New Media Prof Blog

Credibility

Posted on 21. Mar, 2009 by admin in Flying, For Students, New Media

Now here’s a word that gets bantied about lately. Credibility. It appears as if credibility is being questioned at every turn and we’re all trying to figure out how that happened all at once. We are questioning credibility in our government, large corporations and the people who run them, our economy, the stock market and some are even going to jail for abusing the appearance of credibility to the point of fraud.  If you listen to Bernard Madoff’s victims, they were trusting individuals, all 4800 or so of them. From construction workers to highly educated people, you can watch their stories on CNN, read the letters they wrote to the judge, or listen to one victim’s story, the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, Lawrence R. Velvel on Lawyer2Lawyer this week.  They all thought Madoff was credible. We all have a certain expectation of credibility with colleagues and business men and women in general. As a former TV journalist, I hold credibility as one of the most important attributes to protect. In the definition of credibility, two words are mentioned: trustworthiness and expertise. And this leads me to sharing a blog post written by Jill Geisler, who heads The Poynter Institute’s Leadership and Management Group, called Ten Reasons You Should Hire a Journalist.  I couldn’t write it as well as Jill does and I feel a responsiblity to pass the word on so that some of my former colleagues and even journalists I don’t know, who have shared the responsbility of telling their community’s stories get a fair shake in the job market as many are being displaced. So give it a read and you’ll see what I mean. Journalists (most of them) have held high standards when it comes to crediblity and that’s worth a lot in these uncertain times. Even they may not know how valuable that is in the job market and in society in general.

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Tags: credibility, jobs, journalists, madoff, poynter institute