Last year around this time, I reported on the Organization of News Ombudsmen’s annual meeting in Williamsburg, Va. I’ve just returned from this year’s ONO (how’s that for an acronym?) conference at Ponte Vedra Beach near Jacksonville, where my counterparts and I met to compare notes on ways to do a better job of helping make our newspapers more accurate, more accessible, more accountable and thus more credible to our readers.
A bit of background. Ombudsman, for those who aren’t familiar, is a gender-neutral term of Scandinavian origin meaning intermediary. News ombudsmen address readers’ concerns about issues of accuracy and fairness in newspaper articles. We obtain explanations from our newspaper’s staff and respond to readers, generally in columns like this one, in 71 (at last count) newspapers in the United States and around the world. The columns may criticize or explain depending on the case at hand, but news ombudsmen function in an advisory, not a disciplinary or policy-setting capacity. Each newspaper that has one defines the ombudsman job differently, and our titles also vary: We’re also known as readers’ representative, readers’ advocate, public editor, public contact editor or, in my case, Listening Post editor.
By whatever name, however, the objective remains the same: to better meet the needs of readers. In welcoming ONO to Jacksonville, Carl N. Cannon, publisher at this year’s host newspaper, The Florida Times-Union, said, “I don’t think you can really serve your readers unless you have an ombudsman.” And he referred to Times-Union Reader Advocate Mike Clark in terms that should apply to all of us who serve in this role: “He represents the readers, takes us to task when we need to be taken to task, and defends us when we ought to be defended.”
Obviously, news ombudsmen are as sensitized as anyone else to readers’ concerns, since we constantly field readers’ complaints. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two. This year, ombudsmen heard some practical ideas about ethics from Roy Peter Clark, dean of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg. A panel discussion on “War and the Media” included the U.S. Navy’s former deputy director of operations at the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. There also was a report via cross-Atlantic telephone on freedom of the press in Great Britain, from Kenneth Morgan, director of the British Press Complaints Commission. A panel on “Conflicts Between Humor and Sensitivity” continued the Florida flavor of our meeting and included Post editorial cartoonist Don Wright. More on some of these issues in upcoming columns.
I most appreciated the session on “Those Controversial Photos” conducted by Henry McNulty, ONO president and reader’s representative at The Hartford (Conn.) Courant. Mr. McNulty presented slides of news photographs that had produced strong reader complaints. Our discussion of the pictures underscored the unlikelihood of finding two readers who always agree — or even two ombudsmen. For instance, one photo from a gay rights protest, showing two men kissing, ran across two columns below the fold on the front of the Montreal Gazette. Bob Walker, the Gazette’s ombudsman, said the paper was “inundated” with negative reader reaction, some clearly from gay-bashers, but much of it raising the question of good taste. Yet Dave Bishop, ombudsman at The Ann Arbor News, said, “We ran a similar photograph in our paper and got absolutely no complaints.”
Of course, I learned a long time ago that no two readers think the same.
