AP: Despite business tradition, Yahoo bars reporters from meeting. “Irony of ironies that Yahoo should engage in stifling communication. Its very reason for being is to let the world chat, which it must realize won’t consist of endless compliments,” (activist Bart) Naylor said in an e-mail interview.
There were any number of lessons here. Not all of them are on the side of traditional journalists.
It’s indeed ironic that a communications company is so reticient when nearly every other company of any stature lets journalists into the room. The policy is also pointless. A friend of mine, a journalist from another country, will be there. She found a Yahoo shareholder and got his proxy. Yahoo knows this works and can’t stop it, so the company is being plain foolish — and looking, at first glance, as though it has something to hide.
But first glances can mislead. Yahoo is also Webcasting the event. Let viewers judge for themselves what’s going on. Good idea.
Of course, as Yahoo knows perfectly well, physical presence does make a difference at a meeting like this, particularly when a company has had a tough year and shareholders’ feelings are not likely to be entirely warm. The reactions of attending shareholders to what corporate officers and directors say, morever, is often at least as interesting as what comes from officialdom.
Yahoo could make a bit of lemonade out of this lemon by setting up a public online forum for the attending shareholders and encouraging them to post their own accounts of what went on. (Yes, shareholders could do this for themselves, but that’s a speed bump the company could remove.) Then anyone who cares could sift through the accounts.
But who has time to read all that stuff? One of the journalist’s functions is to save other people time, by being the public’s eyes and ears at events most of us can’t attend. Over time we learn either to trust news organizations’ accounts — not that we totally rely on them as absolute truth, but at least we feel the reporter made an effort to convey what happened.
One of Yahoo’s stupidest moves in this little saga was to lie. The spokesperson told AP that Sun and Cisco don’t let reporters into their own annual meetings. The reporter did the obvious thing — checked out the claim and found it to be false.
For a major media company, Yahoo is acting with remarkable obtuseness.