A photo may be worth 1,000 words, but readers thought this o…

It’s all too easy for a newspaper to rile its readers’ sensibilities, as the following instance illustrates.

A Page One photo Nov. 16 showing an African-American police officer peering out a window at a Cedarbrook murder scene brought dozens of complaints from readers who felt The Inquirer was making “a deliberate attempt to denigrate black people,” as one put it.

John Costello’s photo was a compelling news shot of the policeman at a second-floor window at the home where Hope Thomas was murdered. A headline declared “Nightmare in Cedarbrook,” while the caption read: “A …

Not all of our opinions confined to editorial page…

“Put it on the editorial page.”

Many of you readers hate it when our columnists meander out of their chosen territory: A business columnist writes about sports. A sports columnist writes about business.

“That’s opinion,” you charge. “It doesn’t belong in that section.”

Your wrath illustrates a newspaper failing: We play by rules we too rarely explain.

Here’s Rule One: Columnists in every section of the paper are allowed to have opinions and voice them. The best do it strongly, clearly, with passion. So how can a reader know whether it’s opinion or straight …

Philip M. Foisie’s memos to the management of The Washington Post

(The following information was provided to The Organization of News Ombudsmen for transfer to this web site by Geoffrey Foisie in December 1995. It relates to the early history of ombudsmanship and the significant role played by his late father, Philip M. Foisie, the first ombudsman at Stars and Stripes, former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune and former foreign editor of The Washington Post.)

November 10, 1969

TO: Ben Bradlee, Gene Patterson
FROM: Phil Foisie
RE: A proposal for an ombudsman for the Post

I suggest that the Post select, or cause to be selected, by some method …

News ombudsmen: An inside view

By Maggie B. Thomas
Associate professor of journalism
Texas Christian University

Presented May 8, 1995, at the 1995 International Convention of the Organization of News Ombudsmen at Fort Worth, Texas.

Please accept my thanks to all of you who responded to the questionnaire designed to gather additional information about the role of news ombudsmen. Questionnaires were mailed to 42 ombudsmen and responses were received from 32, which provided a return rate of 76 percent. Some respondents did not reply to all items.

News ombudsmen perform a variety of tasks and often find themselves explaining or defending the journalistic efforts of …

More media outlets need ombudsmen…

Nearly two years ago, The Oregonian started down a road that few newspapers travel and more should:

The Oregonian created a news ombudsman’s post, to explain how the paper works and to address reader complaints, comments and questions about news coverage.

On Monday, I will leave that job to become editor of the editorial page.

In general, news organizations are not prone to public self-criticism. That is illustrated by the fact that, according to the Organization of News Ombudsmen, only 35 news organizations in the United States have ombudsmen.

There are more than 1,500 daily newspapers …

Cut? That small word is loaded with potential for dispute, d…

You’d think simple words wouldn’t cause fits.

But, of course, they do all the time. Just consider the word “cuts.”

Then add it to stories that speak of budget cuts, Medicare cuts, welfare cuts.

Each time we’ve published that word lately, my phone line has been jammed. “The Republican Medicare plan is not a cut,” some assert. It’s “slowed growth,” or “slowdown in planned spending.” The dollars aren’t cut. They just aren’t increasing as much as was once planned.

I remind copy editors assigned to write one-column headlines of the hot-button nature of the …

Readers want the news media to cover issues more thoroughly…

The richest and poorest Americans are more likely to blame the media for the condition of the nation, reports the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press.

In a scientific survey of the American public, the Times Mirror Center asked: “In your opinion, what is the biggest threat to people like yourself in the future?”

Government was the most common answer (50 percent), followed by the news media (15 percent) and business (13 percent).

But two kinds of people were most likely to blame the news media.

One of the groups unhappiest with …

This Palm Beach party was news…

I don’t want to know about it, and I especially don’t want it stripped across the top of Page One in my Sunday paper.

That’s how some reacted to Frank Cerabino’s October 22 column about Chase Lanting’s birthday party (“Palm Beach Boy’s B-day will be more like D-Day.”)

About a dozen wrote asking why The Post let Robin and Bill Lanting make such a big deal about their penchant for making a big deal of their childrens’ birthdays.

“It should have been in the social section,” said Donna Holland of Jupiter. “I was shocked,” …

Photo, headline gave some readers offense…

Does a newspaper uphold community standards when it publishes a photograph of a painting of a nude man curled around a fully dressed woman? Did editors go too far when they quoted a filmmaker relatively unknown to the public using the word “suck” as slang in a way that, to some readers, indicated a sexual application?

Readers raised those issues last week after an Oct. 20 Variety cover showed a takeoff on a famous 1980 Annie Leibowitz photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that ran on Rolling Stone’s cover. The takeoff appeared in the …

Ombudsmen and the bottom line

(This article is reprinted from the October 1995 issue of The World and I.)

By Lynne Enders Glaser

From a newspaper’s standpoint, having a designated person on staff to hear and respond to readers adds more to its worth than good will.

It boosts the bottom line.

Now, I can’t prove that through time-and-motion studies or court-case analyses that I’ve read. But, using an empirical base, I believe that valid economic argument exists for the news ombudsman, and it’s my hope that the financial types who control most of this nation’s dailies will someday wake up to that fact.

If …