The great debate - proper content of company publication - includes related article on Larry Ragan - International Association of Business Communicators: 1970 - 1990: Section 2: Coming of Age

Communication World, May-June, 1990 by Larry Ragan

One well-known communication executive laughed at what he termed "chit-chat," the personal news of employees, the comings and going, the births, marriages and bowling scores.

That's not the stuff of real communication," he argued, and no self-respecting editor would have any truck with the stuff."

His opponent, a man heavy with the years of wisdom, said hell no, that's precisely what employees want to read: they want to read about themselves. He contended that it is precisely such information that humanizes the impersonal, faceless corporation.

"The little people are important, too, he said.

Where do you stand on that argument?

Twenty years after the Great Debate I was chairing a workshop at an IABC international conference. I forget what the topic was, but one of the panelists-he was from Mississippi, as I recall-allowed that every June he includes pictures of all the high school graduates whose parents work with his company.

Another panelist expostulated that such material was not proper to a company publication, whose purpose is to inform employees about significant issues facing the company.

It was then that the meeting fell apart. Each of the 50 persons in the room could not wait to be heard; each had a vehement opinion on the subject In the back of the room a woman charged that the anti-high-school-picture crowd were nothing but elitists.

"You guys," she said, "forget that the little people are important, too."

Her very words. I grimaced, thinking of the Great Debate, and wondered if we had learned anything in the past 20 years.

Where do you stand on the question?

To find out, the editors of the Ragan Report asked their readers, "Do you think personal news about employees has a place in employee publications?"

Posing the question, I reminded myself that I had yet to attend an IABC international conference when I have not heard at least one speaker refer unkindly to this form of employee news.

"We have long since passed the time when employee communication means weddings and bowling scores," goes a typical comment. I need not finish the idea because you yourself have probably heard it expressed as well-that what today's employee cries out for is information about the problems and vital issues confronting the organization.

It is as if many editors and speakers at conferences are living in different worlds. The anti-bowling-score commentators don't live in the world that I see, one that includes thousands of publications crossing my desk, and a large proportion of them carrying news about weddings, births, deaths, and-shame! shame!-bowling scores.

Ragan Report readers seem to feel the same way, because 65 percent of them embraced the idea of personal news in employee publications. But the platitudes used to express them remained the same.

One response (in favor of personal news): "When most of us stopped being editors and became corporate communicators, it became un-chic to see ourselves as purveyors of Joe and his fish' stories. Unfortunately, most of our fellow employees are still interested in much of the same old stuff."

A different point of view: Carrying personal news about employees degrades the publication. Space in a publication is too important to waste."

So one can see how far we have come since the Great Debate in the early fifties. Not very far. Despite the technological miracles, despite the video and the audio, the electronics, the E-Mail, the computerized benefits statements, employee annual reports, the corporate policy letters to middle management, the upward communication-all done with growing sophistication and effect-employee communication people have not yet agreed upon what to communicate.

Don't believe it? A half-dozen colleagues ask about the spirit of openness existing in their organizations. Let me start things by recounting a few recent conversations.

A New York editor told me that a lawyer instructed her to remove the word "spearhead" from the annual report. Why? It brought to mind, he said, a phallic symbol.

One public relations director of a small college in the US South explained that she could issue no news releases, no report, no publication without the president's having approved it. She was awaiting an OK on page proofs for the year's first issue of the alumni magazine. It was july.

When three new senior vice presidents were appointed, the editor carried their one-column mug shots in a vertical arrangement because he needed something to balance horizontal elements in the lower part of the page. His boss disagreed. Up and down? That means the person pictured at the top is most important, doesn't it? No, the editor explained; they each have the same title, the story and headline make it clear that they are equals. The boss asked, "How long will it take to re-make the page?" That's why the October issue came out in December.

You can add your own stories-of the PR people who must get a dozen clearances for everything they do, of the president who takes home page proofs of the annual report to see what his wife thinks, of the story that can't be used because it is secret-only to find that it is featured on the evening's TV news show.