How frank can your news pages be?

I’m shockingly old.

That brings the licence to say things which can be passed off as the ramblings of a grumpy old man (normally that is).

And it brings the curse of thinking I’ve heard it all before.

One discussion that ranged when I was starting out in communications, back in the days of quill pens and a working day that finished at 5 pm, was about the independence of the house newspaper.

I remember the fiercely even-handed approach of Rail News (back in the day when the trains worked). BA News was nicknamed ‘The Friday Firelighter’ by managers who were regularly wrong-footed by its news reporting.  And I’m still smarting from the telling off I got from the editor of the BP internal magazine when I tried to sneak in some outrageous puff about the achievements of the IT department.

Companies placed great store by the credibility of the paper or the magazine to tell it how it was and to defend their audience from an avalanche of turgid internal propaganda.

After all, what’s the point of shelling out a small fortune on fancy writers and posh typesetting if no one believes a word of what’s printed there?

I do wonder to what extent this tradition carries through to the news pages of most intranets?

Clearly no organisation wants communications to look like they have been outsourced to the North Korean information ministry.  But (irony alert), what’s the point of shelling out a minimum of resources for an instantly alterable noticeboard if you don’t control the exact wording of what goes up there?

Some time back I watched and cheered from the side-lines as a communicator defended the intranet from dull, self promoting nonsense produced by an internal department.  “We’ve worked hard to build a readership – I’m not having it scared away by this crap” I heard him say.

But it’s a tough challenge for many communicators.

On the one hand leaders need channels that are respected and valued by staff.  Whilst at the same time, many leaders want their own version of Pravda to publish air-brushed hagiographies.

Standing your ground is a valuable skill that in-house practitioners need to learn at an early stage.  But I think the trick is to be smart about who gets told to bog off and who gets coached to try better.

So who is teaching that apart from the school of hard knocks?

 

Comments

[Ellewadding]

Thanks for this. Should be recommended reading for all CEOs! I will stand my ground more often in future.

[Liam FitzPatrick]

It's a tough one isn't it?

On the one hand you want to protect your channel, on the other, you can only say 'no' so many times!