Crisis management : media's perception of crises in organizations

In today's society, crises are a phenomenon that every organization has to be prepared for. There is a great variety of crises and the study analyzes and determines how different types of crises can be described. The media is constantly following crisis-affected organizations. Therefore it is of utmost importance to handle the crisis communication professionally. We find it interesting to investigate how organizations communicate with the media during an ongoing crisis. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of how organizations handle such situations. The extent of our study focuses on two research questions, including to how different types of crises can be described, and how crisis-affected organizations are communicated in the media. A qualitative, case-study methodology is used, analyzing different crises in printed media over a one- month period in spring 2010. The results shows substantial differences in how crises-affected organizations communicate with the media and that there are different types of crises in organizations. The results also reveal that accidents are the type of crisis that figures the most in the media, and that combinations of communication often are used in crises.Validerat; 20101217 (root