It's been hard to avoid the woes of JetBlue.

After last week's snow and ice storm left passengers stranded in New York -- some stuck on planes for many hours -- the airline has been battered again and again. With each passing day, stranded passengers seemed to grow angrier, and the airline's reputation seemed to be sinking further.

Then, JetBlue posted a video on YouTube. In it, CEO David Neeleman told the world what happened and what he was doing about it. This was not a typical, highly polished corporate video. Neeleman wore an open shirt, stumbled here and there on his scripting, and seemed ... authentic.

Take a look.

The one thing we all know about negative stories is no matter how careful we are, we will face them eventually. Dealing with these stories well is an essential skill for communicators.

In my Talking Communications with Farrell Kramer podcast, we take on this issue in Episode 16 -- Anatomy of a Negative Story. This episode looks at the negative story and literally walks through the steps needed to deal with it.

We start with the first word that a story is developing -- usually a phone call -- take on the internal assessment and decision-making process, move on to the actual interview with the reporter, and finally discuss how to handle subsequent cycles of the story once it appears.