Every week, if not everyday, we hear of more newspapers failing or struggling to stay alive. Newsrooms are cutting staffs, cutting sections, cutting pages. Papers are trying to find a silver bullet to attract more readers and larger revenue streams online. They are not having much luck so far.

Faced with the reality of changing needs of traditional journalists, a broadcast media that has become more entertainment than news, and today’s fast-developing online world of social media, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, how do we attract attention and communicate accurately, effectively and clearly?

Here are six suggestions for organizational leadership in today’s competitive world:

• Advocate change – Learn the styles, trends and new protocols of today’s mainstream and online media as it shifts and jockeys to find a niche. Champion change in your own organization. Old habits die hard at many organizations, slowing them from learning new styles and embracing new techniques. While it might be an old habit and more comfortable, for example, to send out a press release, that kind of outreach has become less effective in today’s competitive world.
• Embrace storytelling – Learn how to tell what your organization has to say in an appealing story. Storytelling is the singular most powerful technique for any organization or business to attract attention and trigger word of mouth buzz that will ultimately enhance leadership positioning. The media, whether mainstream or online, is always looking for a good story.
• Think plain language – The communications clarity of business and organizations is too often polluted by obfuscated language of industry short-hand or over-worked business school jargon. As a communicator, translate opaque into plain and clear language that everyone will understand.
• Reach out to few to achieve more – Develop working relationships with those individuals – whether journalists, bloggers, analysts or others – who are opinion-leaders in your industry or business sector. Chances are the list of authentic influencers is astonishingly short. Become a valued and trusted resource aside from promoting your own organization. The payoff will be exponential because of enhanced credibility, and the fact that the top thought-leaders in your industry will begin turning to you and your organization to learn more. With regard to the media, the days of blasting out press releases to thousands of people are fast coming to an end for the simple reason that a release sent to everyone is the antithesis of what any journalist wants or needs for a story.
• Stop marketing and promoting, start listening – We are living and working in a new world influenced by vast choices online, a world of diminished influence for traditional advertising, marketing and promotion. This is the hardest thing for many organizations to grasp – that we must let go of old ways, and listen to the people who matter most to our organizations – customers, clients, buyers, stakeholders, the media – and get into conversations with them. There’s an old belief that the best kind of promotion is when a third-party person says something nice about you … and it’s never been truer than today. Listening and conversations lead to those who matter most to your organization telling others nice things about you. They become an army of ambassadors who build the best kind of awareness.
• Become the credible voice and face of your organization and industry – Look around at today’s most respected organizations. In many cases, the top executives have high visibility, and are recognized as leaders – Tony Hsieh of Zappos, John Chambers of Cisco, Richard Branson of Virgin, Steve Jobs of Apple. They define and differentiate the image, integrity and reputation of their organizations through their own consistent openness and transparency as industry leaders, often leaving less outward CEOs to stand in the shadows.

It is not that difficult to achieve organizational leadership to capitalize on all the changes around us. It begins with the discipline of letting go of old habits that often no longer work, and recognizing that if we do not get more savvy as communicators, we might wake up some day to find that our competitors have.

• Not only mainstream newspapers but traditional media as a whole is on the ropes. You know things are bad when there are layoffs at National Public Radio. It had been business as usual for a long time.
• We are starting to realize that the big automakers – now trying to stave-off bankruptcy – apparently have bumped along for decades without a strategic business plan. It happens when car salesmen run the business. No visionaries there. It had been business as usual for a long time.
• Technology, the darling of our attentions for so long, is now struggling. There’s news each day of layoffs at Microsoft and Google, among many others. It had been business as usual for a long time.

Then, what about the public relations industry, a business that has, for the most part, been using the same models, tactics and approaches for decades? We know that many large PR agencies have battened down the hatches for a bad economic storm.

But, what happens when the gargantuan financial holding companies – the outfits that gobbled up hundreds of PR, advertising, marketing and branding shops over the last decade and have been treating them like the golden goose – see pronounced slumps in revenue streams? If there is one industry where it’s been business as usual for a long, long time, it is the public relations and advertising business. All that is changing, fast.

Some agencies are scrambling to learn the online digital world. But closer examination shows only single-digital commitment of personnel resources to such efforts. Preference is still given to traditional tactics, like billable hours, meetings, events and writing press releases.

Leadership in strategic communications is an area where I consult and have written about for years, and will be the subject of upcoming blog postings. There’s more in my new book, “The Media Savvy Leader: Visibility, Influence, and Results in a Competitive World.”

Emmy Award-winning former CBS Network News correspondent David Henderson has written a timely book for CEOs and communications pros on how to tap into the tremendous power of the news media in the digital age.

Becoming a media savvy leader in today’s technological world requires an ongoing commitment of time and effort. Henderson refers to the book as a “practical field guide on how to capture your share of the spotlight in front of the media and then effectively deliver your news and messages in a manner that boosts the value of your organization – and your own success at the same time – in the Internet age.”

Henderson’s broad experience in network news and as a communications professional is evident.

As a journalist-cum-communications pro, he knows how vital it is for CEOs to be the face and voice of their companies. They should heed the advice of communications departments and respect journalists. More importantly, they must remain credible when communicating with the media. This is especially good advice for companies facing devastating layoffs and profit declines during the current economic crisis.

Click here to read the full review.

Each day, for example, I check in with several blogs, and nearly always find myself learning even more about this exciting online world, beyond what I thought I knew yesterday.

I have been honored by two such leaders in the world of social media, Chris Brogan (right) and David Meerman Scott, because they’ve both reviewed my new book, The Media Savvy Leader, with genuine and valuable perspective.

David’s review was a couple of weeks ago; Chris’ was yesterday in what is one of the most memorable video book reviews – sprinkled with dry humor – I’ve ever seen. Check out video here.

In another time, in the cowboy film, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Wayne growled “never apologize, and never explain.” But that was then—more than 50 years ago in a macho western. This is now. Today apologies can do wonders.

Consider this example: “Gov. John Rowland changed his story and acknowledged that friends—including some under suspicion in a federal corruption investigation—paid for work on his summer home,” reported Susan Haigh of the Associated Press. “Rowland’s admission, made public in a statement, came ten days after he insisted he alone had paid for improvements on the house at Bantam Lake.”

Another politician confirms what we believe about most politicians: that they accept payoffs. We hear it all the time these days. Yet in this case, Rowland exacerbated his situation by lying, then changing his story, and announcing it in a written statement. A statement! Who’s going to believe a written statement? Why not just come clean and stand up in front of the microphones and reporters with notebooks and say something that begins with, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I apologize, and I’m going to do everything possible to make it right .…”

Rowland was later found guilty and went to prison.

Equally astonishing is the absolute refusal by some organizations and titans of industry to ever admit to any mistakes, even when their hands are caught in the cookie jar. In fact, it seems that the larger the scope of misdoings and more egregious misconduct, the more likely that arrogance will prevent the perpetrators from even considering the value of an apology.

It must be something in the American ethos that a guy who makes an apology is some sort of “girlie man,” to borrow Arnold Schwarzenegger’s words. Attorneys advise clients to shun the actual word apology in favor of regret.

Did you ever hear an apology from Enron, Global Crossing, or Worldcom? Nope. The message we heard was one of blame and excuses, seemingly driven by greed and arrogance. We were left with the impression that many of those titans of business were just well-compensated crooks.

Another example: Hurricane Isabel cut a destructive swath up the east coast of the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people with no power for days. Several of the power companies were slow to restore service. It was disclosed in the media that they had cut back the number of repair crews needed to upgrade power lines in order to show a better bottom line to investors.

Rather than standing up in a news conference and saying simply, “We made a mistake. We apologize, and we are now working feverishly to restore electricity to your homes,” the power-company executives attempted to defend their decisions. They did battle with the news media. They made the media their enemy rather than saying they screwed up. It was classic John Wayne behavior, circa 1950.

Yet today such behavior comes off as incompetence and appears to emphasize greed over a clear focus on customer service. It wasn’t smart, and the companies were broiled by the public, the media, the politicians and … the investors.

There are unfortunately far too many executives and attorneys who choose to duke it out (pun intended) with tough stances. The worse the situation, the greater the arrogance—and often the greater the media feast of one story after another. Denying responsibility or twisting facts, especially in the face of evidence to the contrary, will actually create a news story. Hey, just apologize, make amends, and move forward.

President George W. Bush managed to reduce damage to the reputation of his administration by accepting responsibility, albeit belatedly, for incompetence by the Federal Emergency Management Administration in responding to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A week after the hurricane, people were still dying along the Gulf Coast, and the region was in chaos, because no aid had arrived from the federal government. When it was apparent that the government had no plan and the administration was being scalded by everyone from the media to both Republicans and Democrats, Mr. Bush essentially said, “We were wrong, we made mistakes, but here’s what we are doing now …” and outlined a plan for assistance.

Sadly, though, his apology was not subsequently linked to concrete actions and timely relief for those whose lives were devastated by the hurricane, giving rise to what some Bush administration observers called Bush’s “smirk factor,” a habit of making an apology or statement that is, in reality, neither sincere nor backed up by action.

Connecticut-based communications strategist Jane Genova counsels organizations on the value of creating goodwill through an apology. She said non-apologizers might be smart to explore using mea culpa as a power tool and she shared these examples from her work:

1. Just observe. When anyone makes a sincere apology, we listen. “I landed an assignment in the mega competitive hospitality industry by recognizing that even the most unhappy guest will be turned around by an authentic and detailed apology,” she said.
2. Give up on the “cult of the self.” Did the inward, self-focus theory ever work? It’s questionable. In an interconnected, volatile global economy, who can go it alone? That’s why the eastern philosophy of “no-self” is catching on rapidly. If we aren’t defending the self, apology comes naturally.
3. Decide if we want to be right, appear to be right, or be successful. Surrendering on this one is the necessary inner paradigm shift that makes apology possible.
4. Ignore the lawyers, initially. We can apologize in ways that won’t invite legal action or strengthen the case of the opposition. After we make a decision to do a mea culpa, then we should listen to the lawyers.
5. Try out apologizing. When we get the favorable attention of others out there, we know we’re doing it right.

When talk show host Oprah Winfrey realized she had been duped by one of her chosen authors, James Frey, she accused him on live television of lying about the supposed facts in his book, A Million Little Pieces, and she apologized to her audience for originally endorsing the book. The high-profile celebrity knew the power of an apology; done right, it became disarming.

Unquestionably, a sincere apology has become an effective tool in practicing communications. Most everyone will give a break or second chance to someone who admits a mistake. We are human. We do our best. We are not perfect. We make honest mistakes. In extremely difficult times, an apology can be an effective and proven method of controlling what the media says about you.

There are a bunch of books out there about media relations but almost all are flawed. The books to avoid are either written A) by some MBA-professor type with no real-world experience B) by a journalist with no background working in corporate communications for a company, nonprofit or government agency C) written exclusively from the media relations perspective (like a sales book) with nothing about what a journalist needs to do their job D) written as if we’re in 1985 and there is no such thing as the Internet.

The Media Savvy Leader is terrific because David Henderson has been a success both as a journalist and as a media-relations practitioner. He is an Emmy Award-winning former CBS network news correspondent so he knows what it is like to be a working journalist. And as a media-relations advisor and strategist, he has been responsible for such stunning successes as generating massive national media attention on little Branson, MO. And Henderson knows the online world. He writes a terrific blog and knows how online communications fits into the mix.

If you are in media relations or corporate communications you got to read this book. Now. If you’re a CEO who wants to influence the media the way Steve Jobs does at Apple it is a must read. I found the discussions on how and why it is essential to take media relations in-house and not trust your reputation to a bloated PR agency to be absolutely essential information.

David Meerman Scott