What does off the record mean? When you're speaking to a reporter, if you get an agreement with a reporter to speak off the record, it means they cannot identify you by name. And they cannot use the information you're telling them. Now, this can be quite dangerous because a reporter could betray you and still use it, number one, number two, it could be in the notes and that could be subpoenaed or be part of a legal system and it could leak out, someone else could see it and it could leak, the reporter could simply forget which part was on the record which part was off and still use it. So you need to be extraordinarily careful about how you give reporters information on an off the record basis. In general, you don't want to say anything that would really destroy you or hurt your career business.

If it did come out. Now, there are some media training experts who are just quite dogmatic, never, ever ever speak off the record? That's not true. There are times for it. There are exceptions to the general rule of always speak on the record. So, here's an example, let's say, reporter comes to you and says, Look, I've got allegations, I understand there's a lawsuit being filed against your CEO, from this new employee, who is claiming this person stole their car.

And they're going to be filing charges for Grand Theft Auto auto. And let's say for example, it just isn't true at all. Here's what I might do in that situation, I would say the reporter. Look, Sarah, I'm happy to speak to you on the record. What I would ask is, Can I speak to off the record for a moment? Now I'm going to wait I don't just assume I don't just say something off the record, say oh, by the way, that's off the record.

It's not off the record. If the reporter didn't Give you a verbal consent before you started speaking. But in this particular case, let's say I got three reporters agreement that I could now speak off the record. So what I would say is, Sarah, here's the situation. This was a brand new employee. He just started yesterday, he made this allegation at the end of the day, the CEO, he's making this allegation against works in a different office in another part of the city, they've never or different part of the company they've never met.

They've never crossed paths. The parents of this employee have called up and said, oh, we're so sorry. This person has mental illness problems. We thought they were in recovery, but they're not. Of course, we're going to have the lawsuit. Taken away and retracted.

This, we apologize. We just want this to go away. Please don't mention it. We're going to make sure this goes away. And we're sorry for the inconvenience. So it's just not really a serious governance issue here with our company, our CEO, stealing cars, you're obviously free to do anything you want with a story.

But I would simply ask for your understanding about this, these poor parents and this family in this situation. Now, here's what will happen. A lot of times a reporter might think, ah, this isn't really a story, throw it away. So you essentially were able to kill the story by going off the record. Now, you can't do that all the time. And you could get in trouble.

But that is in general what off the record means. That is an example of how you would use it. You can go your whole career and not speak off the record but for those of you at the highest levels of politics, Wall Street, and certain industries. If you're communicating with the media regularly enough, and are part of enough stories there may be times when you have to go off the record