What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [48]
But the truth about truth is itself counterintuitive: Corrections do not diminish credibility. Corrections enhance credibility. Standing up and admitting your errors makes you more believable; it gives your audience faith that you will right your future wrongs. When companies apologize for bad performance—as JetBlue did after keeping passengers on tarmacs for hours—that tells us that they know their performance wasn’t up to their standard, and we have a better idea of the standard we should expect.
Being willing to be wrong is a key to innovation. Procter & Gamble’s A.G. Lafley said in Strategy + Business that he improved the company’s commercial success rate for new product launches from 15–20 percent to 50–60 percent, but he didn’t want to push the rate higher because “we’ll be tempted to err on the side of caution, playing it safe by focusing on innovations with little game-changing potential.” Mistakes can be valuable; perfection is costly. The worst mistake is to act as if you don’t make mistakes. That puts you on a pedestal, and when you fall off you better watch out: That first step’s a doozie.
Consider Dan Rather. Minutes after he reported questions about George W. Bush’s military service on CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2004, bloggers suspected that documents he had used as the basis of his story were faked. At the blog LittleGreenFootballs, Charles Johnson proved it. He took a memo supplied to Rather that reputedly had been typed using a 1970s-era IBM Selectric and then precisely re-created it using Microsoft Word on a next-century computer. He even made a neat animation that placed his document over the alleged original to show just how exact the match was. After his conclusions appeared on his blog, word flashed around the web. For 11 days, Rather ignored the ensuing storm, saying nothing. When he did respond, he dismissed his critics as political operatives. The smarter reply—the journalistically and intellectually honest approach—would have been to say, “Thanks guys. Let’s share what we know and get to the truth together.”
Rather came from an era of control when journalists were taught, ironically, to hide things from the public—sources, research, decision-making, and opinions. “Judge us by our product, not our process,” a former network news president told me in a discussion about journalistic transparency at the Aspen Institute. But today, on the internet, the process has become the product. By revealing their work as it progresses, journalists can be transparent about how they operate and can open up the story for input from the public. Bloggers purposely post incomplete knowledge so they can get help to make it complete. Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton explains that such “half-baked posts” tell readers: “This is what we know. This is what we don’t know. What do you know?” Corrections welcomed here.
I hear people fret that there are falsehoods and lies on the internet. There certainly are. And there are people who believe or want to believe those lies and errors. But there are also people such as Rather’s bête-noire bloggers who are willing and able to ferret out facts. “We can fact-check your ass,” blogger Ken Layne said in 2001. A lot of attention is given to the mistakes or sabotage we see on Wikipedia, but what’s more impressive is watching the process of correcting and improving entries there, undertaken by people who get nothing out of it but the satisfaction of making things right. Snopes.com exists just to debunk urban legends. Wikileaks.org exists to give whistleblowers a place to share documentation of evildoings—and when a federal judge tried to shut it down in 2007, its community responded by replicating the site all over the web. Truth will out.
Contrast the Rather affair with the case of Reuters after one of its photographers was accused of doctoring a photo of Beirut during Israeli bombardment of the city in 2006. Some of the same bloggers, including Johnson, demonstrated that the photographer had used Photoshop to extend