Listening is an ombudsman’s main responsibility…

We’re all in agreement. My main responsibility is to listen to readers who want to voice their concerns, their criticism, their puzzlement, their hopes, even their compliments.

In a “You Be the Editor” exercise I presented to you recently, I asked you how you would rank six of my primary responsibilities as ombudsman of the Star-Telegram.

I posed the same question to a number of the newspaper’s staff members.

This is how the 137 readers who responded ranked the six responsibilities in the unscientific survey:

• 712 points — Listening to readers
• 599 points

…

The 1996 Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture

The first Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture was delivered on May 7, 1996, at the KormanSuites Hotel and Conference Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., by Benjamin C. Bradlee, vice president at-large and former executive editor of The Washington Post.

A chat with Ben Bradlee

The Washington Post wasn’t the first American newspaper to hire an ombudsman. But in 1980 it dramatically showed the journalism profession how important this position can be to a paper’s credibility.

That was the year The Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize when it learned it had been hoaxed by one of its reporters, Janet …

Watch out for uneven labels…

Some of The Bee’s politically conservative readers for years have been bugged — no, make that angered — by how the paper does or doesn’t label various people and groups.

There’s the Christian right, those readers note, but never a Christian left. There’s the political far right but never a far left. There’s extreme conservative but never extreme liberal. The only left wing you ever read about is in hockey and soccer stories.

In some of these cases, the complaints have substance. The media (It isn’t just The Bee, mark you!) love labels as they …

Acid pens: From cops to Copps…

Some 25 years ago, Clint Eastwood played rogue cop Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, a *** 1/2 movie based on a novel by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink.

In this violent piece of Hollywood cinema, he uttered the memorable line: “Go ahead, make my day.”

Last weekend, The Star’s Patrick Corrigan borrowed it for an uncharacteristically abrasive Sunday editorial page cartoon that rubbed quite a few raw nerves.

You remember the one. It shows a cop — no police force identified — in a Crown Victoria cruiser. He dangles a handgun from the …

Shucks! Oysters are fine…

Let’s sing a song of glory to Themistocles O’Shea,

Who ate a dozen oysters on the second day of May.

– Stoddard King, The Man Who Dared

Those who are squeamish about oysters or disgusted by those who eat the bivalve molluscs in an uncooked state are excused today. The oyster rite is not for everyone.

But registered dietitian and nutrition writer Denise Beatty recently went a step further by advising LifeLine readers: “Don’t eat raw molluscs (oysters, clams, mussels).”

Why not?

The reason Beatty gave was vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium found in raw oysters, …

Like it or not, dark corners must be explored…

Editor’s Note: Last Sunday about 1,500 people came to The Star’s One Yonge headquarters to protest the newspaper’s coverage of Polish history.

Serious charges of biased reporting, perpetuation of myths, Holocaust denial and discrimination were levelled against the paper.

Hanna Sokolski, president of the Canadian Polish Congress (Toronto District) demanded an apology from The Star and several copies of the newspaper were burned in protest.

While no apology was given, The Star said the lines of communication remained open.

After the protest, The Star’s publisher asked ombud Don Sellar — who is in charge of …

Editors offer advice to newsrooms: Favre, Overholser address the industry’s problems

By M.L. Stein
Editor & Publisher © 1996

There’s nothing wrong with newspapers that a greater identification with readers’ needs and concerns couldn’t cure, two editors told their peers.

And it also wouldn’t hurt to elevate reporters’ pay scales and recruit writers with solid knowledge of such issues as tax policies, health care, child care and social security, it was added.

Gregory Favre, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee, and Geneva Overholser, who left recently as editor of the Des Moines Register and will become ombudsman at the Washington Post this month, spoke at a joint meeting of the California …

Reading into what you read…

A goodly number of the more than 200 reader comments to this office weekly support a newspaper-as-Rorschach-test theory: That is, what you see in the paper says as much about you as about the paper.

Take ideological leanings. Last week was a good week for sighting them, since The Post itself reported (Monday) another survey indicating that journalists tend to be liberal. A number of readers noted that as they cited objectivity failures. One decried the headline on Thursday’s front-page story looking ahead to two major Whitewater developments June 17 (a Senate committee report and …

Getting what newsrooms ask for…

Janet Cooke’s attempt at a comeback recalls that old line, “You should have been in pictures.” Apparently, Ms. Cooke should have been in fiction.

Instead, she wound up in 1980 as a 25-year-old reporter for The Washington Post – only to be cast out months later, a case that would live in news-journalism infamy. As an article in the June edition of Gentleman’s Quarterly said it:

“Janet Cooke caused the biggest scandal in the history of journalism when her Pulitzer Prize-winning article about an 8-year-old heroin addict turned out to be a fake. Humiliated …

Fair coverage of candidates…

You are the boss: The voter in a democracy. It is time to elect a president. What do you need from your newspaper? From what readers tell me, this at least: fair and substantial coverage.

First, fairness — the absence of bias. You want to believe that reporters will approach their work without prejudice.

A widely held view today is that journalists are disproportionately liberal and Democratic. It’s hard to know what to make of this charge: Surveys differ, though many lend credence to it. Beyond that, the attempt to report free of one’s personal …