Case Study: Every day a member of the Internal Communications team manually trawls through a selection of key newspapers, noting references to the agency and to business issues as they affect the agency.  Topical articles are selected and photocopied for distribution to the Senior Management Team (SMT – the key decision-makers at this organisation) and to a small number of department heads and others.  Rank-and-file staff generally do not receive this current awareness service.

The Information Manager, however, has noticed that some news stories appear to be censored by the Internal Communications team.  She does not know whether this is intentional – it may simply be a result of the selection criteria used by the member of the Communications team.  The Information Manager recommends that a thorough review of the current awareness service is carried out, and suggests introducing enterprise-wide proprietary electronic news services from which the staff can select their own news.  (Full end-user training would be given.)

The editors comment...

The Information Manager’s two principal concerns here are:

1. The Internal Communications team are providing a suboptimal current awareness service.  They appear not to be using more systematic and thorough services such as electronic databases, and the Information Manager’s expertise in this area seems to have been overlooked.  The Information Manager is concerned that effort is being wasted delivering a poor information service.  She is also concerned that her skills in this area are not recognised and that her manager has a responsibility to ensure not only that her skills are used but that she feels properly valued as a member of staff.

2. The manual selection of news stories by the Internal Communications team inevitably is biased and, moreover, she suspects that there may be a hidden agenda or intentional censorship in the dissemination of news stories.  This, she believes, is ethically wrong and ought to be challenged.

The first of the Information Manager’s concerns may be addressed by the Senior Management Team commissioning a review of the current awareness needs of this organisation, and by the Information Manager then providing a more effective electronic news dissemination service to all staff.  As Information Manager she would be given the role of managing the database resource, of training end users in creating searches and in selecting articles, and in providing a proactive support service for the organisation.  Her credibility and satisfaction may increase as a result.

However, in providing an electronic news service to staff desktops the Information Manager ought to consider additional ethical responsibilities.  Although an electronic service may be more systematic than the manual one it replaces, it does not necessarily follow that it will be wholly unbiased.  It will be intellectually neutral inasmuch as content searches are carried out automatically by the computer system, but the setting up of those searches will require careful review to ensure that they are indeed as appropriate as possible.  The Information Manager will not be in a position to forget about the searches once they have been set up by herself or by the user as news stories evolve.  New vocabulary (i.e. new search terms) may emerge; the focus of a story may change necessitating a change or addition to the search terms and search logic. 

Moreover, the Information Manager must ensure that the users themselves do not become complacent in accepting whatever news they receive as being the full extent of relevant news available.  The Information Manager knows that online news services such as Factiva or LexisNexis are extensive but not 100 per cent comprehensive – they may not include salient trade journals or academic journals, blogs or web sites.  It is therefore essential that the Information Manager advises the users to be aware that what they see in their subject folders is not the be-all-and-end-all of information and that some manual searching for news will be required from time to time.

The Information Manager’s second concern is based on the sound belief that when the member of the Internal Communications team selects news clippings he does so in a limited way.  She may be correct in assuming that his information selection skills are not as advanced as hers.  After all, she is the qualified information professional.  However, she ought to respect the Communications team’s professional abilities and not assume that simply because she does not recognise their training or professional context that they are in any way less competent at selecting news stories.

However, the Information Manager may also be correct in assuming that the manual selection of news is biased.  By definition, an SDI (selective dissemination of information) service is biased.  It may be intentionally biased so as to deliver only headline news; or to omit news considered to be peripheral or irrelevant.  Unfortunately, the manual selection of news (or any other information) is inevitably biased by the selector’s intentions, expertise and understanding of the subject.  The selector must be aware of the limitation of his expertise and understanding of the subject, and this ought to be known, at least implicitly but occasionally explicitly (for example, in the case of selecting technical information), by the person receiving the information (i.e. the end user).  Whether the member of the Communication team in the present case intentionally omitted to disseminate news stories is not known, but such intentional omission – whether justified or not - is clearly a case of censorship and ought to be revealed so that the staff can compensate for the absence of information.

Created: v0.9 27-Nov-05 : JG-T

Revised: v1.0 11-Dec-05 : JG-T. v1.01 14-Dec-06 : JG-T.