For years, the author has been a fan of assigning students in business communication classes to draft messages that explained complex decisions or situations. The assignment is the author's variation of the negative or bad news message. This traditional genre has generated a new Web-based method by which people and organizations respond to public crises. In his class, the author asks students to analyze such postings and to create their own specimens based on actual events. As Web users, students bring familiarity with the medium to these tasks, a familiarity leavened by the principles studied in the class. This article provides examples of this genre, situates the genre into the context of traditional business communication, and then offers scenarios for writing assignments. The examples in this article illustrate the various methods, tones, and approaches organizations choose in responding to bad news. To facilitate the use of crises in the classroom, the author provides a list of resources at the end grouped by crisis. Within each group, sources are grouped according to medium (Web or print) and presented chronologically, to show the order in which the postings appeared.