I returned a few days ago from Salt Lake City where the annual conference of Ono, the Organisation of News Ombudsmen, was held. I was elected to the board and charged with the missionary task of spreading the word. I do not find this difficult to do.
The idea that newspapers should be more responsive to readers and more accountable for their actions seems to me to be a rather belated revelation. And the fact that the relatively few of us who deal directly with readers in this way should find some benefit in putting our heads together occasionally is not surprising.
These annual huddles serve more than a therapeutic purpose and give us a chance to compare notes on a wide range of ethical and practical issues – on this occasion the coverage of suicide, our use of pictures, the way we cover and deal with complaints about the conflict in the Middle East, the huge growth in readership through websites and so on.
Although Ono was founded in the US, and still has a majority of US members, it is becoming increasingly international and the intention is to encourage its development in that direction. About half the 30 delegates in Salt Lake City were from the US and the other half from all over the world: Turkey, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Mexico, Brazil. There is interest in the idea from many other areas. I am involved in a project to discover whether an ombudsman might serve some useful purpose in the Russian press; journalists in Germany and a newspaper in South Africa are among those currently inquiring about the Guardian’s experience.
This week I tried my recruiting skills on Soren Nielsen, the ombudsman on Politiken in Copenhagen (I think I may have persuaded him to join). He is the first, and still the only, newspaper ombudsman in Denmark. He started in January last year, doing there what I do here – running daily corrections and writing a weekly column. In fact, Politiken’s operation is based directly on the Guardian model, including Soren’s terms of reference and guarantee of independence.
They have done something that we have not yet done, however, and that is to poll readers (twice) to ask what they think of the service. In the first poll, three months after Soren started, 710f Politiken readers thought the systematic publication of corrections increased their trust in the paper; 2% thought the corrections undermined it. In the second poll, at the end of a year – the number of readers who felt the trustworthiness of the paper had been enhanced rose to 74.6%, while those who felt it had been undermined was 2.1%.
Politiken’s readers are as keen, or keener, to comment or argue, as the Guardian’s. In his first year Soren had 4,200 calls, compared with the Guardian’s (in the year to last November) 6,700. Politiken’s circulation is 150,000 daily, compared with the Guardian’s 400,000 – please, do not take it as a challenge.
In the US, readers may be referred to, accurately and without embarrassment, as citizens – a term that in this context reminds us more strongly of the core responsibility of the news media, to feed public opinion with reliable information for the proper exercise of democracy. This is what one of the speakers at the Ono conference, Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists (and former Washington bureau chief for the New York Times), reminded us about.
It was stirring stuff. “A world in which the well of accurate, reliable information is not constantly replenished is one which becomes more polluted with gossip, rumour, speculation and propaganda. This is a mixture that is toxic to civic health. This is a mixture that will produce a public less and less able to participate in civic life. This is a mixture that makes it more and more likely that a self-appointed elite will be free to exercise its will on society… Journalists must create a new relationship with the public, bringing them into the process of newsgathering.”
The ombudsman, Mr Kovach declared, is in a crucial position to create a demand for quality journalism based, as he puts it, on “citizen first”.
“As ombudsman you can be the pathfinder in creating a demand for quality because you help the public to see how the sausage is made – to see how journalists work; what informs their decisions; why it is important to the public that journalism works as it does.”
You must read his book (details below). The philosophy might be summed up like this: If you ask a journalist, “Who do you work for?” the answer should be: “You.”
