Controlling the message

According to this article, the Harrison Public Library is cold and heartless.

They charged the daughter of a recently deceased woman the $0.50 fine upon the (late) return of the book her mother had checked out at the time of her death.

The appropriate higher-ups are included in the article as saying that they have no comment.

I'm not really concerned about who's in the right or who's in the wrong in the situation. I mean, I have opinions, but that's not the point of the post.

If you're a library in a similar situation and a reporter comes knocking at your door to talk about this situation, you need to deal with it. You need to take responsibility for what happened and you need to make the readers of that newspaper see you as sympathetic people who made a mistake.

You need to have already contacted the person who feels wronged and expressed how sorry you are. You need to know what she needs from you to feel better and you need to do it. You need to back up those words of remorse with actions.

When the newspaper contacts you, you need to have the person in charge of spinning your message seem contrite for being unresponsive to the woman's needs. You need to have disciplined the person who upset the woman. You need to express how sorry you are at what happened.

You need not only to care, but you also need the people reading the article to believe that you care.

People who have never been to the Harris Public Library--people who don't have a picture of the library--now think that the staff there is rude and unfeeling. It doesn't matter how true the story is or isn't. The reporter has already painted them as a library with a cold, uncaring, unsympathetic staff.

And that message is a powerful motivation not to visit the Harrison Public Library. It doesn't matter how much information they have or how many services. It doesn't matter what kind of programs they put on or if their catalog is shiny. Because they didn't handle this crisis very well, they will lose users.