The 1997 Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture

The second annual Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture was delivered on May 6, 1997, at the Barcelona International Press Centre, Barcelona, Spain, by Jordan “Buzz” Rizer, director of the American Forces Information Service, the U.S. Defense Department agency that supports The European and Pacific Stars and Stripes newspapers.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am a publisher. As such, I have two important functions. Both are of equal importance and really relate to each other. The first is to provide for journalistic needs, both news and opinion, of our readers, a largely military audience. The second is to earn and manage the funds necessary to…

What am I trying to accomplish here?…

A couple of years ago I was invited to lecture at a university about news ombudsmanship. I was asked to include in my talk some of the things I try to accomplish as an ombudsman.

I have made that list of things a regular part of the talks I have given since then to many groups. But I have never shared those thoughts with you.

So here are some of the things I have tried to accomplish during the last few years as the ombudsman of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

To make readers continue to think of…

Reporting tragedy…

An editor dispatched a young reporter to interview the children of a Hartford woman who had just committed suicide in jail, thinking there could be a teary front-page story in the now-motherless youngsters.

The family had no telephone, so she went from door to door until she found the children walking down the street with a teacher.

She explained her mission, and the teacher yelled: These children just lost their mother. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

The reporter went back to the office, without a story.

That encounter of more than 20 years ago kept coming back to me earlier…

Fifty-six percent believe news stories err…

Today we’ll digress from the usual ombudsbusiness to devote this space to some fascinating — some might say disturbing — revelations about the news media:

What the American public thinks about the media and what journalists think about their own craft, as discovered in two recent nationwide polls.

First, let’s look at the public’s attitudes, measured by a Pew Research Center survey conducted among 1,211 adults nationwide in mid-February and reported in the Los Angeles Times.

Americans are “paying less attention to mainstream news media and watching or reading with far less enthusiasm than 10 years ago,” said the…

Sounding off on the media…

Why are growing numbers of Americans ignoring major newspapers and network television news?

The question was raised here last week and an imposing number of you took the trouble to share your thoughts.

Was there a consensus? yes, and I think it was best framed by one of my correspondents who said for him journalism has become “boring, biased and extraneous.”

These views are worth sharing, so here are snippets of some of the letters, faxes, phone calls and e-mails we received.

From Cory Briggs of Sacramento: “Much of the information The Bee presents is incredibly useless to me. Let me…

1997 survey of ONO members

To: ONO Members and Friends
From: Elissa Papirno
Re: Results of ONO survey
Date: April 7, 1997

At long last, here are the results of the survey that was distributed to ONO members last December. The idea was to evaluate some of the new ways ombuddies are using to communicate with readers, from e-mail to reader forums. With all of us so pressed for time, the question was what’s the best, most valuable use of the limited resources we have. Twenty-eight people from five countries responded. Participants did not necessarily answer every question; so there are statistical gaps.

Here are some of the highlights:

• 24 people write columns and 21…

‘Blow Ups’…

Would you publish [photographs showing the police brutally beating a defiant young boy suspected of drug dealing]? Yes or no? Last Friday, Folha readers saw such pictures “blown up” on the newspaper’s front page and on the front of the local news section.

“Blow ups,” in Brazilian newspaper slang, means that the photos were cropped big. Did you discuss the photos with anybody at home or at work? Were you disgusted by anyone? The boy? The police? Folha?

Taken by photojournalist Moacyr Lopes Junior, the photos ran without captions. Police subdue the boy, who resisted…

Joao da Silva or Maria das Couves…

In last Friday’s edition, Folha featured, in a front-page photograph, the jurors in the trial of Guilherme de Padua, one of the defendants accused of murdering actress Daniella Perez.

In the four-column photo, it’s possible to identify, with reasonable precision, the faces of the jurors in what is considered the crime of the decade in Brazil.

The images of photojournalist Rosane Marinho showed two blonde women, five men, one of them a mulatto, another black. All were following the testimony in the Rio de Janeiro courtroom.

Reporting by Chico Santos, in a fruitful attempt to verify…