From the recent Philadelphia meeting of the world’s news ombudsmen, I can report that our numbers have remained flat in recent years. My colleagues in the Organization of News Ombudsmen found good and bad news in that statistic for newspapers and the readers who rely on them.
Each ONO member is designated by his or her newspaper’s management to help improve the paper’s accuracy and – a much more challenging concept – fairness, by airing readers’ concerns in columns such as Listening Post.
“You’re really there to talk to the readers,” said Larry Nighswander, director of Ohio University’s School of Visual Communications, during a session on photographs. “The ombudsman is one of those rare individuals who can ride both sides of the fence,” he said. “The role of the ombudsman is to help both sides better understand what is right for your particular publication.”
“What you represent, which is the capacity to listen outside the newsroom, and to critique, is a very important one for our profession,” said host editor Maxwell King of the Philadelphia Inquirer. That’s key, he said, “for a profession that is not particularly good at introspection and self-criticism. Most newsrooms I’ve been familiar with over my 32 years in the newspaper business are better at self-righteousness than they are at self-criticism.”
But the prerequisite of an accountability-conscientious newspaper management may help explain why the news ombudsmen movement tends to gain one here, lose one there. Former Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee’s explanation: Editors “are scared of it because they’re scared of being publicly criticized.”
The loss of several Canadian ombudsmen in recent years has been balanced by the addition of others elsewhere abroad. Currently, ONO has 49 regular members. Thirty-one are in the United States, five in Canada. Brazil has four, Spain three. There is one each in Japan, Israel, Great Britain, Colombia, Paraguay and Ecuador.
In addition, there are 34 associate or honorary members, most former ombudsmen, others affiliated with such organizations as the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg or the press councils of Ontario and Quebec.
In Philly, incidentally, I noted seven women who weren’t around when I began in 1987. That includes the second African-American woman to serve, Shinika Sykes of the Salt Lake City Tribune. (Ombudsman, by the way, is a gender-neutral, Swedish term meaning “intermediary,” according to ex-ombudsman Bengt Erland-sson, a foreign news editor in Stockholm.)
Ombudsmen help explain how their newspapers work and provide a forum when readers have no other recourse for concerns. While we can give those readers a public hearing, we can’t give orders – we’re not a part of management. Just as we can criticize, we can defend the paper’s coverage because it’s fair.
Our recommendations may be ignored or accepted. An example of the latter was when Editor Edward Sears instructed Post editors to adhere to the suggestion, made in this space as a result of a complaint, not to refer to two Riviera Beach politicians as “the fat boys” unless in a quote (though they were commonly known in the community as such).
While there aren’t fewer, it’s a shame that there aren’t more than 50 news ombudsmen in the entire world. Losing theirs “has never come up in all the downsizing talk that’s going on” at The Washington Post, Mr. Bradlee told the group. “The ombudsman goes on, that’s a part of the fabric of the newspaper.”
It isn’t that Washington’s nor Palm Beach County’s Post never makes a mistake. All newspapers do. Too few, however, openly tell their readers about it.
C.B. Hanif is an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. Items for Listening Post may be sent to lp@pbpost.com
