I spent yesterday with a client in Santa Clara, which is something of a haul from my office. I used the time to catch up on some backlogged podcasts, including a January 31 edition of Corante Event Lab. The show involved podcasting challenges. David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet’s Tech Update, was one of the guests. Most of the show dealt with equipment and such, but toward the end of the show, Berlind talked about an experiment he has undertaken. He called it a “podcasting for transparency channel.”

Here’s the idea: In an effort to address the mistrust with which so many people approach the work of journalists, articles and broadcasts that feature “polished edited content” can be linked to “a parallel channel that’s full of the raw materials.” Specifically, a journalist could link a quote or sound bite in the finished product to a recording of the entire interview. Berlind came up with the idea while pondering how to “unobscure that which is obscure from public view.”

So he gave it a try.  he experiment included listing the time codes where readers/listeners can find any given quote in the unedited interview.

Journalists and bloggers responded positively, so he took it to another level. In addition to posting the raw interview, why not also post the e-mails that were exchanged in the story preparation? So he did…including story pitches from PR practitioners.

“The PR community didn’t respond favorably,” Berlind said. “The whole PR community went berserk…They didn’t expect it.”

Berlind has since adjusted his approach to this kind of transparency. “What this means is, if you want to keep your job as a journalists, you can’t go and piss off everybody. You have to figure out how to offer the maximum degree of transparency without compromising or marginalizing what it is you do every day. Now that I’ve learned how sensitive the PR community is to that, now what I’ll do is publish a policy that says, ‘Here’s what I’ll do with what you send me. When you first send me a pitch, I won’t publish that, but I will ask you if I can publish everything that’s subsequent to that.’”

While that’s certainly accommodating of Berlind, I have to wonder why the PR community reacted the way it did. After all, we preach transparency to our clients, citing the risks to reputation of anything less. “If you don’t want to see it on the front page of theNew York Times, don’t do it,” is pretty common advice these days. Are we unable or unwilling to eat our own dog food? As a profession, our inability to live the values we preach to our clients, our unwillingness to walk the talk, is one more reason for those outside the profession to hold us in such low regard.

There should be nothing in any of our communications with the media that we should mind having exposed to the scrutiny of the public, particularly if journalists are enthusiastic about having their own source material put under the same microscope.