Kim Kleman, "Consumer Reports" editor: Mr. Media Interview, pt. 1

In the 1970’s, my dad never made any purchase of substance without consulting Consumer Reports. Vacuum cleaners, toaster ovens, window air conditioners, used cars -- he never made a move without CR.

In those pre-Internet days, he collected the magazine’s back issues the way I collected comic books. I just kept my comics a lot neater and more organized than he did his magazines.

Today’s Consumer Reports is very different from the one my dad admired, thanks to the Internet. There are a whole host of web sites and services competing to provide consumer information in what used to be a niche owned solely by Consumer Reports. Consumers now have instant free access to consumer-written product performance reviews from Amazon.com to Epinions and everywhere in between. In the wired world, it seems, everybody has an opinion and wants to share it.

We’ll talk about that today with my guest Kim Kleman. Kim is the new editor of Consumer Reports, the flagship publication of Consumers Union. She’s also an old acquaintance whom I worked with at the Tampa Tribune twenty years ago and whom my wife worked with at the St. Petersburg Times. Kim joined Consumer Reports in 1997 and has since been managing editor, deputy editor, and special assignments editor, shepherding award-winning investigative projects. Earlier this year, Kim was promoted to editor-in-chief.

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’m sure you were very proud to be promoted to editor-in-chief at the magazine, but I suspect you and everyone else wish it were under better circumstances this year.

KIM KLEMAN: Well, it is a huge honor to work here. I have fun every day that I come to work.

You’re referring to the problem we had with our infant car seat testing. I’m happy to say that I feel like we’ve learned significant lessons from that experience. We are moving on, and we have exciting projects ahead of us. We take it very seriously. The last several months have been a period of intense introspection and communication with our readers as to. “Here’s what went wrong, here’s what we’re doing about it,” and onward and upward.

ANDELMAN: It’s very unusual over the years to hear anything bad reported about Consumer Reports. So when this happened, it had to be a cultural shock for people in the institution as well as people who read the magazine. I hate to put you through this, but can you just take a minute to review for people what happened with the child safety seats?





KLEMAN: We test child safety seats periodically and to do that, we use an outside laboratory which has specialized test equipment that we don’t have here on site. I would say that of all the testing we do, maybe about 10 percent of our tests involve outside labs for specialized testing equipment or outside expertise that we don’t have internally. That said, we take responsibility for everything that we test, either in-house or outside.

With child safety seats, we attempted testing that went above and beyond the government standard. There was a severe miscommunication between our testers and the lab we used, and that resulted in a mistake. We crash-tested car seats at speeds that far exceeded what we thought we were testing. The lessons that we learned from our mistake are that, when we’re attempting new testing, we want to do more research and bring in a lot of outside experts to help us craft the new tests. That is what we plan on doing. The thought was that maybe we were too insular with that test. We have a long history of crash-testing car seats, not the kind of testing that we tried this time, a side-impact test. So, moving forward, we will be involving more experts to help us when we’re testing products in a new way.

ANDELMAN: So this was different testing than had been done previously.

KLEMAN: Right. We were attempting a side impact crash test that we had not attempted before with child seats. The government was charged with pursuing this kind of test years ago and hadn’t done anything about it. So I think the intent was honest and right, but the results, unfortunately, were not what we wanted.






ANDELMAN: Did CR test at a higher rate of speed?

KLEMAN: Yes. We thought we were testing a side impact at 38 mph. It turned out that the crash speed was roughly double that so that invalidated our car seat test.

I do have to say that as soon as we found out that there was a mistake, we pulled down the story from our website. The president wrote a letter that we sent to the 7 or 8 million subscribers we have to both the magazine and the website and our other publications. We wrote a story in the magazine about what went wrong, and we have done many interviews talking to the press about what happened as well. The result is that we did not have subscribers leaving us in droves. We saw not even a blip, not even a dip, in subscribership.

I’m very happy to say that I think our readers know that we normally don’t make mistakes and that we’re very sorry about this and that we learned from what we did. So there hasn’t been a lot of fallout, I’m happy to say.





ANDELMAN: You and I have been with some large institutional publications over the years, and there tends to be a bit of initial reluctance, institutional stubbornness, at first when someone catches a mistake. There was a little sense that Consumer Reports took a little while to acknowledge the mistake. On the other hand, with this kind of testing, I don’t know how quickly you can act on that without going back and checking everything. Is that safe to say?

KLEMAN: Well, let me say that with us, there was no hesitation. The government tried the tests that we did and as soon as the government said, “Hey, listen, we’re not finding the results that you are,” we met with them, we retested, and within a day, we had pulled the story. So I would not say that there was hesitation on our part or yes, it’s right or whatever. If a manufacturer for any test project questions what we do, we gladly bring them in to our headquarters here in Yonkers and show them the results of all the tests for their product. So we are very open to share how we tested and what the results are.

ANDELMAN: There was a particular manufacturer that was affected by this, wasn’t there?

KLEMAN: There were a few manufacturers. There were several car seats for which we said these do not perform well in the test that we did. There were two car seats for which we asked for a recall. Again, we are in the process of retesting all the seats that we tested, so we’re about to come out with new information as soon as we have check-tested the current test that we’re doing.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you how long before the magazine would do another review of child safety seats. Again, other publications would have this experience and would be like they’re not gonna touch that with a ten-foot pole. Consumer Reports has a slightly different obligation from its mission, right?

KLEMAN: Yeah. Our only constituents are consumers, and Consumer Reports is all about product safety. It’s obviously imperative that whatever we do, we do it right, but we cannot shy away from testing child safety seats or anything.





ANDELMAN: Are there particular editorial safeguards that have been put in place to try to prevent something like this from happening again?

KLEMAN: The way that we write stories and research reports here, we do everything as part of a team. When we work together at our various newspapers, it’s the reporter and it’s the editor, and you often do your own check testing of the facts and bam, it goes into the newspaper. Here, again, everything involves a team such that there’s a tester, a main tester, a project leader, and a technician, and there’s a reporter and there’s an editor, and there might be a survey researcher, and there’s a facts checker. The safeguards that we’ve implemented affect the whole team and how the team works. And, again, a lot of it is when we do new kinds of testing, okay, what is everything we know out there about the kind of testing that already exists, and what experts should we call in to talk to us about the new way we’re considering testing, and all that kind of stuff. So that is the model that we’re using to proceed.

ANDELMAN: You were promoted to editor-in-chief not too long after all this kind of broke. How do you get back to the mission of the magazine after an incident like this and restore staff morale, which I’m sure must have been a little upended?

KLEMAN: This experience caused so much soul-searching for our organization. Of course, we took it hugely seriously. I think the best way to move beyond something like this is to acknowledge the mistakes that we made, to be very clear about what we are doing such that this doesn’t happen again and to focus on the new work because, as you said, we can’t stop testing, we can’t be afraid to test, but we have to continue and do it right. So I feel good about where we are now in that we’re moving on to all kinds of testing, and we’re continuing with, there’s kind of flagship tests for which we’re known, and I feel that we’re getting beyond it.

CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!

©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.