• Transparency

    Posted on January 30th, 2007 by and currently 3 commenting.

    Last week I attended the Greenville Chamber annual meeting where our own Courageous President was up for the Athena Award. It was the usual hoopla, but one of the bright spots in the evening was the keynote given by the editor of USA Today, Ken Paulson.

    Ken had a lot of great things to say about the changing landscape of newspapers and reporting, but the one that stuck in my head was his comments on transparency. It seems that he encourages his reporters not to quote ‘anonymous’ sources and when someone asks them to be off the record, his reporters say, ‘Nope. We don’t do that.’

    The reason being is that with all the recent newspaper scandals (where reporters made up sources), people don’t trust newspapers anymore. So Ken preaches ultimate disclosure. He said that they make sure and print all the mistakes they made the next day and that the guy in charge of that task loves getting the emails and calls. And it’s a great example of a company listening to their customers and acting on what they say.

    The newspaper industry has a lot of mountains ahead of them. But Ken has already planted a flag in the peak of this one. Transparency is so easy. And so freakin’ scary at the same time. But if one of the largest papers in the nation can do it, maybe you and your company can, too.

  • http://SwampFox.ws John Warner

    Spike

    That is a good theory but, Richard Nixon would never have been exposed if Deep Throat had not been anonymous.

    The world is a messy place full of compromises.

    John

  • http://brainsonfire.com Spike

    There’s always an exception to the rule, now, isn’t there? We can’t say for sure if Nixon would or wouldn’t have been exposed, maybe something else would’ve happened.

  • http://www.eatlearnlive.com Genie Caroselli

    Hi Spike,

    The only scary part of transparancy is passing the first test which is your own mirror check. Once you’ve accepted and committed to improving your flaws transparancy becomes a way of life. The reward is a culture that is not afraid to say, “Hey Mr. Client, I bet you didn’t realize that we could be doing a better job for you. Here’s how…”. Exposure is good. Never be afraid to ‘flash’ your customers.

    genie