Q&A Interview with Steve Ladurantaye

Globe and Mail media reporter Steve Ladurantaye was a panelist at the Canadian launch of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer in Toronto last week. For those looking for more, Steve answers a few questions about who he trusts and what the media industry is doing in Canada to deserve our trust.

Edelman: In many ways, the media’s job is to distrust everyone else, is it not? So when you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer’s ranking of who people trust when forming an opinion about a company, who do you trust?

Steve Ladurantaye: I don’t think it’s my job to necessarily distrust anyone. I prefer to think that it’s my job to take everyone at their word, and then relentlessly report the rest of the story to find other perspectives.

For corporate news, the more corner the office the more comfortable I am with what I’m being told. I’ve found Canadian CEOs -that’s who I have the most experience with – to be quite candid and forthcoming. They won’t go out of their way to help you with a difficult story, necessarily. But I’ve never sat with a senior executive at the heart of a problematic corporate story and got the impression that I’ve been spun.

But, that level of candour doesn’t run through the corporate ranks. Businesses today are incredibly media savvy; you’d be hard pressed to find even a small company that hasn’t hired a public relations company to coach its employees around communications.

And that’s created a weird chill at the middle levels – the default strategy is to not answer the phone. And if I do manage to find someone to talk to, chances are they’ve been told not to speak to the media without clearing it through a communications office or senior executive.

So increasingly, it’s not even a matter of if you can trust the people you are talking to at a corporation. It’s more a question of whether you can get them at all, and whether they’ll say anything even remotely useful. All that to say a lot ends up resting on the shoulders of CEOs, yet they are apparently trusted the least. I’m not sure that’s fair.

Edelman: Conversely, then, do academics deserve to be at the top of the list?

Ladurantaye: It is true that someone in academia can step into a story and provide a detached point of view. I use academics as sources all the time. But there are pitfalls. Some of the best professors in the country aren’t media savvy. You’d never put them on TV, no matter how smart they are. And they wouldn’t want to be on TV.

But a bigger problem is that universities have built massive public relations departments. Kingston (Ontario) is a wonderful example – the number of PR workers on staff rivals the number of reporters at the local paper, the Kingston Whig-Standard.

The PR staff are there to pimp their profs. They read the news of the day, find a prof who may have something smart to say and then send out news releases offering the prof up to reporters around the country. But it’s not like these profs are following that issue; they just have broad experience and can twist their knowledge into some good sound bites.

When I was city editor at the Whig, there was one professor who was especially good at getting into our pages. I took him for lunch, because I was curious about how he knew so much about pretty much everything.

His answer? He doesn’t. He reads the morning paper and tries to think of good sound bites. With a laugh, he talked about how he commented on industries he didn’t even know existed until five minutes before his phone rang.

That’s not useful, but it’s easy. So reporters keep going back.

Edelman: Trust in traditional news sources rose 14 points this year in Canada, with 40 per cent saying they trust newspapers, TV, etc., “a great deal”. What do you think reporters have done this year to earn that jump?

Ladurantaye: I’m not sure you could point your finger toward any one thing.  We face an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Not only do we have bloggers and micro-bloggers fact-checking and challenging us every day, we’re doing it to ourselves.

The Toronto Star was among the first papers out of the gate with a public editor who responds to readers’ complaints and allegations of bias with a weekly column.

The CBC’s Kirk Lapointe has taken that to a new level, putting all of his decisions on the Internet for everyone to see and putting on a virtual master’s class in journalism in the process.

And now the Globe and Mail is also committed to raising the standard – we have two reporters dedicated to covering the media full time now, me and Simon Houpt.

We’ve also acknowledged that we could do more to let readers know how and why we do things the way we do. We’ve appointed Sylvia Stead as our public editor. It’s her job to hold reporters and editors to the highest possible standards – right out in the open.

We’re also considering other ways to let the world know about the efforts we make to remain trusted – so much of it goes untold. Maybe readers want to watch an afternoon story meeting online to find out why certain stories didn’t make the front page. Maybe they want an online discussion with our foreign editor to find out our motives when sending a reporter to Syria. The options are pretty endless, and the Internet really opens those possibilities.

And we’re anxious to capitalize on that because the more of that we can do, the more trust we will build. And that’s essential, because trust is our competitive advantage. Without that, all the other great stuff we do – the foreign bureaus, the long investigations, the award-winning writing - doesn’t matter.

Find Steve online at @syladurantaye or www.steveladurantaye.ca.