Do newspapers do their jobs?

Should we verify a complaint about media before making it?

Fewer and fewer Americans prefer print publications for getting their news. In an August 2024 survey, Pew Research found that only 4% of those surveyed preferred getting their news from print publications. Thirty-two percent preferred television. By far the top preference was to receive news from digital devices with 58% preferring this method of delivery.

Granted, many of those news reports on digital devices are drawn from print publications, albeit often just a headline or snippet posted to followers. When people rely on social media to get their news (as 54% of the respondents to the Pew survey indicated they sometimes do), what they often get is the news posted by people or groups they choose to follow. It hardly provides them with full reports of the news or even a broad array of all that might be going on in their world.

Newspapers, whether international, national or local, still provide broader coverage of the news than most other options, especially if people read the articles. Receiving headlines on a social media feed rarely gives someone a full scope of the news being reported. Getting those headlines without actually clicking on them to read the articles too often results in users not having a clear understanding of the details of whatever is being reported.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing tendency to complain that newspapers aren’t covering events of importance to an actual reader. And these complaints are too often lobbied by people among that 96% who prefer to get their news elsewhere.

Before complaining about an absence of coverage, however, users would do well to make sure their complaints are valid. It’s OK to gripe that a significant event wasn’t covered, but doing so without verifying that it actually wasn’t covered feeds into a growing tendency to blame the media for things that are more likely to result in selective filtering of where you decide to get your news.

Granted, with more outlets from which to receive news, circulation of newspapers is way down. In 1990, the circulation of weekday newspapers was 63.2 million. By 2022, it had fallen to 20.9 million. Nevertheless, the reporting is out there if you want to find it. (Full disclosure: Since my column is carried in newspapers, I have a vested interest in keeping them alive by having readers subscribe to them.)

Before complaining about a newspaper not covering an event, the right thing is to make sure it really wasn't covered. I have a friend on social media who does this fairly straightforwardly by posing a question to her followers if anyone has seen particular coverage. She relies on those of us who still subscribe to provide her with this information before she levels a complaint about coverage. While I’d prefer everyone would subscribe to a newspaper, my social media friend’s solution is sound.

Before adding to the whirring whine of blaming the media for its shortcomings, regardless of political viewpoints, take the time to become informed. The information is out there.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Offering thanks when thanks are due

Should customers be thankful when a company that often provides hours of frustration when trying to resolve an issue comes through with solid customer service … even if that should be the norm?

The volume on my old Android cell phone had been failing for a while. I hadn’t been able to turn up the volume to hear phone calls for months. No matter how many online hacks I discovered, none of them seemed to fix the issue. I could hear phone calls when I had them on speaker mode or when I Bluetoothed them through the car’s radio, but these solutions were hardly practical when I was trying to have a routine conversation with someone. It didn’t help that my phone was so old, the manufacturer no longer provided operating system updates for it.

I finally decided I needed to buy a new phone rather than live with a phone where I really couldn’t hear most of the conversations I was having with people. When I got to the store, which was in a shopping mall, I told Maurice that the volume on my old phone wasn’t working. He asked me some personal information so he could look up my account. Rather than try to sell me a new phone, he mentioned that I had been paying $4.15 a month for an extended warranty. Because nothing was physically wrong with the phone, Maurice told me that I might be eligible for a free replacement.

Unfortunately, warranties were handled by a different division so Maurice couldn’t handle it, but he gave me the number to call to check. I left the store, walked into a relatively quiet and untrafficked area so I could put my phone on speaker, and called the number. The representative asked a bunch of questions and then offered to send a replacement phone for a $52.06 “replacement fee.” Given that that amount was significantly lower than the cost of buying a new phone, I agreed. The representative ended our call by telling me she would call me three days later at 10 a.m. to help me transfer the data after I received the replacement phone.

I walked back to the phone store, gave a thumbs up to Maurice who shouted “win.” I received the phone the next evening. But the promised phone call at 10 a.m. never came. Typical frustration with my cell phone company began to set in and erase any of the good will Maurice had built. But I found the number he had originally given me, made the frustrating way through the automated response, and then was connected to a technical support person named Jane who patiently spent the next 21 minutes and 43 seconds with me walking me through the data transfer.

When I thanked Jane for her help and patience, she responded: “Patience is a virtue.” That wasn’t the first time she used that phrase on our call. In spite of the annoyance of a broken phone, the lack of a promised follow-up call, a charge of $52.06 for a “free” replacement, and a history of frustration with the phone company, Maurice and Jane did what they could to help me. When a company representative actually tries to help a customer, the right thing is to thank them.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If you have a cold, stay home

I have a head cold.

It’s not COVID. It’s not the flu. It’s not RSV. It’s not pneumonia. It’s a head cold, the term my family always used for the common cold when I was growing up. I’ve got the runny nose, coughing, aching and tiredness.

The woman I’d eat bees for suspects I caught the cold from the person with the persistent hacking cough who was sitting behind us on a 3 hour and 51 minute flight home last week. We had felt lucky that we were able to switch to that earlier flight because a snowstorm was due back home and we hoped to land before it did. The good news was we got home an hour or so earlier than anticipated. The bad news? A head cold.

WebMD tells me I’m contagious for a day or two before the runny nose and sore throat start and for as long as I feel sick, “usually a week or two.” Since I no longer teach full time, I don’t need to worry about canceling classes or passing the cold on to students if I’m contagious for longer than the online sites tell me I’m likely to be. I have two days of interviews that I agreed to do with fellowship candidates next week, but fortunately, these are all via Zoom, which remains impervious to head cold germs.

But I do have meetings with students and colleagues scheduled for next week. I also have the typical tasks that a normal functioning human being without a head cold has to do that involve coming into contact with people.

My options presumably would be to rest up now and if I’m feeling less awful but still under the weather to engage in these tasks. Or to postpone or find alternatives to avoid the risk of spreading the head cold misery. An added challenge is that it’s hard to know exactly when a head cold is over or when, based on WebMD’s broad ranges, I might no longer be contagious.

Some choices are clear. I know I will not pay my 82-year-old neighbor a visit until I am confident I’m over the cold. Even though he will complain that I don’t visit enough, his health isn’t great and I don’t want to risk it. Anything else I can move to an online meeting, I will. As my wife reminds me, she typically does the grocery shopping anyway. There’s no reason I can’t meet her at the door to carry in the groceries when she gets home.

I know that the responsible and right thing to do is to avoid exposing others to my head cold. That is what I will do. While it might be disappointing to cancel a meeting, the health of those I’d be meeting with is more important.

WebMD tells me that chicken soup is actually good for the common head cold. Fortunately, the woman I’d eat bees for shows no signs of having caught the head cold yet. For that I am grateful, since she makes really good chicken soup.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should a recently found cache of errant emails go unanswered?

Are you obligated to respond to an email sent months ago that you inadvertently overlooked?

By my most recent count, I believe I have seven different email addresses. I had a reason for setting up each of these emails. One was for personal use. Another is my work email. Early on, I created a separate email from which to receive email from readers of The Right Thing column. One I have because it came with the url I purchased years ago when I set up www.jeffreyseglin.com. Yet another address doesn’t receive email but is simply an address where all email gets forwarded to wherever I’d like to be forwarded.

All of these seemed like a good idea at the time as a way to keep email correspondence related to various aspects of my personal and professional life separate. But it quickly became burdensome to check on each regularly, so I began having each of them forwarded to the one primary email address I use most often.

I have friends and colleagues who continue to use a separate personal email and professional email to try to ensure their personal emails are kept private from their employers. That seems a good practice. But I don’t do that.

Every time you or anyone else emails me, it all ends up on the same place, or at least it should. I recently discovered that the forwarding service for one of those email accounts had failed to function. It was an email I used to use for reader email to the column years ago, but apparently some publications that carry the column still feature it. I learned about the malfunction after the email provider sent an email to one of my other email addresses to let me know that the account had been inactive and would be suspended if I didn’t log into it. When I did log in, I discovered hundreds of emails that I had never seen, some of which were from readers of the column responding to my request to tell me their stories of kindness…and there were many stories of kindness.

One option would be to reset the forwarding service and ignore the pile of emails I hadn’t seen. If readers didn’t hear back from me, they might assume I chose not to use their stories, that I was overwhelmed by reader email and didn’t respond, or that I was simply rude. But pretending those emails never arrived seemed lazy at best and dishonest at worst.

Instead, I am making my way through the emails – each of them – and trying to respond where possible. I do try to respond to readers when they write, even when they disagree with something, and this should not be an exception to that practice.

While responding to email is not treated by many as urgently as it once might have been, if I ask someone for something in an email and they have the grace to respond, the right thing seems to be to acknowledge their response.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go check the other six email accounts to make sure everything is working fine and I’m as up to date as possible. You can email at jeffreyseglin@gmail.com with your questions, conundrums, or stories, and I will continue to try to respond.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Companies should listen to customers before trying to sell them stuff

Is it wrong to try to sell a customer something after he calls to complain about a service issue?

Twenty-five years ago in The Right Thing column, I wrote about a recently settled strike between telecommunications workers and their parent company. One of the items I focused on that could have added to the workers’ discontent was what seemed to be a disconnect between the company’s values statement and the behavior it insisted on from its customer service representatives.

Among the values the company indicated it held dear were “integrity, respect, imagination, passion and service.” But, I noted at the time, the company requested that its customer service representatives end each call from a customer with the question: “Did I provide you with outstanding service today?” Not a bad question, I guess, but it often placed representatives in the position of asking the question after they’d spent time with a customer who was calling to complain about an issue that might not have been resolved in the call.

As I wrote back then: “Having just calmed an irate customer, a representative offering such a response -- clearly tied to Verizon's core value of service -- could set him off again. The request was cited by strikers as one cause of stress.”

It would have been far better to give customer service representatives the discretion to ask the question or to dispense with it if it seemed clear to them that it might exacerbate their efforts to help a customer.

A recent experience with a cable service provider – a different company from the one I wrote about years ago – triggered my memory of this column.

After receiving a monthly bill that was higher than typical but which had arrived on the heels of a notice from the company that my bill would actually be going down because of the discontinuation of a service, I called the provider to see if they could explain the discrepancy. After about 20 minutes on hold and then another 20 minutes talking to an initial representative and then another half-hour talking with someone in the “loyalty” department, I still didn’t have any clarity about the discrepancy in the charge.

But as we were finishing the call, the last of these representatives told me of this great offer they had on computer tablets for customers. He wanted to know if he could sign me up for one. I asked him if he was really trying to sell me something additional after I had spent an hour unable to get a clear answer about the charges for what I already received. “I understand,” he said (not for the first time in our conversation, although it was pretty clear he didn’t understand what the issue was or what caused it), but again asked if I’d like to buy the tablet at a special price. I declined and hung up.

Twenty-five years after my initial plea to companies not to put their customer service representatives in the position of having to work from a script or to close even the most frustrating calls by upselling more services, they are still at it. The right thing, however, would be for companies to knock it off unless they want to continue to place their representatives in stressful situations and to leave their customers wondering if they want to continue to do business with them.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.