Communicating Through a Disaster - What We Can Learn From Mine Crises

Crisis communications is sort of like an acid test both of your mettle as a communications professional and of your organization's readiness to face the unthinkable.

I recently took a close look at three recent mine disasters in the US - very visceral events with lots going on before, during and after the crisis. The full article is here. An edited version of this paper will soon be published in Mining magazine.

For me the interesting part was digging into the anthropological aspect of death and how that shapes communications (or should shape it). Here's a cool article on the topic from the guy I quoted in my article. In the future I'll likely blog about the interplay of anthropology and sociology in audience understanding. Stay tuned.