Washington Post’s Joann Byrd challenges “good practice”

By Richard P. Cunningham
Quill © 1994

Joann Byrd carried 40 years of newspaper experience into her job as ombudsman at The Washington Post, but she also carried a graduate degree in philosophy with a focus on ethics.

That ethics training sets her columns apart from the columns of two dozen or so other North American ombudsmen who write about their papers’ foibles. The others tend to make judgments based on that tangle of conventions and ideals call “good journalistic practice.”

By contrast, Byrd tends to ask just how good is good journalistic practice.

Here are some recent examples:

On …