Editor's Letter

Campaign strategists are not the only individuals who have been spending time and energy trying to determine the exact nature of the "news cycle" in an era when media messages are widespread and constantly changing.

Business managers, as well, often find themselves trying to determine how long they can rely on favorable publicity for a new product launch, or for how long they’ll need to combat negative publicity during a corporate misstep.

Company owners and managers in the information destruction industry may be finding it necessary to consider to what extent the identity theft wave of news has crested within the wider news ocean.

The secure storage and destruction industry by no means misled the American public about the rapid growth and serious hazards of identity theft as a growing criminal enterprise throughout this decade.

Likewise, it is difficult to accuse the media of fear-mongering or sensationalism for the role it played in familiarizing Americans with the definition of identity theft and how they can take steps (including calling upon the services of secure destruction companies) to prevent themselves from becoming victims.

In most cases, media organizations found a compelling story to tell, and industry trade groups and individual companies helped them tell that story.

While 24-hour news networks and local television, radio and print outlets have proven helpful allies in the past few years, experience with these entities also yields the observation that they can have limited attention spans.

In essence, news directors and editors are often assigned to look for what’s hot, new or breaking. That can help yield publicity the first time a company approaches a media outlet offering itself as a source for an identity theft news segment while the wave is building. Unfortunately, those same media outlets may be a lot less interested by the third or fourth approach if the topic is perceived as stale and the wave has crested.

A frustrating aspect to this is that there may be a very good story to tell. Whether identity theft continues to grow as a problem or if the secure storage and destruction industries have helped identity theft crime rates to go down, it’s news either way. But in many cases, if news directors feel that it’s "old news," it may be hard to grab their attention.

Determining how to keep identity theft and its deterrence in the news is likely to require some sustained attention, and certainly trade organizations and some of their committees are working on that very issue.

Riding the news cycle wave, like surfing itself, will probably take concentration and a measure of risk to do it successfully.