There’s nowhere this tension is more painful than when it involves a homicide. I remember vividly speaking years ago to the father of a young woman who had been killed when she was caught in the crossfire of a gunfight in a busy public place, between two people she didn’t know. The distraught father said he was certain his daughter hadn’t been involved in any gang activity, but he was afraid that her name would carry that association forever because of the circumstances of her death.

He requested that I work with editors to remove his daughter’s name from KansasCity.com, not wanting search engines to direct people to the news story. While I sympathize greatly, it was a request I had to turn down. His grief was unimaginable to me, but information about the homicide has an overriding news value for the public.

Kansas City’s homicide rate has been high in recent years, numbering a tragic 114 in 2011 and on course to be even higher this year. And that means The Kansas City Star will be charged with writing about a great number of victims.

The paper has started a new site, Homicide KC at Homicide.KansasCity.com. Its slogan is “Tracking every Kansas City homicide. Remembering every victim,” with the goal of creating an entry for each individual. The site lists information such as the victims’ age, place and cause of death, and suspects in the crimes.

So far, most of the reader feedback I’ve heard about it has been positive. One emailer called the city’s homicide rate “a horrific and ongoing tragedy, and one which should be a high priority for people throughout the metro, and most certainly the residents of the east side and officials at KCMO city hall.”

He reminded me that he’d contacted me a few months ago with a recommendation for the paper: “I suggested that the paper post all of the victims on the front page to very much put what’s going on in everyone’s faces. And I hope that a feature similar to that started on the (Homicide KC) website can be transformed into print.”

Not all comments on the site have been positive. “Here (The Star) goes again, always putting attention on the negative,” said one caller. “Can you think what it might mean if you gave all that space to kids who are achieving in school, or making a regular feature about people who are trying to get the crime out of the city?”

Another emailer expressed her concern that the photographs of several victims on the Homicide KC page are their police booking mug shots, taken when they had been arrested themselves in previous incidents.

“I can fully appreciate the thought behind Homicide KC,” she emailed. “However the manner in which victims are presented has me a little concerned.” She knew one of the victims on the site, and had read comments on other websites deriding her as “just ‘another dead black youth.’”

“Out of respect to the victims, their families, and friends, I wonder if there is a way that (The Star) could either work to get better photos through family or Facebook, or just not have them at all,” she wrote.

The newsroom does try to contact family members for photos, but those requests aren’t always granted. I certainly understand this reader’s point, especially because the booking photos don’t carry any context. The victim may have been arrested for a non-violent crime that occurred years ago, and may have never been tried or convicted. Sometimes a photo tells an incomplete story, even when it pictures the right person.

Yavuz Baydar from the newspaper Sabah in Istanbul posed this dilemma and got some answers from ONO members.

– Jeffrey Dvorkin
ONO Executive Director

Ombuds-

Here is another question for all of you.

We have a developing case of a columnist who has been accused of denigrating a physically handicapped MP (who lost her leg and arm in an accident), with political undertones. This happens at the same time a large group of NGO’s exert pressure on criminalising hate speech in Turkey.

I agree with the critique from readers.

But, I have remained utterly reluctant to step over the opinion segment; except in 2 times (each time in racism).

Have you ever had to deal with complaints on hate speech in columns / Op-Ed?

What did / would you do?

Best.

– Yavuz Baydar

From Karen Rothmyer, The Nation, Nairobi.

I’ve had to deal with racism, and I called the columnist out on it. She is an Asian-Kenyan and said some things about African-Kenyans that I thought were over the line. The column brought a complaint by a progressive Asian-Kenyan organisation, which made it easier, since I could begin with their complaint.

I recently did a long column on covering hate speech, which was criminalised here after the inter-tribal 2007-8 post-election violence, as a way of helping readers to understand what a complicated concept it is. I talked to the head of the commission that investigates hate speech, along with the head of the national media council and some of our own journalists. Maybe you could try doing something similar, pegged to the effort to get a bill passed, that would serve as a general look at the situation. I know I learned a lot about the issue, and what I thought about it, just from doing that column, and I expect to be applying that knowledge to readers’ complaints about hate speech ahead of the next election. One thing I feel certain of is that there is no single answer that’s right for all countries, so you could do a real service by looking at your particular circumstances.

From Kirk LaPointe, CBC, Toronto

The situation can depend on the code or guidelines you against which you are assessing performance, but I have had to determine that name-calling foments contempt or hatred in a couple of cases. That said, when there are instances of hate speech, usually in our situation the courts are called upon instead of an ombudsman to resolve the matter.

From John Horgan, Irish Press Council, Dublin

Yes. They rarely succeed. However, one very prominent one, about three years ago, was a complaint about a columnist who had written a column criticizing Western aid policies towards Africa. He was adjudged to have caused “grave offence”, which is the lesser of two possible breaches of Principle 9 of our Code. The more serious one is that of “inciting hatred”, but no publication or journalist has ever been found to be in breach of that provision.

The reason such complaints rarely succeed is that though the comments in question might well have been regarded as offensive, they rarely “gravely” so. The test of offensiveness is whether I consider it gravely offensive – not whether the complainant does so.

401 Ninth St. NW

Washington, DC 20004

Email: jkkaplan@syr.edu

There is little that warms the cockles of a journalist’s heart more than reader responses to the things we publish. They prove that you are reading, are moved by what you see, and are willing to spend time telling us what you think.

Today there are more ways than ever for you to make yourself heard in the marketplace of ideas, but for my money the most effective is the same as it was in Ben Franklin’s newspaper days:

The letter to the editor.

It is high-profile — letters usually appear on the editorial page or in the opinion section.

It’s exclusive — published letters are selected by an editor as a worthy contribution, culled from many submissions.

And best of all, each published letter includes the author’s real name and city of residence. Despite the popularity of online give-and-take, few things are more worthless than an opinion that arrives with no name attached. A signed letter to the editor carries weight that anonymous chatter does not.

Of course, attaching your name to your opinion requires a certain degree of self-assurance, because doing so invites disagreement and occasional criticism — and occasionally more than a little. Thus, a gent named Austin Kuder of Seven Hills — a frequent correspondent — seemed to feel a little bruised last week after an encounter with some readers in Sunday’s Forum pages.

The previous Tuesday, The Plain Dealer had printed a PolitiFact column that addressed a statement by House Speaker John Boehner that Social Security is out of money. “Mostly False,” ruled PolitiFact.

Mr. Kuder wrote a letter that we published the following Thursday, accusing conservatives of trying to undermine public confidence in Social Security.

That got things going on the other side, and last Sunday’s Forum section included a package of five letters, all taking issue with various points in the PolitiFact story and Mr. Kuder’s letter.

“One [letter] would have been enough,” he wrote me last week, “but the PD printed five similar critiques.”

Well, that’s what can happen when a letter writer strikes a nerve, and it’s part of what makes the letters section the vibrant place it is. Particularly on Sundays, when Forum includes an entire page of letters, we offer one or more packages of opinion on a single topic and thus provide discussions, rather than just single opinions.

“Basically the packages reveal themselves, I don’t have to go looking for them,” said Racquel Robinson, who has been The Plain Dealer’s letters editor since 1999. “I identify trends based on the submissions I get and put them aside for use as potential Sunday packages. Often, there’s that one column or letter or package that really sets people off, and I know I’ll get an interesting mix of opinions.”

She said packages usually are not as one-sided as the Social Security comments last week: “In an ideal world, I’d get one letter expressing an opinion on each side of every issue,” she said. “But people mostly write when they disagree with something, and all the letters were on one side of that issue.”

Most of the complaints I get about letters involve balance. “Why didn’t you run any letters from the other side?” readers will want to know. But Robinson can’t run letters she doesn’t have, and she says she tries to publish letters in proportion to what she receives.

“I don’t necessarily look for equal balance,” she said. “I think readers need to know which side is weighing in more heavily. This isn’t a poll, and it’s not scientific or even consistent. One week we’ll be heavily liberal, and the next week the conservatives will weigh in.”

The letter writers tend to police one another, she said: “It’s their page. In any debate, there’s a wide spectrum — a wide continuum of thought — and our letter writers are really good about writing rebuttals if they think somebody has gone too far on the other side.”

Letter writers are restricted to no more than one published letter every 30 days. “I have a huge stable of regular letter writers, all of whom I greatly value,” said Robinson, “but it’s always refreshing to publish a new voice. I love it when I call somebody to verify that they wrote a letter and they get excited to know that they’re going to be in the paper.”

One person who didn’t get a call but who I’m confident will be excited today is Austin Kuder of Seven Hills. Last week he took it on the chin, but if you look at page G5, you will see that a package of readers rallied to his defense.

Happy reading, Austin.

Jacob Mollerup, president of the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and the Organization of News Ombudsmen, sees the hacking saga as a case in which many participants – the press, police, PCC – failed to draw the line. Instead, it was the public that finally said, “Enough!” after the vastness of the hacking was uncovered.

Read the entire editorsweblog.org article by Teemu Henriksson

A Star reporter recently came to me for my take on what, if anything, he should do in regards to a recent story he’d written. Because there is a genuine dilemma here, I have elected not to name the subject or disclose the specific topic itself.

A caller contacted the reporter because she was concerned that the report featured a man whose face and name she recognized. He is a sex offender who has been required by law to register in Missouri’s database for a 1981 conviction for molesting a 10-year-old girl in California.

The topic of the story in The Star had nothing to do with children or crime. And this man was actually a rather minor part of the coverage overall, mentioned in four paragraphs at the beginning with one innocuous quote, as an example of an individual affected by the broader subject matter the story addressed. His photo was the story’s lead image, though.

The question, then, is whether the reporter would have gone ahead and used this particular man as a source knowing about his criminal background beforehand.

There are no absolutes here. For one thing, there isn’t a single umbrella way for any journalist to do a thorough background search on any subject. Years of police procedural TV shows have led many viewers to believe computer database searches of criminal histories and fingerprints are instantaneous and definitive, but that’s an almost laughably fictionalized version of how actual criminal records searches work.

In the real world, there is a vast variety of overlapping jurisdictions with different data formats and legal standards for reporting. Some records are public documents, but many are not available to journalists or other members of the public for a variety of reasons. And despite Google’s false siren song of putting the world at everyone’s fingertips, there are millions of public documents that have never been digitized and made searchable. Some will undoubtedly never leave the filing cabinet.

There’s also the legitimate question of whether a criminal background — even for an offense as reviled as child molestation — should be an automatic disqualifier for any coverage.

In my other role coordinating research for The Star’s newsroom, I’ve helped reporters check out subjects to avoid this kind of dilemma many times in the past, particularly when the story involved children.

In this case, the horse is out of the barn. Although it’s easy to say this in hindsight, the entire question of the source’s appropriateness would have been negated simply by finding another person whose situation reflected the story’s theme.

On the other hand, there’s a strong counter-argument that the criminal justice system establishes appropriate punishment and that a person’s debt is served afterward. Does that mean journalists should consider any prior offender off-limits even in the context of a completely unrelated story?

That strikes me as draconian. But then again, I’d feel differently if I were reading benign coverage of a person convicted of a crime against me, my family or loved ones.

This column was originally published in the Kansas City Star on Sept. 11, 2011.

The velocity and richness of media inventiveness come, however, amid a paradox: The sharp decline of the news media institutionally. By that I mean the media not as information utilities, where they are still indispensable, but as entities with the will, the material base, and the intellectual courage to stand up to the powerful winds of manipulation and to speak independently in what they believe is the public interest.

This past decade, which is about to be commemorated exhaustively, has been bookended by the two most egregious instances of media failure in the half-century since Vietnam. Both have had historic consequence. The first, soon after the Twin Towers fell, was the media’s enlistment into the Bush administration campaign for public support for its invasion and occupation of Iraq and, more broadly, into its War on Terror.

The media’s complicity in that post-9/11 panic had many elements. Their endorsement—with some notable exceptions—of the administration’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was only the most flagrantly destructive.

More toxic, in the long run, was the continuing and largely unquestioning acceptance of a number of dubious and transformative propositions: That the country needs a permanent global network of forward bases and a colossal domestic apparatus devoted to protection of the “homeland” (itself a gauzy, post-9/11 linguistic innovation); that it can and should subject ordinary citizens to routine searches and surveillance, may imprison without arraignment and hold without trial, can torture with impunity, and, in short, must behave as if it is on a perpetual war footing and, day in and day out, is fighting for survival.

That these propositions still seem even arguable—in spite of evidence that the real threat this country, the world’s mightiest, actually faced was a small network of resourceful and murderous fanatics—testifies to the lasting influence of media that, by and large, told us what they were told to say.

The second media failure, the one that serves as the other bookend of this lamentable decade of co-optation, involves the deficit hysteria, which has crippled the government’s capacity to respond to the most serious economic challenge in 80 years.

True, public sector borrowing, which had soared thanks to the imprudent and unfunded spending of the previous administration, has since deepened and remains a matter of grave, long-term concern.

But the importance assigned to debt in today’s economic coverage is baffling. That rise to prominence came quickly, in early 2010, when the U.S. economy was still in a deep recession unleashed by Wall Street profligacy and had been pulled only a half-step back from the precipice by emergency measures under Bush and Obama.

Suddenly, the subject was changed. The news no longer even hinted at the possibility of further stimulus for a desperately weak economy. Despite miserly growth, housing markets in freefall, rocketing foreclosures, alarming jobless rates, the most authoritative media had seemingly been commandeered by voices chanting a single, plaintive note: the federal deficit.

Did the deficit actually have anything to do with this recession? Not really. The world’s debt markets have remained eager to lend to the U.S. government, judging from the rock-bottom interest rates they demand. (Besides, further debt wouldn’t even be necessary if this country’s leadership had the political will to tax the same bloated elite from which the government must instead borrow.)

As a matter demanding urgent response the deficit is a scam, the WMD of current policy discourse. The media’s zealous coverage of the primetime theatrics over the debt ceiling misled the public into believing a major curative was at stake, and meant weeks of ignoring the real economy, from the fate of foreclosed homeowners, to the miseries of job-seekers and the rise in poverty rates, to the lack of reprisals against the financial moguls whose deceit led to today’s misfortunes.

Most important, the demonization of debt is a stalking horse. The real goal is to paralyze the government for partisan advantage, under the banner of a resurgent reactionary politics consecrated to delegitimizing the public sector and vilifying anybody who might turn to it for help.

The decade since 9/11 has been long and eventful, and the media have given us dazzling new toys and stupendous new opportunities. But once they were also institutions that recognized they had a role to play, not just a market to serve, and that role obliged them sometimes to defy the received wisdom, not cave to it. And that recognition is in steep decline.

Edward Wasserman is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. This column was originally published on Aug, 2011 on “Ed Wasserman’s Blog.”

The Times’s transition from a print-dominated operation to a digital-minded one has progressed at a striking pace, and in the last few months it has closely resembled a full integration of the old ink-stained approach with the purely electronic. Where once The Times’s online content was prepared by a separate and subordinate “continuous news” operation, it is now managed by the same people who run print.

Traditionally in newspapers, it was the person holding the title of “news editor” who controlled the final content of print pages, often exercising power late at night, long after the top editors had gone home. Now, at The Times, news editors ride herd all day and deep into the night — steering content to digital platforms and, yes, the daily paper.

This integrated system is the product, at least in part, of a months-long study by Ms. Abramson last year. It seems like a good idea that she took the time to prepare herself in this way for the duties of executive editor, which she will assume in early September.

I wish her well as she and her colleagues confront the enormous challenges that The Times faces in such a turbulent period. And as they do, there is one thing in particular that I hope they keep in mind: Like the newsroom itself, the daily news report is evolving rapidly, and The Times will benefit by having clear standards for how mistakes and changes are handled in the fast-paced digital environment.

Unlike print, digital news is often updated throughout the day and night, sometimes many times. Versions evolve and sometimes morph into something quite different. Mistakes happen and are fixed. How The Times tracks and manages this can be very confusing.

For example, in the days after news broke that Arnold Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with his family’s housekeeper before becoming California’s governor, The Times ran an article about her, describing her neighborhood in Bakersfield. Some readers complained that this invaded her privacy.

You won’t find that article anywhere on NYTimes.com now, though, because later the same day a completely different story, written with a different focus by a different reporter, replaced it online and eventually appeared in the paper. Meanwhile, the original article appeared elsewhere, including on the front page of The Press Democrat, a newspaper in Santa Rosa, Calif., that is owned by The New York Times Company. The story can still be found on that paper’s Web site.

A different example arose on the Op-Ed page, where on May 1 the columnist Ross Douthat responded to the breaking news of Osama bin Laden’s killing by writing a column on Bin Laden’s failure to strike further against America after 9/11. Mr. Douthat had already written a piece for that day, about Libya, which appeared online but then, like the original housekeeper article, went poof when it was replaced — gone forever.

It’s problematic when content just disappears. It can also be problematic in a different way when content changes more subtly as a story evolves through the course of the day. One recent example even involves The Times’s June 2 coverage of Ms. Abramson’s appointment. An early version of the article included this quote from her: “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Later versions appeared without that quote, and various news organizations and bloggers saw this as airbrushing something that could cause problems for The Times. In response, a Times spokeswoman said the story was updated with fresher material from Ms. Abramson’s speech to the staff later that day.

Finally, in addition to changes that vaporize information and leave people wondering, there are occasions when corrections are likewise vaporized and therefore go unacknowledged in the often-ephemeral digital domain.

Philip B. Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, told me that The Times published a correction online after an article on Jan. 8 erroneously reported that Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona had been killed in the Tucson shooting. I hadn’t realized a correction was ever published, and I can’t go online to verify it now because the correction is no longer there.

The reason, as Mr. Corbett explained, is that the story itself, crafted in New York early in the coverage, was replaced later by a new article written by a Times reporter in Tucson. The paper felt that the old correction shouldn’t be appended to the “new” story, though the subject was the same and the article was just one more version during a day of fast-breaking developments.

When I queried Ms. Abramson about these issues, she affirmed that The Times’s standards for publishing corrections are as strict online as in print. “Our policy, when an error occurs in an earlier version of a story, is to acknowledge it, so the notion that we are covering up or hiding our errors is wrong,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Indeed, in the online world, the chances of a serious error in The Times going unnoticed or uncorrected are pretty slim.”

My preference would be that The Times do more to document and retain significant changes and corrections like those I have described. It has a policy against removing material from its archive (except in rare cases), on the principle that the record should be preserved. The Times should clarify its policy on replacing stories online, which looks like de facto removal to me, and offer the public a better-documented archive that includes all significant versions and all corrections. A clear policy statement on this, posted online, would make it easier for readers to understand The Times’s approach.

Right now, tracking changes is not a priority at The Times. As Ms. Abramson told me, it’s unrealistic to preserve an “immutable, permanent record of everything we have done.”

I realize there are other priorities. But more attention to this issue would bring two clear benefits. First, The Times could offer more transparency to its readers and stem the erosion of trust that occurs when readers don’t understand mysterious content changes. Second, by more carefully retaining important published material, including all corrections, The Times could reinforce to its staff the importance of accuracy and full disclosure when errors happen.

Enforcing and publishing a clear set of standards would go a long way toward ensuring that time-tested news values survive in the digital age.

This column was originally published in The New York Times on June 25, 2011.

But times have changed and in many places, acknowledging errors is becoming more common. This may be in large part the result of the web, which allows bloggers and others to point out errors that a newspaper might otherwise be able to ignore. There’s also a new emphasis on being open with the public — a reflection no doubt of changes in societal values.

For better or worse, however, the trend toward more corrections hasn’t yet come to Kenya. If judged only by the number of corrections they run, the Star and its main competitors are remarkably error-free.

But as anyone who has ever worked on a newspaper knows, that’s just not possible. Errors are a fact of life in any newspaper if for no other reason than the speed with which a newspaper is produced. Add to that occasional carelessness, plus the hidden agendas of some of those involved in feeding information to reporters, and you have the makings of an inevitable number of mistakes, large and small.  And so, after a few recent Star bloopers, I thought it would be a good time to inquire into the paper’s policy on corrections.

Officially, the Star ethics code states, “Whenever it is noticed that a misleading, inaccurate or distorted article has been published, it must be corrected at the earliest opportunity.” This is similar to the wording in the Media Council’s Code of Conduct. But what does that really mean in practice? To answer that question I sat down with Star Editor Catherine Gicheru.

Gicheru says that she has no problem admitting an out-and-out error — for example when the paper, earlier this year, mixed up an MP’s wife with another woman of the same name who had been charged in a fraud case, the paper carried a page two ‘Apology’ the next day.

But Gicheru says that she tries hard to avoid corrections whenever possible. The main reason, she says, is her concern about the paper’s credibility. “If you have too many corrections, then your credibility starts to plummet,” she says.  And, she says, a lot depends on your competition: if they aren’t printing many corrections, you don’t want to print many either.

There are some weeks when she fields as many as three serious demands for corrections, she says, and other weeks when there are none. Her first line of defence is to let the complainant simply blow off steam. Often, she says, that, plus a sympathetic manner and a believable explanation, is enough to cause the caller to relent. “Most often people cool down and say, ‘Okay, I can understand how it happened,’” she says.

Some of her other time-tested responses are to offer the person the opportunity to write a letter or a commentary. Or, she may offer the prospect of a friendly story at a later date  to make up for the offending one.

Gicheru also favours a technique that I’ve also seen used elsewhere: finding a reason to run a follow-up story that corrects the error without ever acknowledging that one has been made. One such case involved a story about a security guard who falsely claimed to be a student who’d done brilliantly on the KCSE exam. After the story ran, the principal of the school that the guard had allegedly attended spoke up, as did the real student whom the guard was impersonating.

The Star, rather than issuing a correction, ran a second story quoting the principal and the real student and adding new details to the story.

Similarly, a May 26 page one splash ‘Raila locked out of jobs’ that was based on a misreading of a bill on appointments was followed the next day with a page three story that ran under the headline ‘Clause retains Raila’s role in new appointments’.

Gicheru says that if she decides that there is no other course but to print a correction, she will determine what to call it according to its severity. If it’s an honest mistake, it will be called a ‘clarification’. If it’s inexcusable, it will be called a ‘correction’. And if it has the potential to turn into a libel case, it will be billed as an ‘apology’.  “You’re really pleading at that point,” she says.

The Star’s new website presents an additional set of dilemmas. So far, the Star has been correcting errors in stories posted online without indicating that they have been altered, or, in cases where a simple correction of fact isn’t possible, it has removed the entire story.

Maybe it’s because I’m no longer in the hot seat myself, either as a reporter or an editor, but I personally would like to see more Star corrections (called, moreover, by their right name rather than the weasel word ‘clarification’).  I want to know when something I thought was the case turns out not to be, so I can adjust my understanding accordingly. I’d also welcome, whenever possible, a brief explanation of how the error occurred: A reporter misunderstood what someone said? Wrong information was given out at a press conference? Or perhaps a sub-editor inadvertently changed the meaning of a sentence while shortening it?

I understand Gicheru’s legitimate worry that if the Star prints a lot of corrections, especially by comparison with its competitors, it will be perceived as incompetent. But other papers have shifted to a ‘more is better’ policy and haven’t appeared to suffer. The Guardian in the UK, for example, runs a column of corrections every day. So does the New York Times: I counted nine on one recent day and eight on the next, ranging from a misspelled name to an inaccurate description of someone’s role in a military operation. My guess is that if one paper took the lead, not only would others follow but it would become so much the norm that readers would come to expect a box of daily corrections just as they expect the daily editorial and letters.

But I’d like to know what others think. So here’s a question for all you Star readers out there: If you were setting a corrections policy for the Star, what would it be and why: correct every error, avoid corrections if at all possible, or something in between? I’ll print some of the most interesting emails (please keep your responses short) in my next column.

This column was originally published in the Nairobi Star on June 23, 2011.

Read the article in English.

Read the article in French on the La Presse Web site.