Begbie, Sally

Sally Begbie, SBS ombudsman
Special Broadcasting Service
Locked Bag 028 Crows Nest
New South Wales
Australia 1585
Telephone: 0011 612 94303844
Fax: 0011 61409996783
E-mail: sally.begbie@sbs.com.au…

Batten, Robert James

Robert James Batten, complaints review executive
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
GPO Box 9994
Hobart
Tasmania
Australia 7001
Telephone: 0011 61 3 6235 3393
Fax: 0011 61 3 6235 3407
E-mail: Batten.Robert@abc.net.au…

Ombudsman: Self-criticism in newspapers

By Jairo Faria Mendes
Master of Arts in communication and culture
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Few people know what an ombudsman is, but various of the biggest newspapers in the world have the column, as Le Monde (France); El Pa¡s (Spain); Washington Post, Boston Globe e Philadelphia Inquirer (USA); The London Free Press, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazete, Toronto Star e Halifax Cronicle-Herald (Canada) for instance; and even the Russian newspapers Izvestiya, known as an official organ of the communist party of the extinguished USSR. About half of the Japanese newspapers have an ombudsman, among which the one with …

Fighting the enemy within

(Andrew Finkel was until recently a Reagan–Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. He has also served as a correspondent based in Istanbul for a variety of international organisations including The Times, TIME, the Economist, and CNN. He is also one of the few foreigners to have written a regular column in the Turkish language media.)

By Andrew Finkel
IBI Global Journalist

Blaming the media when things go wrong may be an old political trick, but it is one that succeeded only too well in earning Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoðan an enthusiastic round of applause …

Death of the ombud? Only in Canada

By Jeffrey Dvorkin
ONO executive director

Are news ombuds an endangered specied. In North America, the answer now seems to be yes.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I agreed in May to become the first executive director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO) in the midst of the largest economic downturn in the history of journalism.

Only a few years ago, newspapers and broadcasters around the US and Canada would point to their in-house ombuds (aka readers’ editor or public editor) as an example of openness and transparency with their readers, viewers and listeners.…

Frequently asked questions about ombudsmen

Q. How do you deal with angry callers?
A. Let them vent for a reasonable amount of time, then let them know you have listened, you understand the complaint, you will share it with the staff and indicate what action might be taken. Try to avoid getting into a rapid-fire exchange. When the heat starts rising, hold the phone away from your ear, lean back and let the caller have the floor. You may have to politely, but firmly, end the call. You will have to judge whether you want to get into a disagreement with a caller; it may …

A pair of shoes and a notebook…

With exclusive stories about topics pertinent to the lives of readers, the newspaper showed how it can continue to be relevant.

October was the month in which analysis of performance showed Folha offered the biggest number of examples of how the printed newspaper should continue to be relevant and useful to readers in the 21th Century a total of 18 times.

In eight front page headlines, it had exclusive stories about the topics of highest importance, the result of its own investigation, which obviously is costly.