Simplicity for Children: Whispering into the Friday Afternoon Black Hole

Starting around lunchtime on Fridays, Jack Flack always keeps his head low and his eyes open.

Why?

Because that's the traditional release period for bad news from commercial enterprises. Every flack knows that Friday afternoon is the black hole of the business-news weekly calendar. And even though the emergence of the web has filled that hole a bit, companies can still minimize the negative coverage by holding their damaging news to just before the weekend.

So this afternoon's joint announcement from crib-maker Simplicity for Children and the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission caught Jack's attention. After all, it's one thing to game the timing of your announcement when you're closing a plant or firing your CFO for stealing. But it's another when you know you've got a potentially dangerous product in the marketplace.

Jack Flack speculates on three possible scenarios for the suspicious timing.

Scenario 1: It just happened to work out that way.

Scenario 2: The announcement was indeed deliberately held to minimize the impact.

Scenario 3: Simplicity was still trying to verify to its own satisfaction that there was a genuine causal link between its cribs and the infant deaths, when the jittery CPSC forced the announcement by saying, "either we announce together before the weekend, or we'll go without you."

Jack is hoping for Scenario 1. But as they investigate the story, savvy reporters would be wise to focus on who knew what facts when.

Jack will be very curious to see how much coverage this story gets over the next few days. While such a recall would have been a relatively minor news story three months ago, it now plays right into the teeth of one of the macro-themes currently dominating business news -- "How safe are your children from the products you buy them?"

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