Information Gap

You might refer to it as a kind of no-man's land - a span of time when no concrete information exists. Such a gap occurs in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. For instance, let's use the case of an active shooter on a government facility.  The crisis has just occurred, yet no information about it has been released to the general population due to the fact those on site are still trying to cope with and make sense of what has happened; yet people are aware of what has happened. The existence of such a gap potentially brings with it confusion, uncertainty, irrational behavior, rumors and chaos. It is a dangerous stretch of time.


Michael Doble, director of corporate public relations for the Raytheon Company, is one practitioner who has written of the gap between an event of great threat and when information about it is collected and shared with the principles involved as well as external publics. Doble notes the task of making that gap as brief or short as possible is the ultimate challenge for the communication professional. With the existence of a threat, panic is rarely far away due to two primary reasons: the threat itself and the lack of knowledge as to how wide spread it is and what preventative steps, if any, can be taken.


To help reduce the size of this inevitable gap requires the public information professional to become actively involved in contending with the incident. Their instinct, understandably, may be to hide under a desk, yet their responsibility is to serve their publics by working closely with the first-responders in order to collect as many details as possible that they may share with others. Just as it is the first-responders job to quell the crisis, it is the communication professional's duty to let the public know what is going on, what is being done about it, and what they can do to ensure their own safety. The communicator, in such a scenario, is vital.