I used to glide past the front desk with a hello to Katie.
“You’re in luck,” she might sing out as I started down the hall. “I believe Adam is in, back from D.C.” Adam as in Adam Aron, CEO of Vail Resorts, then still based in the Vail Valley.
Sure enough. On the phone in his glass office looking up at the slopes where Beaver Creek Village was nestled a few miles up the road. Waving me in.
If not Adam or another of the C-suite bigwigs, nearly always Kelly, VP for communications, my favorite.
“What’s this rumor you’re up for sale,” I could ask and she could frown at me. “No comment, and where do you come up with this stuff anyway?”
“Is it true?”
Kelly handled herself well with my tribe. A stern look belied by a half smile, then a mother’s half-warning, half-amused, “Don.”
This was in the earliest 2000s, so I don’t think I’m betraying any trusts here, only illustrating a different time in ski town journalism. Oh, we did our work following the facts and telling the truth, happy or tough, wherever they led. But no one had to be standoffish jerks about it — sanctimony never worked very well anyway, in either direction.
A few years later, Vail Resorts moved out of the mountains to a 10-story tower in an office park in Broomfield just outside Boulder, near the FlatIrons shopping mall.
To visit, I scheduled my appointment and drove down. Kelly took the elevator from the ninth or 10th floor to fetch me. Rob, the next CEO, would be there and we could have our annual chat aside from bumping into each other in Vail or somewhere in between.
My purpose with each regime was the same: To know one another well enough that when we inevitably bumped heads, it was less Evil Empire and Those Assholes at the Paper and more the real human beings, presumably able to be more honest.
In Nevada County, California, home of ski town Truckee up high and Gold Rush mecca Grass Valley/Nevada City in the foothills, the sheriff always called back himself, usually right away. He bantered easily with our courts-and-cops reporter even when he thought she had bashed him, always ready to set us straight, and quick to kid.
Seemed like the first thing his successor did after he retired and she won election was hire a communications director, like the big city agencies. Good luck trying to reach her from then on.
This sheriff’s nadir predictably came after a couple of deputies confronted a young mother carrying a large kitchen knife and clearly out of her mind as she walked with her two children in a neighborhood. The deputies answering the call promptly bumbled too close. The kids gathered in front of her and shouted at one deputy to leave Mommy alone. The other slipped behind her with a Taser.
He missed, the mom lunged at him, and I think the other panicked and shot her dead, firecrackers, even though his partner could easily evade the young woman they had provoked. Apparently this was their training, no hesitation.
All this was captured on body cam. Days later, no doubt orchestrated by their ever-truculent communications director, the sheriff finally gave a stiff, lame press conference/statement on Zoom. I don’t recall her answering a question.
If the point of a communications pro was to connect the sheriff better with the public, this couldn’t have been a worse fail, even with all their over-polished statements and social postings. The old sheriff modeled how it’s done simply by answering his phone. Not like anything else was more pressing.
Early in Rob Katz’s turn as Vail Resorts CEO, he and one of our sister papers got into a tussle that played out through tweets, which resulted in the company pulling their advertising and Denver TV news satellite trucks pulling up outside the paper’s office. It was over something stupid like tweeting about snow in the Denver area when the mountains missed the storm, and then private conversations with the paper’s leaders showing up in tweets, too. Then the whole avalanche of stories and commentaries and letters to the editor, oh my.
The upshot was that our company came up with quick orders about talking to the press. Only our chief operations officer was authorized from henceforth. This was totally understandable from a central command perspective, very tidy, though I found it funny being the press gagged when approached by the … press.
I confess I didn’t mind the lack of cooperation during a stint as editor of a daily serving a Midwestern town with a steel mill when its owners worked through an anti-communications team and gave us nothing beyond the occasional self-congratulatory press release or pap statements in lieu of conversation.
This served my purpose to get reporters out of the office and down to the shift changes at the mill’s gates. The company was too large to control the employees, even if we had to use and explain anonymity way more than we wished. Even so, the resulting stories were way more insightful and true than the other way.
Talk to real people, I exhorted reporters. In this case, that was the only choice.
The rise in communication professionals simply is part of the ski town evolution, like traffic, development and homes few employees can afford, never mind buy with cash.
I tend to like the flacks and appreciate those who understand their job is to connect, to facilitate real conversations and ongoing relationships with sources rather than isolate them. I welcome the help.
But there’s also more of an anti-communication vein than there used to be as more organizations take on an Orwellian tinge, thinking they can control access, fail to respond to inquiries if a story doesn’t seem “positive,” post their way through a tougher one on social media free of pesky questions and their message getting messed up.
To me, that’s just a bell ringing for the journalists to get to work. That’s when we’re needed most.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at[email protected]or (970) 376-0745.