VCU’s Pam DiSalvo Lepley Gives the News on News

By Anne Harmer

Few people know and understand the Richmond community better than Pam DiSalvo Lepley.

As Executive Director of University Relations at Virginia Commonwealth University and its Medical Center (MCV), Ms. Lepley connects the public with breaking news events and information on a daily basis. However, don’t be fooled by this simplified job description. When relating news that potentially impacts thousands of people, it’s not as much what you say as how you say it, and the ‘how’ demands both strategy and sensitivity.

Ms. Lepley is hardly a newcomer to news and public relations, having spent 11 years in broadcast journalism before working in the Pennsylvania governor’s office in the environmental agency, where she gained her first experience with public relations. Here in Virginia, Ms. Lepley served as vice president at Siddall Inc., a local public relations and advertising firm. It was at this company that Ms. Lepley gained exposure to health care and higher education issues, inspiring her current position at VCU and MCV.

Despite her considerable expertise, however, no amount of experience could render her present job “easy.” Every news item, big or small, carries with it a unique audience and a different scope of impact, which in turn requires strategic channels of contact.

The first thing to keep in mind? “Always have a goal for communications,” Ms. Lepley advises. “There should always be a reason for communicating.” By specifically answering the question of why a story is important, which helps to organize and prioritize its delivery, the story’s relevant audience also begins to crystallize. This second step, identifying the audience, is indispensable because it determines the actual modes of communication with the public. In addition, after the story’s initial delivery, Ms. Lepley and her team are concerned with staying connected with and responsive to its audience via these channels.

To demonstrate the complexity of determining a story’s audience, Ms. Lepley cites last year’s H1N1 flu virus outbreak. On one level, VCU was involved as a university with a vulnerable student body and concerned families and local residents. In addition to this local audience, national interest fixed on MCV as a potential vaccine source. Thus, some stories create a “concentric circle” effect, where several audiences require news updates about different aspects of one event.

The rise of the Internet is a game-changer in terms of communication media. Online news sites, e-mail and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter join newspapers, radio and television as major news suppliers. For some audiences, especially young people, these modern agents have completely usurped the latter ones as primary news sources.

 

Ms. Lepley admits that the Internet enables news-related rumors to spread quickly and widely, especially through social media sites. However, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for her and the VCU communications team. For one, while sites like Twitter aid the dissemination of damaging or panic-inducing rumors, they can also be used to control the hearsay. The VCU news organization boasts its own Facebook and Twitter accounts, enabling it to stay in touch with what others are saying, address concerns and misinformation and instantly connect to a wider audience. Another vital benefit is that online communications are more individualized, and therefore can be used more strategically since stories can reach the relevant audiences more directly and quickly.

 

Regardless of the emergent forms of modern news coverage, however, nothing can replace old-fashioned reporting. “Just stick to the facts,” Ms. Lepley states. “It’s all about transparency.” In the fog of war, when a story first breaks, she admits it can be difficult to gather all the facts and to separate the accurate information from the incorrect. Missteps inevitably occur from time to time, but her devotion to transparency guides her to own up to any misinformation – social media sites are especially effective for speedy corrections.

Only a minority of VCU and MCV’s news is dubbed a crisis, or what Ms. Lepley calls “issues management,” and in news, a crisis can be any pivotal event, good or bad. However, such events do occur, and when asked to recall a particularly memorable news experience at VCU, Ms. Lepley readily responds.

In October 2002, two crises occurred within just 10 days of each other. The first event transpired during the “D.C. Snipers” incident, which had the East Coast gripped in fear. MCV treated one victim of the random shootings, and his arrival prompted national media frenzy. “They were literally camped out on our doorstep,” Ms. Lepley remembers. She coped by providing updates to the press every 30 minutes on the patient’s condition.

Just days later, amid the tumult, a crisis of the “good” persuasion rocked Richmond. At 5am, a phone call roused Ms. Lepley to inform her that Dr. John Fenn, a VCU professor, was selected as the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. That same morning, a full news conference convened at the university as international attention focused in.

Ms. Lepley describes her experiences at VCU as dynamic and rewarding. One Richmond resident sent an e-mail to thank her for the informational and sensitive coverage of the sniper victim, and she has kept the e-mail as a warm reminder to always maintain perspective and remember the human element of news coverage.

“I wouldn’t trade this job for anything,” she states. “It has been a joy to watch VCU grow not only in infrastructure, but also in stature and its offerings.” As an alumnus of VCU and an adjunct professor, Ms. Lepley’s devotion to the university and MCV allows her to deliver news to its internal and external community with both a personal and professional sense of its unique needs.

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