Are you using all your credibility
assets?
By Doug Fisher
What is
our business?
In these
turbulent times, that's an important question. Our audience
demands more for less time and cost. Technology has made
our jobs more complicated while also making competition
for our audience's time more intense.
And our
public esteem is sagging.
We often
say we're in the information business, or maybe news or
journalism or advertising. But as other industries have
done, it is time to reassess, and we may well discover we're
in the credibility business.
In preparing
for a panel at the recent South Carolina Press Association
summer meeting, I concluded that we no longer can afford
to make credibility just a component of what we do. Regaining
it, maintaining it and enhancing it should be our core mission
because we sell credibility daily:
I don't
want to be in the information business. Information has
become a commodity, cheapened by its glut, little valued
by consumers. Economics 101 teaches that if you're in the
commodity business, you get cheap and you get big, neither
of which is particularly good for quality, distinctive journalism.
We're really
not in the information business any more than Ford, General
Motors or CSX are in the transportation business. (If they
were, why is there no Ford Airline or CSX Bus Line?) The
automakers -
with a little push from the Japanese - came to realize they
were in the business of delivering quality, which they do
through their cars and trucks. The railroad industry is
realizing it's in the business of dependable, on-time deliveries.
As a result, the Wall Street Journal reported recently,
railroads are breaking with past practices of waiting until
freight trains were full before moving them out. Now, the
trains move on rigorous schedules, full or not.
If we're
in the credibility business, and we deliver that credibility
through our journalism, we should use all our assets in
that effort. The Internet, the beast that makes our business
more challenging, can be a powerful tool in helping to boost
our credibility. Ford has legions of quality-control experts;
we have a more powerful force: the public. But we don't
always make it easy.
In preparing
for the SCPA meeting, I examined the Web sites of South
Carolina's 18 daily newspapers and eight of its largest
weeklies. Only one site told me in so many words that accuracy
was keenly important to its editors and that if I spotted
an error, here was the person to call or e-mail. But to
find that I had to scroll down five screens and click through
three. Two others told me whom to call or write, but without
the clear statement about accuracy. Both links were buried.
For most
others, there was a contact list. But should the public
sort through executive editors, managing editors, news editors
and the like? Often, the first person on the list is the
publisher. Do editors really want the publisher getting
the complaint calls?
Still others
were like "Let's Make a Deal": guess behind which
button, such as "site map," the contact list hides.
Some gave me blind e-mail addresses - not the best impression
for an increasingly sophisticated audience. Fewer than half
had reporters' or editors' e-mail addresses associated with
stories, and some didn't make the addresses clickable. That's
bad form in an interactive world.
From what
I've seen in other states, the results would be much the
same. Yet a simple "corrections" button on the
home page could take readers down a clear path to help them
tell us if something is wrong. They also could check a clickable
list of corrected stories. The Washington Post and Honolulu
Advertiser have received notice recently for leading the
way in these matters.
Remember,
one reason Jayson Blair happened was because those who could
have given The New York Times early warning found the paper
largely inaccessible.
At the
SCPA meeting, Rich Rassmann, managing editor of The Herald
in Rock Hill, detailed how his newspaper, as part of an
initiative by the Associated Press Managing Editors, has
built a database of people willing to be solicited periodically
by e-mail for comments on various topics.
There are
challenges here, among them validating respondents and making
sure reporters don't come to view such databases as substitutes
for getting out and talking to people. But those same challenges
have existed through the years with other newsgathering
technologies - the telephone used to be decried for many
of the same reasons - and we've found ways to minimize the
harms and use the strengths.
In 1998,
Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The Oregonian and then president
of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said, "To
get more credibility, we first must stop squandering what
we have."
Just putting
a corrections button on a Web site or creating an e-mail
list of willing readers aren't going to solve our credibility
problems. But if we can agree that credibility is our business,
shouldn't we start by using all the assets we have?
Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches
journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be
reached at dfisher@sc.edu
or 803-777-3315.
