By Joe Diorio
May 7, 2025
I share a media dilemma with Jordon Hudson, the girlfriend of former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. During a recent interview with CBS News, Hudson, who is 50-plus years younger than Belichick, shot down a question from reporter Tony Dokoupil about how she and the eight-time Super Bowl winning coach met.
Forty-three years ago, I tried shooting down questions from a newspaper reporter and damn near got myself fired.
It was 1982 and my employer, the IBM Corporation, was going to hold its annual shareholders meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. When IBM’s public relations staff told the Jacksonville news media about this the reaction from news reporters was, “Why Jacksonville?”
IBM tried its darndest not to answer that question. It didn’t work out well.
In the weeks leading up to the April 1982 meeting the local newspaper asked if they could interview a “typical” IBMer. The manager of the local IBM sales office was identified as “typical.” IBM also decided to have a public relations professional sit in on the interview.
I drew the short straw and was that P.R. professional.
I was instructed to make sure no questions were asked that would seem “un IBM-like.” No one told me what an “un-IBM” question was, so when the reporter asked the branch manager if he experienced a sense of glee when his sales team won a bid for new business, and when the manager started to flounder in his response, I chimed in and said it was all about fair competition and not beating the other guys. Basically, I told the reporter we were not answering that question.
The reporter’s story, therefore, noted that “IBM flew a P.R. professional, Joe Diorio, into town to shoot down any questions the company didn’t like.”
An executive at IBM’s Armonk, New York headquarters read that and bellowed, “What’s a Joe Diorio???”
From that moment on until I left IBM (on my own; I wasn’t fired), my nickname in some circles was “WhatsaJoe.” It still isn’t funny.
I’m not Jordon Hudson, but the blowback over my actions were as bad as it was when Hudson, upon hearing Dokoupil ask Belichick how he met her, interrupted the interview, saying “We’re not talking about this.” Belichick never answered and just glared at Dokoupil as though he was a game official who just made a questionable call against his team.
It’s been over a week since that interview and the angry exchange has not vanished from the news.
Similarly, 43 years ago the press never stopped asking IBM why it selected Jacksonville for the annual meeting. A colleague said to me, “it’s almost as though they were saying, “Why this hellhole? Or are they looking for some evil intention?”
The reality behind IBM’s selection of Jackson was not evil and it was not an attempt to have the meeting in some backwater town. North Florida in 1982 had a very large concentration of retired IBM employees living there, almost all of whom were shareholders. It made perfect sense, therefore, to have the shareholder meeting near shareholders.
Why IBM didn’t want to just say that still makes no sense to me. I am convinced that if someone said that to the Jacksonville press the “why Jacksonville” question would have gone away, I wouldn’t have had to sit in on an interview, and my uncomfortable nickname would never been created.
I cannot speak for Hudson or Belichick, but it seems like a simple, “we met online” or something equally innocuous would have answered the question Dokoupil was asking and, according to the subtitle of my book on crisis communications, “made nothing happen.”
But like I said, I’m not Jordon Hudson. But I did learn my lesson that open communication is better than obstruction.
Joe Diorio is the author of “Crisis Communications and the art of making nothing happen” (Beaufort Books, 2025) and “A Few Words About Words. A common-sense look at writing and grammar (Beaufort Books, 2021).
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