Yahoo's Anti-Press Decision Is Bad PR
from the looks-bad dept
A lot of news organizations are picking up on the story that Yahoo is not letting reporters in to this Friday’s annual shareholders meeting. Yahoo claims they’ve never allowed reporters in and mention that some other Silicon Valley companies do the same. When asked who, they said Sun and Cisco, though both those companies deny such practices – and Yahoo later said that they really made that up in the first place anyway. It’s definitely in their right to do so, but their reaction to the press questioning it makes them look stupid, and turns what’s really a non-story into a story that’s getting covered everywhere. They should have just shut up and let the reporters in, and no one would have even noticed. Instead, it looks like they’ve got something to hide.
Comments on “Yahoo's Anti-Press Decision Is Bad PR”
Another perspective
If Yahoo had taken the “only those who hold shares can attend” position, then the logical step would be for Yahoo to suggest that the reporters buy shares.
The reporters would then get into such a tizzy about violating their objective perspective, but it would drive home the point that since reporters typically have no vested interest in a company, there is no downside for them in trashing a stock unduly. However, on the flipside, reporters who pump a stock unduly tend to ultimately suffer blows to their reputation. Thus there is, I believe (but could never prove) an inherent pessimism to “objective” reporting.
Question for the audience (or at least Mike) is whether stock ownership changes the balance in the other direction or neutralizes it toward true objectivity or tanks the balance toward pessimism?
Re: Another perspective
That really depends on the individual reporter. My girlfriend is a reporter for a university paper, and she recently wrote a number of stories and editorials on a fairly major story at our university. There was quite the argument about the fact that she did both, and whether she could keep her opinions, voiced quite strongly in the editorials, out of the stories. She is a good journalist (really), and I believe that she did, however, I do know people who said they could not have done so in the same situation.
Anyway, I believe some reporters would consciously try to check themselves. Some would succeed, some would fail, and some wouldn’t even try in the first place. It depends on their morals, ethics, and writing methodologies.
Re: Another perspective
It’s an excellent question, and I honestly don’t have a good answer. From a personal perspective, I don’t own much in the way of equity in anything, and I’m too cynical to let a silly thing like ownership effect how I feel about what a company does. Others… I can’t really say. I think it’s usually pretty tough for *anyone* to be really objective, and the best you can do is to make sure you’re honest and lay out whatever conflicts may occur.
Then, if you’re a reader/investor or whatever, to look for multiple opinions on a topic, and use that to zero in on what might be a more “objective” opinion as you take into account each reporter/analysts own biases.