RE: Editors of Model RR & Garden Railways - A request for accuracy
This is NOT written from my position as a GR contributor/Kalmbach contractor, etc., and should not in any way be construed as a response from Kalmbach or anyone on its editorial staff, nor should it be construed as their corporate policy. It IS written based on my 15 years experience covering large and small corporations for various news organizations.
1) Corporations don't care about public forums, nor the opinions expressed on them. In many cases, they don't even read them.
2) Corporations don't respond to comments made on such public forums. As others have stated in another thread here, it would be a futile exercise for them.
3) Corporations are loathe to respond to direct questions about matters they consider "internal." They will not invite you over for coffee to sit down and listen to the VP of operations tell you every last detail about what's going on. That's why the news media relies on "sources inside XYZ Inc." because the front office doesn't say squat.
4) Most often, if you aren't just completely ignored out of hand, the best you get is a written statement that's typically quite vague and non-committal about the issue at hand.
Will they will be silent under the addage: "Of course everyone knows that those are the standards we adhere to, therefore it is obvious what has happened to Dave Goodson is clearly a case of Dave NOT being objective, of being biased, and of being ill-founded in his appraisal of the K-27."
Let's be careful here with the quotation marks. That implies that what's between them is an official statement made by someone within the corporation. Again, I'm not saying that as someone who works for Kalmbach, but as a journalist whose butt would be called into my news director's office if I did something like that.
The bottom line is that if Kalmbach is like most corporations I've dealt with in my professional career, they're not going to waste their time here answering these questions. Both companies have published phone numbers and e-mail addresses, should one want to ask these questions directly. In fact, both companies have public forums like this one with company reps who do read them and occasionally respond when they feel it necessary or advantageous. I can't say as to whether they'd respond on their individual forums or not, but they're far more likely to do that there than here.
Later,
K