What do you do if you’re a major city with major problems that are getting lots of attention from the media? You hire a PR firm of course! Pay them $100k to $200K for a four month campaign intended to spin the news media. It turns out that is exactly what San Francisco has done:
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The city’s image has been tarnished by a record rate of drug overdose deaths, businesses fleeing the Downtown core, homeless encampments multiplying on major thoroughfares like pop-up shops, rampant bipping, corruption scandals and a broken bureaucracy that seems intent on finding new and creative ways not to work.
But in an effort to highlight the positives of this fair city, such as San Francisco’s parks and its world-class restaurants, the local point people for next month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit have hired tech-centric PR firm LaunchSquad to spin out positive press and actively push back on narratives considered unhelpful to the cause.
The money for this campaign is reportedly coming from private donations so at least taxpayers aren’t on the hook for this. But I was surprised to learn that the biggest impact the PR firms claims to have made to date is this NY Times story published a couple weeks ago. As it happens, I was struck by the tone of that story when it was published and wrote about it at the time. In retrospect, author Heather Knight was pretty up front about her sources: [emphasis added]
But as remote work has upended the thrum of daily life, the city has become a poster child for petty crime, public drug use and tent encampments, even though the quality of life in most San Francisco neighborhoods hasn’t significantly changed. In a deeply polarized country, conservatives have found a ripe target in the woes of liberal San Francisco.
The narrative threatens the city’s recovery of lost convention and tourism traffic. And it has become enough of a problem that the city recently enlisted a public relations firm to try to convince the world that the city isn’t doomed. The effort comes in the run-up to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in November, which is expected to draw President Biden, about 20 other heads of state and 1,200 corporate chief executives from around the world.
“The Tenderloin is a disaster. The Financial District has issues. But let’s have perspective here,” said Jason Mandell, a public relations executive who has lived in San Francisco for 26 years and was hired by the conference organizers to counter the persistently negative narrative.
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Later on we get quotes from people who think the city is doing great. It’s not clear if these sources were also provided by the PR firm but it certainly sounded that way to me.
“So many of my friends told me I was crazy for moving to San Francisco — it’s unsafe, it’s filthy, it’s going down the tubes,” she said. “My experience has been the opposite. The beautiful neighborhoods, vibrancy and positivity — that message isn’t getting out there.”
Anyway, today the PR firm took a little victory lap calling the story “a placement” and suggesting spin like that could be worth millions to the city.
Last month, the New York Times ran a story in which San Franciscans confronted concerns of friends and family in other parts of the country, who often assume the city is the godforsaken hellscape they’ve seen described on national TV and in headlines.
“We did help facilitate that [New York Times] story. I mean, that was a placement,” Mandell said. “And I would say if we got a story like that for one of my corporate clients, especially like a startup—we work with a lot of startups—or if it was like a brand, you know, a brand reputation thing, I would argue it’s worth millions of dollars and maybe tens of millions of dollars to their current market cap.”
Again, when he says he facilitated the story that makes me think he did more than just give an interview. Facilitating stories could involve rounding up a group of people who say they’d be happy to say something positive and then providing those contacts to the reporter knowing the result will be a glowingly positive piece. Is that what happened here?
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The author of that NY Times story was Heather Knight. She has worked at the SF Chronicle for a while and was just hired away by the Times a couple months ago. She’s a good writer and has written some hard hitting pieces that were appropriately critical of the city of San Francisco. I was hoping that sort of honest coverage would continue at her new perch but turning one of your first stories for the Times over to a literal PR firm hired by the city is pretty disappointing.
