briefing for the media. The media, who had been aware of the first briefing, assumed that we were panicking. In fact, the next day's Wall Street Journal headline read, "AT&T Tries Again to Clarify TCI Deal."8 Given the infor- mation, reporters added up the figures on the last page and came up Don't Let Plugging Leaks Become an Obsession with a total of over $4 billion to provide phone service. It was less than $15 to $20 billion, but it was far more than the $1.8 billion in AT&T's capital budget for the first three years of the merger. As we tried to explain in a letter to the editor, most of the costs listed in AT&T Labs' presentation were already in TCI's existing construction budget SO that it could add channels and offer high-speed data. The cost of add- ing phone service to that was $300 to $500 per household, depending on whether or not a household was a video customer. The charts had actually spelled all that out, but because the present- ers from AT&T Labs had approached the question as engineers, rather than as marketers or even reporters, they had never made it clear. And those of us in PR who should have known better didn't do an adequate job of following up. After the second briefing, AT&T's stock slid an- other $1.88 to the lowest price since Armstrong took over. We made at least three mistakes here. First, to solve a short-term problem (lack of information on the cost of upgrading TCI's cable systems to provide phone service), we chose a channel with a long- term focus. Industry analysts are a source of information that the media use, but they do not publish on a daily basis. Most of their analysis comes in thick technical reports commissioned by clients or in monthly newsletters that are primarily designed to promote their capabilities by being provocative. Second, we created the impression that we were reeling from one strategy to another by scheduling two briefings in such close proxim- ity. If it was necessary to hold separate briefings for analysts and re- porters because the former would tend 