MEASURING TRUST AT THE TD

When a company terminates an employee or three, or when a high-profile employee quietly exit a business, remaining employees -- and in many cases, customers -- have an opportunity to engage in a bit of a "trust" check. I started thinking about how a public organization such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch measures trust among its readers this week after former columnist Mark Holmberg left the paper.

Holmberg wasn't so much a rising star at the TD as he was a quirky storyteller, a writer whose passion for the under-served and penchant for the unnoticed felt unique, and interesting, and maybe a bit otherworldly to regular readers of the daily newspaper. It was an odd surprise in 2003 when Holmberg was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, though it made sense to those who tracked his gradual shift from a GWAR-crazy entertainment reporter to crime reporting to columnist of Richmond's forgotten residents.

His departure wasn't so surprising, either. Late last year, after a series of tough newsroom decisions led Style Weekly to delve into a paper in serious transition, Holmberg went public (or was "outed" -- hard to tell) with his opinions on the changes. It wasn't long before the changes included returning some of the paper's columnists to the news desk. This week, Style and the TD hit the streets simultaneously with the news that Holmberg was leaving; Style reported that he would be shifting to TV reporting with WTVR, the city's CBS affiliate.

Which brings me to my reflection. It's clear -- from Style's reporting last summer, as well as coverage in the "newspaper" of journalism, Editor & Publisher magazine (I wrote a reasonable summary of the issue last July) -- that the year-plus tenure of Publisher Tom Silvestri and Executive Editor Glenn Proctor has been rocky. What's less clear is how the remaining TD staffers are feeling today after close to a dozen significant reporters, columnists and editors have moved on.

More importantly, what are readers thinking?

Reading local weblogs suggests that Richmond's armchair journalists don't have a high degree of trust in the TD, and Style certainly hasn't been silent in its examination of the birthing pangs of the new senior team, but its hard to suss out how the turmoil of the past year has impacted the paper's average readers. Do they notice? Do they care? And if subscriptions are up, does it even matter?

Comments

[Scott Burger]

I think the TD management is still trying to get out from under what has preceded them. A very telling, key issue has been how the TD handles the VaPAF/arts center story. The level of disclosure of Media General's corporate involvement with the VaPAF is still not where it should be, yet I have detected some miniscule improvement which is better than nothing, I guess. Are they ever going to replace their ombudsperson or are they going to continue to rely on "Town Squares" to give the impression of balance? But, even more internally, the TD still needs to figure out how it should handle labor issues. So far, the TD still seems to deny there is even any question of labor relations.