Companies in Silicon Valley are now increasingly using blogs to announce layoffs, according to this article in New York Times. In fact, they are having to do it because if they don’t someone else will. So many employees have personal blogs and Twitter feeds that news travels instantly.

"Today, whatever you say inside of a company will end up on a blog," said Rusty Rueff, a former human resources executive at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo. "So you have a choice as a company — you can either be proactive and take the offensive and say, 'Here's what's going on,' or you can let someone else write the story for you."

Yes, it is based on Silicon Valley, an extreme case, but it probably won’t be long before this need is much more widespread, and it is worth considering when you have bad news, or even when your employees think you might have bad news, whether you want to be the one who announces it or whether you would prefer to leave it to somebody else. If you want to appear open and honest, that’s a pretty clear choice, and maybe in itself sufficient reason to start your corporate blog.