STOCKHOLM — The “Readers’ Editor” for The Observer of London was sightseeing here last week when his cell phone rang. It was a Kenyan journalist asking how his newspaper company might create the role of a news Ombudsman.

In the last decade, Kenya has enjoyed a surge in press freedom, a trend that’s paralleled the opening up of Kenya’s political system. One of the best testaments is the phone call from the editorial director for the Nation Media Group, who wanted an Ombudsman for his papers in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and two other countries in East Africa.

Another journalist from Kenya visited NPR this week and made the same point. “Media in Kenya is not restricted in any way,” even following the recent violence, said Nairobi radio journalist Tole Nyatta. “You can criticize the government. Seven or eight years ago, the government would threaten to close you. But now we are very independent and very robust.”

As the link between the public and the newsroom, the Ombudsman plays a key role in ensuring a news organization upholds its own standards as well as making sure audience concerns are taken seriously.

Kenya is not the only place where the press is becoming more free and where news organizations are considering adding Ombudsmen. In Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America, there is a greater interest in the position, according to a meeting last week in Stockholm of the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO), which I attended.

However, in the United States — where press freedom is taken for granted, even when it’s under assault — the number of Ombudsmen at news organizations is declining, largely for budgetary reasons. Just a few years ago, 40 news organizations employed Ombudsmen (sometimes called “public editors” or “reader representatives.”) That’s not many, considering the United States has some 1,500 daily newspapers, three broadcast TV networks, several national radio networks, scores of cable networks, and thousands of local radio and TV stations.

Today, there are only 34 U.S. news ombudsmen, most of them at newspapers.In broadcast, only NPR, PBS, ESPN and WJAR-TV in Warwick, R.I. employ someone to act as a liaison between the newsroom and the audience. In the last year, four newspapers killed the position.

Worldwide, there are only 100 news Ombudsmen for newspapers, TV, radio and the Internet, according to Esben Orberg of the Danish Union of Journalists, who researched the role and gave a report at the ONO conference.

“Ombudsmen are growing in parts of the world where a free press is starting to assert itself,” said ONO President Pam Platt, the public editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky, the first paper in the U.S. to create the position.

Estonia is another country now enjoying press independence after decades of dictatorship. In 2004, Estonia joined the European Union, an important symbol of its new freedoms. Last year, the government created the position of Ombudsman for its public radio and TV. The first to hold the position, Tarmu Tammerk, writes internal criticism four or five times a week and has a monthly TV show where he shares his views publicly.

Tammerk sees great potential for other news Ombudsmen in Central and Eastern Europe because communist-state censorship is gone.

“These countries – the new member states in the European Union – have been able to build up free and democratic media systems for the past fifteen years,” said Tammerk. “There’s an even bigger potential for media Ombudsmen in the former Soviet republics, which are still struggling with how to turn former government broadcasters into public broadcasters, which would be journalistically independent.”

In Bogota, Columbia, two private television stations have Ombudsmen, who each produce weekly 30-minute TV shows critiquing their employers. “There’s definitely interest in Latin America,” said Consuelo Cedpeda Cediel with RCN Channel.

Brazil has two popular Internet sites, each with their own ombudsman, iG and UOL (Universe online).

Why have an Ombudsman?

Having an Ombudsman is a form of self-regulation by a news organization that the public should find heartening. An Ombudsman can point out publicly when a news organization is not living up to its own written standards and ethics. Having an Ombudsman indicates that a news organization is confident enough in its journalism to be publicly criticized by someone on its payroll.

While it may seem self-serving for me to say so, an Ombudsman also lends credibility to a news organization — as long as the person is contractually independent and cannot be fired for her comments. The role encourages self-criticism within the news organization, something that editors and reporters often don’t have the time, or the appetite, to engage in. Think of it as quality control.

“Reporters and editors have a tendency to brush off criticism,” said Michael Getler, PBS’ Ombudsman. “If you have an independent Ombudsman who says, ‘You are wrong. You violated your own guidelines,’ that definitely makes them think.”

Getler knows. After 21 years with the Washington Post as a foreign correspondent, reporter and editor, he spent five years as the paper’s Ombudsman before joining PBS in 2005.

While it is true that some news organizations, especially in the electronic media, have editors for ‘standards and practices,’ the role is largely internal and doesn’t involve dealing directly with the public.

“The public likes to know there’s somebody there listening to their criticisms,” said Getler. “An Ombudsman makes news organizations live up to their own standards. An editor is too close.”

Meanwhile, the editorial director for Kenya’s Nation Media Group has asked ONO for help in writing a job profile so he can hire an in-house critic. Considering the dozens of polls that repeatedly tell of the media’s loss of credibility in this country, it is unfortunate that more U.S. news outlets aren’t willing to take this same step toward regaining public esteem.

Early summer in Stockholm sees the sun set at midnight and rise again at 2.30am, making this beautiful city of water and shimmering sunlight a suitably disorientating place to examine the unsettling future of journalism.

Readers’ editors from around the world gathered in this almost continual daylight last week to consider the future of an industry which is going through monumental change, with journalists everywhere examining how they work and where they produce that work – in print, online, in podcasts or on video.

There was considerable angst in the air. Cultural change is always unsettling, particularly when the way ahead is not at all clear. ‘Old’ media are told that they have to find ways to involve readers in a continual, enriching, 24-hour online dialogue. Journalists can no longer stand aloof, the argument goes. Ignore the audience and you will perish.

Nonsense, say the traditionalists. All this detracts from the central duty of any media organisation, to tell the truth as it sees it.

Jane B Singer of the University of Central Lancashire spoke of the blurring lines between the producer and the consumer, with the journalist no longer the sole purveyor or ‘gatekeeper’ of the news. She told the Organisation of News Ombudsmen about her research into the blog ‘conversation’ on commentisfree at guardian.co.uk – which she described as the widest-ranging of its kind anywhere – and her conversations with journalists at the Guardian and The Observer who expressed concern at the veracity of some of the blogs, their challenge to the authority of the newspapers and the level of abuse hurled at some of the columnists. She thought the dialogue was like ‘a very raucous party, one where there is no cover charge and no one guarding the gate’.

Joakim Jardenberg, of web development agency Mindpark, believed the abuse would disappear once journalists really engaged with bloggers, who behave, he said, like angry teenagers because they are not being listened to. ‘Mainstream media are seen as the enemy. They think they own the story and they own the audience. They don’t.’

Where does this leave the readers’ editor, whose focus is often on the needs of the silent majority rather than those who make the most noise? With readers now able to access information from myriad sources, traditional media are going to have to actively demonstrate their trustworthiness, which is where we come in. Our task will continue to be one of trying to maintain ethical standards, to correct our errors and to explain the workings of the media.

Jardenberg would go further. He would have us stop calling ourselves ombudsmen and look upon ourselves as nurturers of an online community, a proposal that had some of the members muttering in their beards … but the times they are a changin’.

The ombudsman is someone who seeks mutually satisfactory solutions for all parties to a disagreement; he is an agent of conciliation, not litigation

The annual conference of the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO), which groups about 100 people who perform the job in news organizations around the world, ended yesterday in Stockholm.

The Swedish capital is the location most appropriate for this meeting because it was in this nation that the word was born and the position was created in 1713, as Par-Arne Jigenius, ombudsman at the Swedish daily “Dagens Nyheter,” explained.

Charles XII was the king of Sweden, one of the biggest powers of the era, with a territory that included present-day Latvia, Finland, Estonia, part of Germany’s Baltic coast and part of Russia. He became famous for the wars he waged against Denmark and Russia, initially successful but ended with a reversal so costly to his country that it never returned to the geopolitical importance it had in that era.

When he was exiled in Turkey, influenced by similar experiences he observed there, Charles XII created the Office of Supreme Ombudsman. The word comes from Swedish umbuds man, which means representative.

From the start, despite the authoritativeness of the title, the ombudsman had only the authority to receive complaints from the public, investigate them and send them to the government departments with the authority to resolve each topic.

Charles XII was a great warrior. But when he decided to establish the ombudsman he was thinking like a politician about how to reconcile in a peaceful way conflicts of interest between citizens of the state.

With the passage of years, the position inspired similar attempts in governments, companies and finally, starting in 1967 (in the “Courier-Journal” and “The Louisville Times” in Louisville, Kentucky), in newspapers and afterward in other news organizations.

The ombudsman is someone who seeks mutually satisfactory solutions for parties in disagreement. He is an agent of conciliation, not litigation; he promotes harmony, not dissent. The model is that of a diplomat, not soldier.

Sometimes, in societies that find themselves in great ideological agitation, some could idealize the ombudsman as someone in charge of attacking and punishing, even if only for public humiliation of someone considered an enemy.

That is not what he should do. That was not the reason that the institution was conceived, not in the sphere of the state nor the sphere of the media.

The exchange of ideas in Stockholm among professionals from countries as diverse as Brazil, Turkey, the United States, Colombia, United Kingdom, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, South Africa, Switzerland, Australia and Sweden shows that despite the cultural, economic, political and social differences, the media ombudsman’s mission is clear.

It has basically three dimensions, all of them fundamental. One is to mediate eventual misunderstandings between consumers and producers of information. The second, stimulate technical improvement of news organizations in which they work. The third, help expand public consciousness about the role of news media in society and refine the relationship between them.

In another happy coincidence at the 2008 ONO meeting, the presidency of the organization is occupied by a journalist from Kentucky, the southern U.S. state where the first press ombudsman worked.

She is Pam Platt of the “Courier-Journal.” In a good-humored speech to open the conference, she compared what ombudsmen do with her recent adventure paddling a kayak alone in Florida in a river full of alligators. To come out well in both situations, she recommends two priorities: never stop rowing and know the road well. Wise counsel.

Donations to parties

In my opinion and that of 14 readers who complained about the topic to the ombudsman, the story that Folha published on Monday about donations to political parties was mistaken.

It showed, in an accusatory tone, that the big companies which made donations to the governing Workers Party (PT) in 2007 provided services to the federal government in the second term of President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva worth a multiple 54 times larger than their donations.

The donations were legal and are public. By questioning them, the newspaper could give the impression of not approving of this type of operation foreseen in legislation. It most certainly would not prefer that it be done with slush funds in a clandestine way.

It is natural for big companies that they come to receive large contracts from the federal government. If the tenders won through competitive bidding don’t show any irregularities, there is nothing to get excited about.

In every country in which donations to political parties are allowed by law, it is common for big companies to make associations as a way to achieve power. In Brazil, that is no exception.

It turns out that in a separate and smaller story, which was not mentioned on the front page, the newspaper reported that at least some of the same companies also donated to the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and provided services to the state governments in So Paulo and Minas Gerais.

The strangest thing is that those who are willing to look through the accounts discover that the relationship between the donor and recipient in the case of the PSDB is much greater than in the case of the PT. But the attention on the front page as well as inside the newspaper focused on donations to the PT.

To read

“Ombudsman – Pascal’s Clock,” by Caio Tlio Costa (So Paulo: Generation Publishers, 2006) –tells about the experiences of the first ombudsman at Folha (starting at 29.25 reals, or about US $18.25)

To see

“Queen Christina,” by Robert Mamoulian, with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert (1933) –film about Sweden two generations before the creation of the post of ombudsman shows the importance of diplomacy in the resolution of conflicts (available on DVD in the Greta Garbo collection, Volume 1, which also includes the films “Mata Hari” and “Grand Hotel,” starting at 69.90 reals)

Topics most commented during the week

1. Campaign donations

2. Isabella story

3. Sports coverage

What the newspaper did right

Internet

Book by Mark Bauerlein about the Internet deserves the attention it got in the arts and entertainment section on Wednesday and will generate controversy

Ruanda

Story on Sunday helps to keep alive the memory of one of the biggest genocides in contemporary history

And where it was wrong

Alstom

The case that involves Petrobras appears in the newspaper, but topics involving the So Paulo state government stay out

Base School

Newspaper fails to report the guilty verdict against the Folha Group by the So Paulo Court of Justice, still subject to appeal in a higher court.

–Translation by John Wright

Friday, May 30, 2008

Day 2 of the annual ONO conference in Stockholm began with a bang, and three speakers who talked about how today’s challenges in the news business (on all platforms) will shape and transform the ways newsrooms and ombuds operate tomorrow.

We will continue to post their full remarks, or links to Web sites that give you more information about them, as the day progresses. For now, a recap:

– Jane Singer, University of Central Lancashire/University of Iowa, spoke of “Norms and the Network: Journalism Ethics in a Shared Media Space.”

Main points included how immediacy, interactivity and interconnections are bringing about ethical adaptations to this cyber universe of shared space and shared control, in which journalists and newspeople are not gate-keepers but are “sense-makers” and collaborators in this raucous information-news environment.

Singer also raised questions about how the concept of objectivity is getting another look in this new universe in which no story is finite or final, and no story is an island. The ‘net also is bringing about “the collapse of distance” between news provider and news consumer (indeed, how even those terms are getting a workover) because “isolation has no value” in the Internet.

She brought up other issues that we ombuds (and everyone else in the news business) deals with, especially user-generated comment and concerns (“all rights and no responsibilities” for users) about credibility and civility issues involved in that.

Bottom line: The radically evolving media landscape provides fertile ground for ombudsmen when it comes to transparency, discourse, ethics and relationships with users.

Please check back later to see her full comments.

– Joakim Jardenberg, one of the owners of the Swedish media entrepreneur group called Mindpark, works with news organizations, including newspapers, to make the transition to other platforms. One of his precepts: “Content isn’t king, conversation is … and content is just the stuff we talk about … and we cannot and should not stop the conversation.”

Ombuds were created when there was more distance between reader/viewer and newspeople, and someone was needed to put his-her ear to the ground and convey the conversation, he said. Now that that distance has collapsed, and that all of us live among “the crowd,” ombuds need to re-think how they do their work. “We don’t own the story or the crowd,” he said.

Jardenberg told the ombuds that “credibility without relevance means nothing” and that one of the things ombuds need to do is act as community managers, and to work as the “internal evangelist” to encourage news staff to join the conversations going on about their work.

Final thought: “We must move closer to the audience, or perish. Set sail, not anchor.”

Visit his Web site at http://mindpark.se. (You should be able to have the site, in Swedish, translated into English.)

– Ed Wasserman, Knight Professor in Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., spoke about ethics and the news business and new threats to journalism retaining its”soul” as the business morphs along with technology and audience.

He touched on five main areas: “verticality” and how technology drives segmentation of news material and advertising, and what that might mean to the greater missions of journalism; internet advertising and the implications on user privacy and surveillance, and potential conflicts of interest; convergence, and its potential to encourage trivialization of news; the search for new revenues to replace advertising, and how the search for deep pockets and the backing of individuals or groups and foundations with strings attached could comprise journalism; and how the use of producers of content who are not full-time journalists also pose conflicts and issues — and how all those factors could erode the trust that is most important to the relationship we as newspeople have with our readers, viewers, audience or “crowd.”

Please return later for Wasserman’s full remarks.

Gotta run … another session is starting.

Pam Platt, representing The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., USA, and president of ONO

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Hello from Stockholm, where it doesn’t get dark until midnight and the sun’s up by 4 a.m. and ombudsmen never sleep.

Well, almost never.

This blog comes at the end of a good, full and long day (I’m writing this after midnight, Sweden time) of great information from academics and professionals, of several productive sessions of shop talk, of a breathtaking cruise through the archipelago of islands that make up Stockholm.

Wifi problems kept me from filing this earlier, but with all the video from Sweden’s TV4 and the prepared remarks by speakers that we are posting on the site, you don’t need to hear much from me.

But I will say a couple of things:

The international nature of the Organization of News Ombudsmen is one of its greatest assets. It is inspiring to meet and talk with people from around the world who are committed to a free and fair press and who advocate for the reader, viewer, user or consumer. We come from different places but there are great common denominators to what we do, and what we encounter on the job.

On the site, you’ll find studies conducted by people from Australia, Denmark, Switzerland and The Netherlands. Tomorrow, you find even more posts by people from even more countries.

That diversity mirrors that of our delegates. Elsewhere on the site, you can take a look at who our members are, where they are from and which media outlets they represent.

To members who could not be here, we miss you – and we hope that the video and posted remarks give you a good and real sense of what is happening here.

To visitors who are not ONO members, welcome. We hope you enjoy what you see and what you read, and that you’ll come back to read more dispatches from our conference in Stockholm and – more importantly – the work from news ombudsmen throughout the world whose work we post every week on the ONO site.

Until tomorrow (or later today!) ……

Pam Platt, representing The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., USA, and president of ONO

The title of the 2008 conference of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen was The News Ombudsman Today and Tomorrow, so it seemed ironic to be told by Joakim Jardenberg, chief executive of Mindpark, a web development agency serving five media owners, that preparations for tomorrow should include ceasing to be ombudsmen and becoming “community managers” instead.

The setting of last week’s conference was Stockholm, a place so handsome that some of us are finding it hard to shake off city-envy. It was doubly ironic that we were being urged to drop the ombudsman tag by a Swede, because it’s a Swedish invention. The office of ombudsman was created by royal decree in 1713, when King Karl XII decided to appoint a representative to keep public officials and the judiciary in order.

Numbers at the conference were down this year, reflecting economic pressures on news organisations, particularly in the US. Of the 40 or so people who attended, only 23 of us were working ombudsmen. Delegates included Estonia’s first ombudsman and two new members from Brazil – one of them appointed by UOL, the biggest internet service provider in Latin America.

The combination of reduced numbers, uncertainty about the role in the digital age and the fact that mandates for ombudsmen differ from one news organisation to the next meant that existential concerns featured prominently in sessions and in the informal discussions over coffee and cinnamon buns.

Everyone agrees that visibility and independence are critical to the role, but some ombudsmen are more visible than others. Consuelo Cepeda Cediel, ombudsman for RCN in Colombia, and Janne Andersson, of TV4 in Sweden, have their own weekly TV shows. But the listeners and viewers editor at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Jacob Mollerup, and Julie Miville-Dechêne, the ombudsman for the television and radio broadcaster Société Radio-Canada, do not have access to the airwaves. They publish their reviews of complaints about television and radio on the web.

Speakers at the conference included academics and others interested in media self-regulation. The journalist Esben Orberg published a report earlier this year based on interviews with editors, academics and ombudsmen in the UK and Denmark. He told the conference about their perceptions of the upsides and disadvantages of having an ombudsman.

The advantages identified included improvements in editorial quality and increased trust in the way news is produced. Among the downsides were confusion about the organisation’s editorial line and concerns about loss of editorial control. Most editors believe there are already enough controls. Orberg told delegates that “the fact that there are less than 100 ombudsmen in the world suggests that it’s not necessarily an advantage to the media organisation” .

Damian Tambini, senior lecturer at the London School of Economics, told the conference that he has been looking at how ombudsmen “fit into a broader ecology of regulation and self-regulation”. Although traditionally ombudsmen have been seen as more friendly to free expression than state regulation, in some ways self-regulatory institutions might be seen as chilling speech, he said, especially when they are involved in the removal of content from websites.

News organisations that don’t want to open themselves up to scrutiny may find it convenient to focus on the downsides of having an ombudsman, but there are good reasons for considering this form of self-regulation in the digital age, according to the American academic Jane B Singer, who has been studying journalistic ethics on the web. “Demonstrable trustworthiness is crucial,” she told delegates. “Ombudsmen are the face of that.”

She and a colleague from the University of Central Lancashire have conducted a case study examining how Guardian journalists assess and incorporate user-generated content from an ethical perspective. “Journalistic ethics are not necessarily different in a network,” she said. “But more emphasis on openness and transparency is needed.”

Lilian Öhrström opens the conference
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Torbjörn von Krogh gives a history of Swedish press and broadcasting
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Video from 2008 ONO Conference
courtesy of TV4, Stockholm

ONO officers introduced on Swedish TV
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Reception at DN-huset
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Janne Andersson and Yavez Baydar
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Dinner cruise on the Stockhold archipeligo
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Panel discussion: Can listeners, viewers and Web users improve journalism?
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Erik Fichtelius — The prize of access
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]

Joakim Jardenberg — Content is not king; conversation is
[Click image to view video on TV4 site]