Globalized risks and crisis, plus increasing audience activism, have blurred the line between pre-crisis and post-crisis and posed as a serious challenge to students and practitioners of crisis communication. The organization-centric paradigm of public relation is now giving way to audience-centric mode of theorization and practice. This paper tries to fit the triple crisis of Japan that occurred between March and May 2011 into the “best practice” model available in the most updated literature in crisis communication. Rather than constructing a case of ineffective communication per se, the authors attempt, instead, to highlight the necessity of a paradigm shift. Acknowledging the fact that crisis communication is a dynamic process that involves ongoing interaction between communicators and their audiences, the authors also urge more theory-generated studies to help substantiating the best practice model currently available.