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.

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