Remember this acronym: BHAG.
The initials stand for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, cited as one of the “successful habits of visionary companies” in the book “Built to Last.”
BHAGs (pronounced bee-hags) are defined by authors James C. Collins and Jerry Porras as commitments to challenging, audacious — often risky — goals and projects toward which a visionary company channels its efforts.
Register Editor Tonnie L. Katz has set a 1999 BHAG for the newsroom:
“It is our goal to produce an error-free newspaper,” she said.
That means no factual errors.
No spelling or grammatical errors.
None.
The goal, I think we all can agree, certainly is big.
Readers call every day after spotting flaws.
The goal, I think we all can agree, certainly is hairy.
When millions of words pass through so many hands, it’s hard to catch everything.
The goal, I think we all can agree, certainly is audacious.
Try impossible, I hear some readers and journalists agreeing.
So why try?
“All we have to sell is our credibility,” Katz said.
She has looked with concern at the recent American Society of Newspaper Editors survey, in which readers nationwide pinpointed the major reasons newspapers have lost their trust: factual errors and repeated spelling and grammar mistakes.
Katz wants to stop the erosion and restore readers’ confidence.
So, she has committed the newsroom to the effort.
Top editors have been challenged to re-emphasize accuracy among their staffs.
A newsroom team has organized to examine methods that would reduce errors.
Register University, the newsroom’s internal training program, is conducting sessions that stress attention to practices that increase accuracy.
While spelling and grammar will draw attention, Katz particularly would like to eliminate substantial factual mistakes.
Such mistakes resulted in 405 published corrections in 1998.
The editor would like to see that number go down all the way down — by the end of ’99.
But as much as she wishes errors would be eradicated, she knows mistakes will occur.
When they do, the newspaper’s policy is clear:
“It is critical that we admit our errors and immediately correct them,” she said. “Morally, you need to own up when you make a mistake. It also is important from a legal point of view.
“Correcting errors goes to our values of credibility and authority.”
The existence of a daily corrections column on News 2 is evidence of the newspaper’s commitment to correcting mistakes quickly and openly.
So is the existence of an ombudsman. Just 35 of 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers have an independent, neutral examiner for the public to contact with challenges to accuracy and fairness.
“I don’t think people hate you for making errors,” Katz said. “They respect you for admitting and correcting them. But you have to prove you are working as hard as you can to eliminate them.”
You, too, have an important role in the newspaper reaching its goal, in addition to holding journalists acccountable.
You can suggest what you believe it would take to make the news reports more credible for everyone.
That, I think we all can agree, certainly is a BHAG.
