This week's PR Roundup examines how to respond when your leadership insults members of the media, using the example of President Donald Trump and a reporter he called "piggy," how the Cloudflare CEO responded after another outage caused havoc and a new Sprout Social report acknowledging that social media users want brands on Bluesky for customer care.
When Leadership Publicly Lashes Out at a Reporter
What happened: President Donald Trump’s choice to call a Bloomberg reporter “piggy” after she raised a question about the Epstein files caused many to pause and reflect. The exchange quickly dominated headlines, but the deeper issue, as Poynter’s Tom Jones wrote about in Thursday’s Poynter Report, wasn’t simply the insult itself, but the pattern it reinforces.
The questions that Trump bristled at, Jones noted, “were fair questions. They were not gotcha questions,” yet the president appeared “surprised and rattled by them,” raising serious questions about preparation and briefing discipline.
“He surely had to have known those questions were coming,” Jones wrote. “If he didn’t, then he’s not as sharp as he should have been, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt and her staff are not doing their jobs.”
Jones also warned against the normalization of these actions, writing, “It is incredibly rare for a president to act with such ill will toward reporters…And just because it has become a normal part of the current president’s routine does not mean that it should be normalized.”
Rather than distance the administration from the rhetoric, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reframed the moment at a recent White House Press Conference as authentic and transparent. When a reporter asked what President Trump meant by the remark, she answered that the president was simply being “frank and open and honest,” adding that he “calls out fake news when he sees it” and becomes frustrated when reporters “lie about him” or “spread fake news about him and his administration.” She further positioned Trump as the “most transparent president in history.”
Communication takeaways: For communicators, the takeaway is uncomfortable but clear: this is what happens when tone becomes brand strategy. While the approach may rally a certain base, it also reframes the media relationship as adversarial by default, shrinking space for accountability and trust.
Parry Headrick, Founder & Chief Evangelist, at Crackle, addressed this episode on LinkedIn, deeming it “cowardly” and “unbecoming of anyone.”
In a brief interview with PRNEWS Headrick also labeled such behavior from a leader at any brand or organization, “a giant red flag that a PR team shouldn’t tolerate.”
“If a client excoriates a reporter it’s a bit like a person being rude to a waiter/waitress—a huge tell about that person’s character,” Headrick says. “They get one chance to apologize and learn from the mistake. Two strikes and you’re out.”
However, not everyone can fire their client, particularly when the client is the President of the United States. Headrick also offered some advice for those whose leaders lash out at media.
“The PR account lead has to have a pointed side conversation with the client to re-set expectations,” he says. “Reporters are the lifeblood of any successful PR program. The message: Bite the hand that feeds you at your peril.”
In crisis and high-stakes environments, language isn’t just optics—it’s a foundation. And when that foundation is built on humiliation rather than clarity, the reputational cost can extend far beyond the moment itself.
How Cloudflare’s CEO Turned a Major Outage Into a Moment of Brand Accountability
What happened: This week, Cloudflare (which powers roughly a fifth of the internet) went down hard, taking major websites, apps and services with it. Platforms like ChatGPT, X, Canva and more were hit by HTTP 500 errors, as Cloudflare’s network struggled to route core traffic.
According to a company blog written by CEO Matthew Prince, the outage wasn’t the result of a cyberattack, but rather a routine database-permission change. That change caused a “feature file” used by Cloudflare’s Bot Management system to double in size, which led to a software crash across its distributed network. He included charts, graphs, and explained in simpler terms how the complex technology works.
Prince also apologized in a candid narrative, and posted about it on LinkedIn as well.
“On behalf of the entire team at Cloudflare, I would like to apologize for the pain we caused the Internet today.”
He added that “any outage … is unacceptable,” underscoring how deeply the company feels its responsibility. The fix came by rolling back to a known-good version of the file and restarting core services.
Communication takeaways: When a vendor malfunctions, your brand is inevitably part of the story. Pro-active comms matter.
In terms of crisis communications, Cloudflare leaned into transparency—explaining the technical root cause, accepting blame and laying out concrete steps to prevent a repeat.
Julianna Jacobson, Partner and SVP of Marketing Communications at Hot Paper Lantern, recently wrote for PRNEWS about managing high-profile outages (remember AWS just a few weeks back?). Jacobson believes Cloudflare and Prince took the right steps, in a timely manner to address the issue, because outages like this remind us that infrastructure vulnerability isn’t just a tech story—it’s a brand and stakeholder story.
“Cloudflare's responsible and transparent approach reflects strong leadership, reinforcing the brand's solid reputation,” Jacobson says. “He took full responsibility for the issue, even admitting to their initial incorrect suspicions, and outlined the steps the company took to resolve the problem.”
Bluesky Becomes a Customer Care Channel Brands Can’t Ignore
What happened: Sprout Social’s Q4 Pulse survey shows that Bluesky is quickly becoming a destination for customer care. And with the holiday season upon us—a time of year when shoppers reach out to brands online regarding everything from package tracking to assembly issues, it’s important to have your popular outreach channels secured.
Among users with Bluesky accounts, the platform now ranks #3 for contacting brands, behind Facebook (50%) and Instagram (32%), with 28% saying they’d reach out there. While not top of the list, the trend is clear: where audiences are active, expectations for service are forming fast.
Other key findings from the survey:
- 65% of users plan to rely on social for customer service as much or more than last year.
- 73% are likely to contact brands via social during the holidays.
- Preferred channels:
- Direct messages (DMs): 49%
- Comments/public mentions: 27%
- Generational trends:
- Gen Z: 28% likely to tag/@-mention brands publicly
- Millennials: 24% likely to tag/@-mention brands publicly
- Gen Z is more likely than average (25% vs. 15%) to reach out via story replies.
- When reaching out publicly, 51% expect an initial public acknowledgment before moving to private messages.
Communication takeaways: Bluesky isn’t just another platform. Customer care is migrating in real time, and silence there can signal indifference. Brands that treat Bluesky as a necessary platform, and not an afterthought, will shape trust rather than chase it.
Curtis Midkiff, Director of Social Media Marketing at Sprout Social, says the Bluesky surge in data shows that customer care is being reshaped in real time.
“Consumers are moving fluidly across platforms, and social data is telling us exactly where they expect brands to show up,” Midkiff says. “The opportunity for [communicators] is clear: treat every channel as a listening post and every interaction as insight.”
Midkiff also notes that the brands who will lead customer care this holiday season are the ones using social intelligence to anticipate needs, unify workflows and respond with speed and humanity.
“When care is informed by real-time data, it becomes more than problem-solving—it becomes a competitive advantage.”
Nicole Schuman is Managing Editor at PRNEWS.