, Levick Senior Vice President Gene Grabowski prescribed the basics of developing and implementing a crisis communication program that could one day spare the owners and operators of parking facilities across the country from reputation demolition. Read More

We saw it with the failure of Bear Stearns back in March – and last week with the implosion of IndyMac and the near-collapse of Wachovia. In a down economy, rumor and speculation can carry the weight of fact. Throw in Information Age technologies that provide investors and account holders with instant access to Wall Street gossip, and what you’ve got isn’t recipe for a run on a bank, but rather an all-out sprint. Today, financial services ... Read More