[David Brinza]

This year's homework assignment for FRC teams is to engage the media. Great concept, but it has potential pitfalls.

It's important to be clear in communicating the FIRST message to the media. Sometimes the accuracy of a story can get lost in the process of relaying it to the masses. Unlike in the book or technical periodical publishing world, there isn't often the opportunity to review a "proof" of what is broadcast to the world.

Something else to realize about the world of "news": failure and shock-value reporting "sells". Failures can spend days on the front page, but even remarkable successes will go completely unnoticed. It's the nature of the business. Thousands of airplanes landing safely every day isn't news, but crashes are. The last commercial airline crash in the US was over a year ago (Kentucky) and it was justifiably big news. The fact that it's been so long since an accident has occurred is remarkable, yet not "newsworthy".

Safety in FIRST is paramount because even a fairly minor injury can create publicity that hurts the program. Several football players off might be carried off of the field, but that is secondary to the number of points scored in the game. Injury is an "acceptable" risk in contact sports. FIRST's world is 180-degrees opposite to that environment. The outcome of a FIRST event (champion, winner) probably wouldn't even be mentioned in a news story that reports some sort of an accident at that event.

Teams need to adhere to guidelines that FIRST provides for getting the message to the media. Dean mentioned a "Media Guide" in the Kick-off. The official FIRST Q&A forum includes a "Key Message Summary" which provides "talking points" in clear language to be conveyed to the media during interviews. FIRST does not want the Key Message Summary to be duplicated and distributed directly to the media but wants members of the FIRST community to speak in a common voice. I'll leave it to the CD moderators to decide whether the Key Message Summary should be hosted on CD (white paper?).