The 1998 Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture

The third annual Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture was delivered on May 12, 1998, at the Westgate Hotel, San Diego, Calif., by Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, the largest newspaper in the Northwest.

From 1984 until April 1993, Ms. Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. She had been with the papers for 22 years, serving as reporter, assistant city editor, features editor and managing editor before being named executive editor in 1984. Under her leadership, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for …

The Clash of the Paradigms

By Dr. Deni Elliott
Practical Ethics Center
University of Montana

It doesn’t take a psychic to predict journalistic backlash. Take any scandal or any sensational event that dominates the news shows and news columns. The public will be riveted by the story. They will read the same rumors in three different newspapers and news magazines. They will surf the channels looking for one more re-telling of the same speculation.

Then, the handwringing and head-shaking over the state of journalism begins. The story after the story is how journalists screwed up. In something as complicated and on-going as the Clinton-Starr saga, …

Why Newspapers Need Ombudsmen to Ensure their Credibility and Accountability in a Multi-Media, Multi-Ethnic Society

By Chuck Stone
Walter Spearman Professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

When St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Cole Campbell offered me the position of ombudsman with specific responsibility to monitor an upcoming racially polarized mayor’s race, two thoughts occurred to me: One, I had a high threshold of ignorance about the responsibilities of ombudsmen; and, two, I was amazed at the alacrity with which my even higher threshold of hubris impelled me to accept.

After my mercifully brief baptism of only five months on the Post-Dispatch assignment, I came away a devout …