Years ago, as publicist for a TV station, I got a call from one of the town’s top newspaper TV critics.

Whatever you think about his comedy skills, Jay Leno would make a helluva PR exec.

Particularly with crisis and reputation management.

This week, Leno came out swinging – finally – in the right media outlet, speaking to the right audience, at the right time. And he said the right things to get himself what he realizes is necessary: to start shifting the direction of the industry dialogue about his new 10 p.m. show.

All weekend, I delighted in mocking the lame PR stunt concocted by self-aggrandizing wannabe star Richard Heene and his glassy-eyed, mute collaborator wife, Mayumi.

And I work in publicity.

Procrastinating throughout two days I’d earmarked for laundry and paperwork, I enthusiastically sent silly texts to friends, read the incriminating updates, set my cable remote reminder for the Larimer County sheriff’s press conference and posted one-liners on social networks – apparently funny enough to rack up a handful of new Twitter followers.

That 1997 "Law & Order" story arc about a Hollywood executive's murder -- the one which mocked every L.A. stereotype -- was rerun Sunday morning. In it, one character boasts, "Sex is the official hobby of the entertainment industry."

True then, true now.

Timing and 20/20 hindsight are everything.

Years ago, I’d flown back East to spend Yom Kippur with my parents.  I was in temple, in the midst of some heavy atonement (or as one of my best friends always says about Yom Kippur, “when Frankie annually apologizes for the duties of her job”) when my pager started a steady hum.

One of the most frustrating things about understanding new media is that you don’t get really smart about who’s using it, how and why until it becomes … well … old media.

As one of the first to use podcasts for PR purposes, I found the experience comparable to hitting a piñata while blindfolded in the Staples Center. One day I got a research study claiming podcast users were 19-year-old boys, and a second definitively ID’ing them as 60-year-old moms.

She whined. They bit back.

Wednesday’s announcement by Summit Entertainment was brief: Rachelle Lefevre would be replaced by Bryce Howard in the third “Twilight” feature due to a scheduling conflict on Lefevre’s part.

It caught almost everyone by surprise.  Media, bloggers and fans howled, floated conspiracy theories galore, generated online petitions and write-in campaigns to restore Lefevre to the role and maximized the opportunity to make every vampire double entendre imaginable.