Lou Gelfand, ombudsman for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and I were catching up by telephone last Tuesday. “What are you going to write about this week?” Lou asked me.
“I think I’ll write about what it means to be an ombudsman,” I replied. “I need to remind myself every once in a while what this job is about.”
In fact, I have been the ombudsman, or readers representative, for The San Diego Union-Tribune since Feb. 2, 1992, a date I never have to look up. That’s when the morning San Diego Union, my old newspaper, and the Tribune, its afternoon competitor and sister newspaper, merged into The San Diego Union-Tribune. That’s also the year that the Los Angeles Times ceased publishing its San Diego edition, and newspapering in San Diego changed forever.
Some will say the Union-Tribune is a better newspaper than either of its predecessors; some will say the newspaper suffers from lack of competition. To me, the Union-Tribune is a more interesting newspaper in many ways, but when the competition left San Diego, I fear some of the fighting spirit went with it.
On some days, when I see the paper reporting for the first time incidents that are already days old, I wish for some of that not-long-ago urgency, that excitement that pushed reporters, no matter how pressured for time, to get stories into the newspaper before the competition beat them to it.
Reporters for each of the competing newspapers took pride in being the first to tell their readers what was happening in the region. Union-Tribune journalists still do, but sometimes, I fear, some staffers appear (and this is term that should be an anathema to a newsroom) laid-back.
Print journalists who discount television as competition are making a mistake. Although television reports don’t usually have the depth and context that newspaper articles do, they tell their viewers what has happened. Readers who hear about breaking news from television or radio expect to read the details the next day in the newspaper.
A recent incident that the Union-Tribune was late in reporting was the accident in Mexico involving Donald Kraft, who died last week. The accident happened on a Tuesday. The first report in the Union-Tribune appeared on a Saturday. That was after other media had the story and after some of you had called, asking when the newspaper was going to report the incident. Why the delay?
“When we became aware of the Kraft story, we set out to get the most complete account possible,” said Lorie Hearn, one of the Union-Tribune’s two metro editors. “This was a highly charged controversy on both sides of the border. We didn’t feel we had all the information to be fair to all involved until Saturday. In hindsight, I wish we would have been more aggressive.” she said.
It’s true reporters have a fondness for investigative reporting, for serial narratives that give them an opportunity to stretch their writing skills, for stories they know other journalists will admire. That’s fine, as long as they do not forget their duty to readers, which is to bring them the news in a timely manner and do it better than anyone else. That’s what Hearn means by aggressiveness.
As ombudsman for the Union-Tribune, I am free to make these observations, to criticize, to acknowledge in print to you, the reader, when the newspaper fails to do its job.
In fact, that’s what the newspaper pays me to do. No one, not even Publisher Helen Copley or Editor Karin Winner, has ever told me what to write in my column. They support the independence of the ombudsman, and for that I am grateful.
The first U.S. ombudsman was appointed 32 years ago in Louisville, Ky., to represent readers of The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times. The San Diego Union appointed its first ombudsman 24 years ago and had one at the time of the merger when I took over for the combined newspaper.
Even after so many years, I sometimes find myself explaining what an ombudsman is. The word is pronounced “om-BUDZ-man” and is gender neutral; you can call a woman an ombudsman. The word means go-between. The dictionary says an ombudsman is “a person employed by an institution to investigate complaints against it.”
That’s what I do. The independence that comes with the job makes it possible for me to give my opinion based on three decades in journalism. Sometimes I agree with the readers; sometimes I take the newspaper’s side; sometimes I agree with neither.
The Union-Tribune is among 36 out of nearly 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States that have a publisher and an editor who care what readers say and will pay someone to listen to them. Granted, the number of ombudsmen is not impressive. However, newspapers in the United States that have ombudsmen have the potential for reaching more than 13 million subscribers and, some say, at least three times that many readers.
Of the top 100 newspapers in the United States in terms of circulation, 27 have ombudsmen. However, out of the largest 25 newspapers (the Union-Tribune among them), about 44 percent have ombudsmen. This year, the Los Angeles Times, the third-largest newspaper in the country, became the largest newspaper to have an ombudsman.
Like most ombudsmen, I focus on readers and news coverage. And like most of my colleagues at other newspapers, I consider it inappropriate to comment on editorials, which reflect the opinion of the publisher. However, as ombudsman, I want readers to know they will be heard. When it comes to news content, I will be your messenger to the staff.
