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I have a mantra: be a better person today than I was yesterday. It sounds simple until you actually try to run it day over day. Some days I do it well. Some days I don't, and I know it while it's happening, which is its own particular kind of uncomfortable. Most recently, I was talking through a specific issue with a colleague, and somewhere in the middle of it I started zigging when I should have held steady, then zagging when I should have just stopped talking. By the time I noticed how confused and stunned they looked, the honest move would have been to admit I'd muddled it and reset. Instead I dug in, defended a position I didn't fully believe anymore, and turned a small mix-up into an actual problem. Not my finest moment, and the worst part is I knew it while it was happening.
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Explaining that screw-up to someone later, I found myself wondering something that had nothing to do with me personally: what would it look like if a business ran on the same principle? Not the version that shows up in a mission statement, the mounted plaque in the lobby that nobody reads twice. The actual version. A pledge to be better tomorrow than today, that the organization was structurally required to keep.
And then, because it’s that time of year, the question sharpened. Rosh Hashanah just passed. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is this weekend.
A year ago, I wrote that journalism needed a Yom Kippur of its own, a season of self-accounting and a promise to do better. I still believe that. But "reflect and do better" is exactly the kind of pledge an organization can make sincerely and still not keep, which is the trap worth naming directly this time. The machinery Judaism has built around this stretch of days is more specific than "be sorry," and it's worth borrowing the specific part, not just the sentiment. Most organizations, newsrooms very much included, don't have anything like it.
A baseline over feelings only works if you actually have the baseline. NewsGrade will hand you an unvarnished read on your own site in about two minutes, no board-deck polish included.
Confession is not the same thing as change
The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are built around an accounting of the soul, what Jewish tradition calls cheshbon hanefesh. Not a feeling of regret. An actual accounting: here is what I did, here is who it affected, here is the specific thing I’m going to do differently. That’s a different exercise than apologizing, and most institutions never get past the apology.
Newsrooms have a version of confession already. It’s called the correction box, and it’s honest as far as it goes. We got the name wrong, we misattributed the quote, we’ve updated the story. What it almost never contains is the accounting. Why did it happen. What about the process let it happen. What changes now so it doesn’t happen again next month to someone else. The correction closes the loop on the error. It doesn’t touch the pattern that produced it. This is exactly the gap groups like Trusting News have spent years pushing newsrooms past, treating corrections as a starting point for real accounting rather than the end of an obligation.
This is where Maimonides is more useful to a media strategist than you’d expect. His definition of complete teshuva, full atonement, isn’t about the sincerity of the confession at all. It’s a test you can only pass later: you know atonement is complete when you’re back in the same situation, with the same temptation or the same shortcut available, and you act differently. Not “I felt bad.” Not “I said I was sorry.” You were there again, and you did the other thing.
That’s not a sentiment. That’s a diagnostic. And it travels well outside a synagogue.
The test, applied
Try it on your own newsroom. Not hypothetically, specifically. Think of the last correction you ran, the last source who stopped returning your calls after a story ran, the last piece that got chased because it would perform rather than because it mattered. Now ask the only question that counts: if that exact situation showed up again next week, would anything actually go differently, or would you get the same outcome and a marginally better internal excuse for it?
Most organizations fail that test constantly and don’t notice, because they’ve never been asked to sit for it. The apology gets issued, everyone moves on, and the underlying incentive that produced the problem in the first place is still sitting there, untouched, waiting for the next reporter on deadline to walk into it. That’s confession without teshuva. It looks like accountability. It functions like amnesia with better PR.
What a real pledge would require
A newsroom that actually ran on “better tomorrow than today” as an operating principle, not a slogan, would need three things most don’t have.
A baseline over feelings. An unvarnished record of what actually happened, not the sanitized version written for funders or board decks. (A baseline over feelings only works if you actually have the baseline — NewsGrade will hand you an unvarnished read on your own site in about two minutes, no board-deck polish included.)
A cadence faster than “eventually.” A once-a-year post-mortem is functionally useless. The accounting has to happen while the muscle memory of the choice is still fresh, not months later when everyone’s already rewritten the story in their own favor.
Incentivizing the admission. Rewarding people for surfacing a systemic pattern, not just for reflexively defending the individual incident — which cuts directly against how most institutions are wired to protect themselves.
None of that is about becoming a better newsroom in some abstract, aspirational sense. It’s about being willing to run the Teshuva Test on your own decisions and actually let the answer change what you do next time the same situation shows up. Which, if I’m honest, is exactly the same test I’m running on myself when I catch a day I didn’t handle as well as I could have. The scale is different. The mechanism isn’t.
Yom Kippur asks whether you’d do it again. That’s a harder question than whether you’re sorry — and whether you’re managing a newsroom or just trying to get through the week, it’s the only test that actually counts.
Last year I asked what your newsroom’s Yom Kippur would look like. This year, run the test in the comments: what’s the one thing that would go exactly the same way if it came up again tomorrow?