Forty-four news ombudsmen and reader advocates from 15 countries met last month in Paris, France, bound by a common passion:
You.
Listening to people who read, view or hear news reports, is Job One for members of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. So when we meet for our annual convention, you are what we talk about most. The way Courier-Journal readers react to their newspaper is remarkably similar to people who read newspapers in Turkey, Cameroon, Brazil, Ireland, Kansas City or Japan.
If you doubt it, consider the results of a pre-convention poll on the concerns ombudsmen hear most often from readers, viewers and listeners. As Miriam Pepper, readers’ representative of the Kansas City Star, tallied the survey, the top five complaints are that newspapers and newscasts:
Shortchange our readers on accuracy by getting facts wrong, misspelling words, botching grammar and omitting needed context. “Too much appears wrong,” Pepper’s summary said. “Wrong historical dates, poor math, missing type, wrong continuation lines, poor spelling, grammar, word choices and missing context for deeper understanding of subject covered.”
Don’t separate facts and opinions. We slant stories, and either ignore or cover poorly some sections of our local communities. Pepper said the issues include “political coverage, perceptions the paper favors a political position, controversial columnists (call it columnist rage), opinion and fact presented as news.”
Make poor Page One choices, too often choosing stories that are sensational and giving the stories headlines that don’t fit their content.
Provide too little good news and local news.
Do things that prompt concerns about privacy and ethics issues. That sounds a lot like the issues Courier-Journal readers raise when they call or write me. And, some additions from the “runners up” list fit what I hear readers complain about, too: newspaper delivery problems, production flaws, TV section failings and too many ads.
Something else links ombudsmen from news organizations on five continents: None of us works in a newsroom where people like to be told that they’ve done something wrong.
That’s why the ombudsman’s job is known as “the loneliest job in the newsroom.” We ombudsmen spend our days listening to readers complain, often bitterly, about our news organizations. Then we take the complaints to newsmen and women who don’t want to hear that they’ve done something wrong. No one is ever glad to see us.
“Journalists are defensive,” said Didier Epelbaum of France Television.
No ombudsman disagreed.
Ombudsmen see their jobs as bridging that gap between the people who produce news reports and those who receive them. That’s a particularly challenging and, perhaps, important role at this time when big media companies around the world merge and the various technologies of broadcast, print and Internet journalism converge.
Ombudsmen stand in that roiling mix as independent voices, arbiters and advocates for ethical decision making and high journalistic standards, teachers and defenders of the language.
Again, the common concerns cross borders and cultures.
In many countries, readers expect newspapers to set a standard for correct language use, a duty with which newspapers are struggling.
Europeans complained about American English “increasingly battering on our doors” and of technological terms invading like worms to impoverish the language.
The battle against split infinitives is lost, said Ian Mayes of The Guardian in London, England, but the struggle remains to use words correctly.
“When do you give in?” he asked rhetorically. “You give in when you’re an isolated person shouting to a deaf crowd.”
Appropriate usage also remains an issue. Like editors elsewhere, Courier-Journal editors have tussled over when to call people “elderly.” We have not, thank heaven, followed the example of one English newspaper by referring to the senior set as “wrinklies.”
The struggle continues on many levels and is not easily won. Each issue of the French newspaper, Le Monde, is proof-read five times, and yet Robert Sole, its ombudsman, said one reader tallied 40 typographical errors in one day.
That leaves lots of work for the ombudsmen, who are back at work now, taking abuse from readers and facing resistance from newsroom colleagues.
It’s telling that many of those lonely reader advocates paid their own way to the convention.
At the end of an inconclusive session on how beleaguered ombudsmen can maintain their own mental health in the newsroom tussle, someone asked how many of the ombudsmen like their jobs.
Everyone in the room raised a hand.
