How to choose a crisis management service provider in Australia?

In March 2024, Channel Nine’s director of news and current affairs, Darren Wick, resigned after an internal investigation into his conduct. The allegations were not confined to one incident; they pointed to a pattern and to a newsroom culture that had allowed it to continue.

Nine responded by commissioning an external cultural review, led by former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, across its Sydney newsrooms.

It was a PR and reputation management disaster. The crisis soon widened, with chair Peter Costello resigning in June and managing director Mike Sneesby stepping down later in 2024.

That sequence is the lesson. The individual conduct triggered the crisis. The culture question is what kept it alive for months afterwards.

Any board facing a similar situation needs a crisis management service provider who understands both problems, not just the first one. An adviser who treats this as a media containment exercise will miss the story that actually matters: what the organisation knew, and for how long.

Most organisations only think seriously about crisis counsel once the story has already broken. By then, the hours that shape everything that follows are usually gone. A properly briefed crisis communications consultant reads media momentum, aligns the response with legal and HR obligations, and gives the board language before a journalist asks the first question.

This is why the selection decision matters more than most boards treat it. A crisis PR agency in Australia is not a commodity purchase. It is closer to appointing outside counsel, because the wrong choice will not simply fail to help. It will actively shape how the incident is remembered.

Five things separate a genuinely useful adviser from a name on a pitch deck.

Project based counsel, engaged only once a crisis has broken, is the most expensive way to buy this expertise. The adviser is learning your organisation at the exact moment it needs to already understand it.

A retained model closes that gap. Senior counsel through Wilkinson Confidante means the adviser is already briefed on governance, culture and risk before anything happens. For organisations that have already mapped their exposure through issues management, a retained crisis adviser is simply the next layer of the same discipline.

Nine’s crisis was, at its core, a question about one executive’s conduct and what the organisation had tolerated around it. CEO reputation management in Australia increasingly sits inside the same conversation as organisational reputation, not beside it. Boards now need advisers who can separate the two threads and manage both simultaneously, because a leader’s personal conduct can outlast the organisation’s official statement by months.

That is a different skill from standard reputation management. It requires an adviser willing to tell a board what it does not want to hear, early, before the external review does it instead.

Nine’s crisis will be studied for years, not because the original allegations were unique, but because the culture question outlived the resignation itself. That is not a communications failure in the narrow sense. It is a judgment failure, and judgment is precisely what a crisis provider is meant to supply.

Boards do not need an agency. They need a person whose judgment they trust before the phone rings, not after.