Timothy Coombs is editor-in-chief for the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management and senior parter at the Center for Risk Communication. As an author, his works include the award-winning book Ongoing Crisis Communication. As a theorist and academician, his research and thinking has shaped modern crisis communications, winning multiple awards from professional organizations including the 2002 recipient of Jackson, Jackson & Wagner Behavioral Science Prize from the Public Relations Society of America and the 2013 Pathfinder Award from the Institute of Public Relations.

Tim and I spoke about crisis comms, and how it's changing in a world increasingly defined by groups actively seeking to escalate any situation into a societal or political crisis. We also spoke about academia: as a longtime professor, we talked about an academic sector that is too often disconnected from the real world of communications practitioners, and which is – at least in my opinion – in the throes of a full-on existential crisis.