19/02/26 · Publicity

An apology tour has four stops and they are always the same four

— Backlot Bex

This is a piece about a shape, not about a person, and I am deliberately not attaching it to anyone currently in the middle of one. The shape is worth knowing because once you can see it you stop being surprised by the timing of things.

1. The statement. Posted late in the week, written by a committee, containing the words “reflect” and “learn”. Its purpose is not to persuade anybody. Its purpose is to exist, so that later coverage has something to link to.
2. The long-form interview. Four to six weeks later, with a sympathetic outlet, always in a domestic setting. Watch for the interviewer being an old colleague of the publicist; it is remarkable how often it is.
3. The association. A charity, a workshop, a mentorship. Sometimes entirely sincere. Always announced in a way that gets a photograph.
4. The project. The actual objective, arriving about six weeks after the interview, at which point the previous three stops become “a difficult period” in the third paragraph of every write-up.

The genuinely useful signal is the gap between stops one and two. A short gap means the team is confident the story is small and wants it finished before the news cycle moves on. A long gap — three months or more — means legal is involved, or the second stop is waiting for something else to resolve first.

The other tell is when a step is skipped. Going straight from statement to project, with no interview, almost always means no outlet would take the interview on acceptable terms. That is a much louder signal than anything in the statement itself.

None of which tells you whether the person deserved any of it. It only tells you what the people managing it think the size of the problem is, which is a different and more knowable question.