The British Organisation of Readers’ Editors (Bore) — just a suggested title — held its first meeting this week, in a restaurant in Covent Garden. A table for four was sufficient for the purpose. We decided that there should be one rule only — that we desist from correcting each other.
I was there, and so were David Seymour, the readers’ editor of the Mirror; Stephen Pritchard, the readers’ editor of the Observer; and the newest addition to the band, Simon O’Hagan, the readers’ editor of the Independent on Sunday.
I repeat the title readers’ editor with a little relish since it was (Mr Pooter will be my witness) my invention. It was made necessary by the appointment, just before I took up my job in 1997, of John Willis as the Guardian’s “ombudsman”, a title favoured by most of those doing similar jobs to mine on other newspapers, particularly in the US. I tried to devise something that expressed the middle ground between readers and journalists rather than total allegiance to one or the other. That was the idea, anyway.
So the Guardian has two ombudsmen, one called the readers’ editor and the other called simply the ombudsman. We both have our independence guaranteed by the editor of the Guardian, the fount of the movement in its emerging form, and by the paper’s owner, the Scott Trust.
One of John Willis’s duties is to act as a kind of appeal court, considering serious complaints from people unable to accept my conclusions. I try to resolve things by agreement of the parties but it is not always possible and a small number go on to the external ombudsman, to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) or to the lawyers.
All the other readers’ editors at present have additional duties on their newspapers, and we all go about the job in different ways. The uniting principle is that our papers have decided to demonstrate what they agreed to do when they signed up to the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct — that is, to correct significant mistakes.
Readers of the Guardian’s corrections know that we correct a lot of not-very-significant mistakes too. The serious corrections, without the intervention of the law or the PCC (which was being criticised in the Guardian this week for being too weak) often exceed the rigour required by code or law. The PCC is often criticised, but serious self-regulation is not always what those criticising it really want.
The lunch this week did not include John Willis (with whom I have had no social contact), nor the only two newspaper ombudsmen who, until I joined recently, represented British newspapers on the Organisation of News Ombudsmen (Ono), about which I wrote in an earlier column (Ono? Oh, yes: April 28). They are William Newman, the ombudsman of the Sun (one of the longest-serving members of Ono), and Robert Warren, the ombudsman of the News of the World. I hope we shall all meet for mutual encouragement and the pooling of experience before long.
The difference between them and us, the readers’ editors, is that we have a visible presence in our various organs. We all write corrections and three of us write regular columns: apart from mine there is one every week in the Independent on Sunday by Simon O’Hagan, and one every four weeks in the Observer by Stephen Pritchard. I regard the weekly column as an essential way of discussing matters raised by readers which cannot be dealt with in the daily Corrections and Clarifications.
One thing we have discovered by meeting in this way is the existence of the serial complainant — the person who says, “I hope you will correct this. I tried to get the same mistake put right in the Guardian but the chap there is useless.”
It would be eccentric to buy a newspaper simply for the corrections. However, anyone looking at the corrections in the Guardian, the Observer or the Mirror (it is too soon to say much about errors in the Independent on Sunday) would notice a certain common ground. We all stand in a litter of error, but some of us are looking at the stars.
In his introduction to the Guardian book of Corrections (see below), the editor of the paper, writing in the late summer of last year, said, “The tide is inexorable. Within five years every broad-sheet national paper will, I predict, have some sort of regular corrections column if they wish to retain the trust of their readers. Within 10 years it will be commonplace on tabloids.”
We shall be dedicated to spelling correctly the name of Lucian Freud — and to other things as well, of course.
