Results of the Enron Verdict Press Release

I promised on May 24 I’d post the results of my press release offering to comment on the Enron verdict. And being a man of honor who writes about ethics, I’m keeping that promise.

Results were less than stellar. An email drop to some 700 outlets resulted in *one* radio interview–admittedly, nationally syndicated and for a full hour. PR Web claims 36,997 people saw the press release (which means they saw at least the headline) and 398 media outlets picked it up but none used it. This is about half the number of page views of my previous two releases posted there, but both of those have been up quite a bit longer.

But here’s the really astonishing thing: not only did my carefully crafted press release (vetted with a PR expert before it went out) fall flat, it seems that almost no one was looking for comments on this big, big story.

Watching Google-flagged alerts for business ethics and related topics in the days following the verdict, I found only one case of a reporter turning to expert sources to comment on the case: the South Bend, Indiana paper, interviewing two professors from Notre Dame and another local university.

There were quite a number of reporters who made their own comments, all of them roundly critical of Lay and Skilling. But nobody was talking to experts.

Strange!