By Ben Brown

If you’re getting bad press—or no press—for a good project, you don’t have a communication problem, you have a management problem. So engage the media the way you engage other key stakeholders.

Here’s how:

1. Do your homework. Know where locals get their news, and reach out to reporters and editors who specialize in topics featured in the charrette. Do it immediately, as part of pre-charrette research. And make the contact personal, one-on-one.

2. Sell the process. Stress the charrette’s inclusiveness and its bottom-line efficiency, both of which play to journalists’ values.

3. Anticipate rough spots. Assume reporters will be attracted to conflict and personality, the two big drivers of daily journalism. Defuse volatile issues with more information, not by secrecy.

4. Plan to explain and repeat. Journalists arrive with varying degrees of knowledge and experience. Prepare fact sheets. Connect reporters with experts who can frame key issues and bring them up to speed.

5. Protect the spirit of openness. Make clients and charrette team leaders defend any attempt to exclude reporters from any part of the process.

6. Tell the truth even when it hurts. Admit problems. Allow no misleading information to stand—even if it temporarily benefits you. Honesty solidifies trust, which is the principal currency of communication.

Excerpted from The Charrette Handbook, by Bill Lennertz and Aarin Lutzenhiser, published by APA Planners Press, 2006.