Sins of omission and the power of e-journalism

Yup, I screwed up.

Cobourg public school board candidate Al McLellan got a hold of me early in the election to tell me about his web site and inviting me to link my web project at Vote! to his site.

Since the site was just getting some momentum and students were still being organized, I begged off, saying we would get to it. Be patient.

Well, somehow, his request fell through the cracks. And, to make matters worse, he created a link to our site. The least that could be done was to reciprocate.

Then, I received the email below. Not a proud moment for me or our team. The criticisms are justified. We dropped the ball without question.

While not our proudest moment, this demonstrates one of the great powers of the Internet and e-journalism. Our audience keeps tabs on us in a way that is far more effective than traditional journalism.  The limited space of traditional media does not allow everything to be printed. Sometimes letters to the editor are cut or changed for brevity. Also, television or radio cannot always accommodate this kind of discourse.

Online, through tools like this blog and other vehicles, we can easily post all materials and I can respond. Publicly. Despite the humiliation. Hopefully, this transparency can slowly earn our profession back some of the trust and credibility it has lost. Yes, I failed to follow up on a promise to the candidate. He deserve, at the very least, to be treated like all the other candidates who have web sites. And, we can hope that any trust we have breeched can be mended by putting it in right away. If we are lucky, maybe our ability to blog the incident and be forthright with the candidate and our audience, we can gain some shred of credibility back. We can pray our honesty and our apology can help.

That is the power of this new medium.

We are sorry, Mr McLellan. We hope you and our audience can forgive us. And, we will continue to work hard to earn your trust back.