Why Running a Newspaper Means Having to Say You're Sorry

Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth's much-awaited apologia for the paper's planned off-the-record dinners at which paying lobbyists would be sitting in journalists' laps (or was it to have been the other way around?) came out in the Post recently with a whimper, not a bang.
Maybe it's just me reading into her highly wordsmithed – and, no doubt, PR polished and lawyered – message, but I was reminded of so many other people, who, having found themselves in an unsavory situation, try to distance themselves without leaving so much as a slither mark.

So here's my message to Weymouth:

1. Process is rarely interesting. Less explanation, not more, is better.

2. The parsing of words makes you seem guilty just at the moment that you're trying to do damage control. (Remember Bill Clinton's infamous utterance, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is"?)

3. When people who work for you show a lapse in judgment, it's just as much your fault as it is theirs (the buck stops on the boss' desk, even if it assumes the shape of a well-appointed dining table). This was the time to fall on the sword, sister, not to sort of take responsibility for this part of the problem but not that other part.

4. A reputation, once tarnished, is hard to recover (at least that 's what my mother always told me). Smart people, including Howard Schultz, the chairman and CEO of Starbucks, who wrote a now famous memo about the "commoditization" of his coffee, understand that the aura of a brand counts for a lot. A reader's relationship with his newspaper is a lot more tenuous, especially these days, than a sipper's relationship with his coffee.

5. A flat-footed apology is always best. Just ask anyone (and that's all of us) who has been on the receiving end of an apology that goes something like: "I'm sorry if that's the way you heard it." Even Bernard Madoff, as empty as his apology was before being sent off to prison until well after the next Ice Age, knew better than to put a spin on things.