Product reviews are a common occurrence in tech PR, but they can be a high-risk gamble, with the potential to make or break a product. A positive review from a respected publication is among the biggest-impact clips that a PR agency can get for a client. But on the flip side, a negative review can dissuade customers, causing them to take their business elsewhere. No one wants to buy something that an expert declared terrible.

Years ago, when I first began my career in tech PR, a client (who shall remain Nameless) asked us to seek out reviewers for their brand-new software product. They insisted it was ready to go prime time and would blow away the competition. Nameless was delighted when my team arranged for one of the most well known journalists in the tech review world to review the product. But when the article came out, it was unbelievably bad. Beyond negative, it was catastrophic. Not only did the software fail to live up to its claims, but it actually destroyed the reviewer’s test machines with an ominous “blue screen of death.” The company immediately went back to the drawing board to try and fix their product, and they ceased all marketing and PR spending. To my knowledge, Nameless never recovered. To this day, the #4 search result on Google for the company is this scathing tech review. The Internet never forgets.

Fortunately, truly negative reviews are somewhat rare in tech PR. As InfoWorld recently noted, writing a bad review is actually a lot more work for the reviewer because nobody is happy with a negative review, and the reporter and his editor have to double-check everything to make sure it’s accurate. It’s much easier to simply “rubber stamp” a positive or semi-positive review.

But what should you do if you end up with a bad review? Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do, once it’s published. In the best case scenario, the reviewer will give you a head’s up and let you read the negative review in advance so that you can correct any errors. Of course, you should work closely with the reporter to try to clear up any confusion. If there was a mistake in the review process, he or she should be happy to correct it. But if the product is simply bad, then no amount of PR spin is going to change the reviewer’s opinion.

What you should NOT do is what Tesla Motors did recently when a New York Times reporter had an unfortunate test-drive that culminated in his being stuck on the side of the road in an immobile car in the New England winter. When the scathing review was published, Tesla fired back, claiming that the reporter was lying and they had the vehicle logs to prove it. As you can imagine, the NYT did not take kindly to being called liars, and Tesla ended up with a whole lot more negative press around the debacle. Tesla would have been better off acknowledging the limitations of their electric car, noting that it does take a long time to charge and is not a complete replacement for gas-powered vehicles yet, though it does have a lot of other great benefits.

Badmouthing the journalist is never the way to go.

Did you hear the rumor last week? The Washington Post reported that the federal government is planning to “create super WiFi networks across the nation,” allowing people to access the Internet for free. Other media outlets immediately jumped on the rumor bandwagon, publishing their own articles reporting on the “Super WiFi” plan.

Personally, I was psyched at the idea of free-for-all WiFi access. As the Internet has become an indispensable tool for consumers and professionals (especially for those of us in the 24/7 PR industry), it makes sense to make Internet widely and freely available across American cities, right? After all, Internet service is quickly becoming an essential utility on par with municipal electricity and water.

Well, the problem is: the government isn’t actually planning to build these “Super WiFi” networks at all. As TechCrunch reported the next day, it turns out that the WiFi news was a complete media fabrication. So what happened? TechCrunch explains:

A somewhat confusing feature in The Washington Post about a few loosely connected government initiatives about greater access to faster Wi-Fi got twisted into a story about a plan to create a so-called “Super Wi-Fi” network. What ensued looked like a game of telephone between hair-trigger media outlets.

The whole situation has turned into an interesting case study on today’s rapidly changing media environment. Reporters and media publications are facing increasingly tight competition, while the Internet’s instant-access milieu has greatly constricted the timeline for reporters to learn about news, do fact-checking, and publish their articles. Search engines tend to prioritize articles that are published first, thus rewarding the early bird with more page views (and more $$). The overall result is that reporters are under pressure to report news as quickly as possible, even at the expense of the facts. This is a major reason that traditional embargoes are falling out of favor, as well.

The danger of this media environment was clearly exemplified by the “Super WiFi” rumor last week, which circulated widely before it was busted. Of course, the silver lining here is that the truth, once uncovered, spread just as fast as the original rumor. But not before the media industry suffered the embarrassment of spreading false news.

Fortunately, this was a special case, and untrue rumors of this magnitude are rarely spread by (legit) news organizations. Media professionals remain committed to reporting news accurately, and this isolated incident will probably not change anything. As PR professionals, the best we can do is to understand the pressures that reporters are working under today and do our best to help them to report on the truth, as quickly and smoothly as possible.