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My brother was a Russian hostage. That is now in the past but I am still processing it. But as his release started to appear on the horizon, and I was preparing for the media, I put a lot of thought into how to maintain some control in these final moments. It’s one thing to own our creations. We also need to think about the lifecycle of those creations and how we maintain control, if we want it.
I have posted before about owning your own stuff. That post focused on keeping your copyrights and ownership over things you create. There is no good reason to publish or draw or create a photo and cede your ownership of it. Unless you want to. I just think that there is always an opportunity to make that choice.
This post is a bit different. I knew I was going to keep intellectual control over whatever output I was creating. I have seen my words reprinted but that is the whole point of doing a media statement. The statement speaks for itself and you don’t have to speak to every media outlet that just wants a quote as they attempt to monetize your life’s information.
One of the early lessons we learned was to control the manifestation of the information. When you post something to X or another social media site, you no longer have the ability to manage it. You can, of course, delete it. But you can’t always edit the content and, if it’s been reposted and you are trying to amplify your message, deleting it will undo all of that amplification.
Five years ago, when we started our advocacy, there were also methods that were used to increase the likelihood engagement. The simplest is inflammatory language. But the other was to add an image. And our very first media statement was turned into an image, a simple paragraph of text on a white background, and posted to social media.
This was possibly the least best way to do this. While it did get a lot of attention and was easy to read, it had what we later learned was a contentious representation of Paul’s military service. By the time we learned, it was embedded in the internet. Like any correction, the inaccuracy had too big a head start to have any chance of undoing it. Once you say something on the internet, it’s published forever.
Over the years, I’ve taken greater control of the entire media management process. I’ve written a bit about it in this ebook I created for other hostage families. I happened to already have a website host, for this blog and other things that I work on, and that made this process easier.
Paul was arrested on December 28, 2018, and we learned about it on December 31. By January 4, I had moved from a one-to-one email response (I was so deluged, I wasn’t responding to phone calls or texts) and onto an email delivery list. This had a couple of benefits.
There is no way to emphasize how vital this was. Each email response, even with the same information, takes time. If you have 200 emails all of which need that treatment, you’ve lost hours out of the gate. Many journalists would ask followups. Many would also spam their questions or interview requests by email, text, and phone, without regard to what time zone I was in and what time of day it was. A shift to an email list meant that only people who needed more information would ask, and those questions tended to be very focused and unique to that journalist.
First, I had a free way to quickly push information to a dedicated audience, journalists, without having to rely on broadcast tools like X which would go to randos, Russian bots and trolls, and everyone else. I didn’t need to sign up for a premier tier to write longer messages, or to have them stored, or edit them. It was a great way for me to speak directly to people who could use information and amplify our advocacy.
Also, we have a historical archive of all of those statements should Paul ever want to see them. I honestly don’t know if he will want to. His release on August 1st seems so momentous, beyond our family, that I feel as though they might have a life beyond their initial publication. Also, frankly, I feel as though I’ve published them and there is not, at the moment, any particular reason to delete or secret them away.
I’m not much of a crier. I think it’s a healthy expression, it’s just not something I do with any regularity. As Paul’s freedom was unfolding, I was dry eyed and clear headed, knowing it might be bad news, and that I might face a bunch of media interviews. But I lost it when President Biden pinned his lapel pin onto Paul’s shirt. President Biden and Vice-President Harris’ compassion for him, for our family, was almost tangible in that moment.
That email list was the first step, then. Our sister spun up another website (freepaulwhelan.com) and that has its own collection of information. Another benefit of the email statements? Our family got them too, so everyone knew what our shared messaging was. Elizabeth could cut and paste it onto the freepaulwhelan site and anywhere else she was active. Lots of control.
I started on our final media statement in April 2022. Yes, 2022. It became clear that we would want to have it prepared and, if only as a matter of hope, it seemed a positive thing to work on. Over the years, I aggregated the names of all the people who had touched Paul’s case. We wanted to be sure to thank people, as we have throughout the last years publicly and privately.
Also, I was increasingly tired of dealing with media. I knew that, once Paul was free, I wanted to be free as well. The media statement would stand as the final contact point for folks following the case for our family’s comments. Once Paul was free, he could speak for himself.
I started to test out my final approach which was relatively simple. The first thing was that I would take the statement written in Microsoft Word and publish it to PDF. I had for a very, very brief moment thought about leaving that PDF on my OneDrive and just sending out a link. But I was too worried about the fragility of that link if I created it, as well as any repercussions if I made the link incorrectly (what if people could replace the PDF?).
The PDF would reside on my website. I would upload it via WordPress so it would sit in the media library and could be managed like any other content object. There were two cosmetic downsides to this choice.
The first is that you can’t get analytics on a PDF if you use a javascript-based analytics tool like I do (Matomo, but also Google Analytics). For another brief moment, I thought about putting analytics in the PDF or even a tracking pixel but decided that it was too much effort and also a bit sketchy feeling. The other was that the URL was really long and ugly: /wp-content/uploads/year/month and that was even without the actual PDF file name.
I ended up using the Redirection plugin for WordPress (which I’ve posted about in the past) to create a cleaner URL. The URL I landed on was /whelan-family-final-statement/ and it points to the actual URL of the PDF for the statement. In that way, I can create a persistent connection to that PDF so that, if I move it or rename it or delete it, I can still capture people coming in to the shorter URL. All I will need to do in the future is edit the redirection.
A benefit to using the Media Library in WordPress is that it doesn’t get published to an RSS feed like a page or post might. Until I linked it anywhere, it would remain invisible to search engines and others, because it also doesn’t appear in my sitemap. I had briefly considered just publishing it as a normal piece of site content but realized that it could inadvertently publish it to a syndicated function before I was ready. Or even show that I was testing (there are ways around this, like a staging server, that I don’t use).
There wasn’t a good solution to the analytics issue. But for a single file, it’s easy enough to just grab the raw log files from the web server which, again, I have complete access to. So analytics doesn’t rely on a third-party platform or a subscription or any other new tools or apps.
Also, as you can see from the image above, Excel does just fine with a web server log file. The recent changes in how Excel handles text/csv imports adds a few steps but seems to be better at figuring out the text file delimiters. I created a couple of filters to drop out other file URLs and I was able to grab the information I wanted.
The numbers are kind of interesting. The email list goes to about 200 journalists, so I expected those numbers. The remaining 1,600 visits are largely coming from the link being posted to Facebook and Twitter. Those are less valuable visits but still worth enabling, because they’re probably supporters or at least people curious enough to read the statement. The journalists are more likely to take the statement and re-use the wording in their coverage.
Another motivator for me for this approach is that the media are not a gateway to the information. Anyone on the internet can read it. Too often, the media misstate things or get them entirely wrong. Like this Detroit Free Press article that says its quoting the statement but in fact is quoting the email I sent to journalists, which is more administrivia than anything. I’ve asked them to fix it but it’s out of my control. I mostly find it irritating but I have such a low opinion of some publications and the lack of interest in accuracy by media generally, that I don’t spend a lot of energy on these errors.
There is no reason to place information in walled gardens. We posted the link to the X account for FreePaulWhelan. But it’s an entry point in a very unstable media platform and, at any point in the future, public access to that may disappear. Much better to create publicly available access points for anyone who wants to get access to the information.
I was glad that I retained this control too. As soon as Paul was released and we watched him being greeted by President Biden and Vice-President Harris, we learned about Vice-President Harris’ key role in bringing on board the German and Slovenian governments. I hadn’t included her in our list of people we thanked. Worse, I saw the bad faith takes (really, on X, if there weren’t bad takes, there’d be no takes) pointing out the omission.
Since I had the PDF on my server, I just opened up the Word document, added an acknowledgement to Vice-President Harris (and to a consular staff person I’d omitted) and uploaded the revised PDF. I could replace the old file with the new, and the old URL was persistent because it hadn’t been pointing at the filename anyway.
I said “goodbye” in my last email to the media because I really hope to never have to interact with them about this topic ever again. I have very mixed feelings about journalism, media, their ethics and the control oligarchs have over these information flows. I’ve seen platforms flip to propaganda after ignoring an issue for literally years, and how “old boy” networks impact stories and perspectives across different platforms, when the authors are all connected. Now that I’ve seen how often I could just write something and have it quoted on TV or reprinted without any corroboration, I question so much more of the information I see.
It’s true. You do NOT want to ever see how the sausage is made.