Eleven years ago, after working only a few months as the Boston Globe ombudsman, I attended my First news ombudsmen convention in Fort Worth, Texas. While I was still relatively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I did notice that several of my colleagues who had spent years in ombudsmanship had something of a worn, world-weary look about them.
One of them pulled me aside, and, noticing my rookie enthusiasm for the job, asked if I thought that the Globe readers who were contacting my office to comment/complain about the paper generally seemed to be full of good-old grassroots wisdom and common sense. When I answered in the affirmative, he shook his head sadly and warned me that in a year, I’d be slamming the phone down and cursing said callers.
There was a certainty in his voice.
Part internal-affairs cop, part complaint department, American news ombudsmen are truly a unique breed. They work in what has often been considered one of journalism’s most thankless jobs: getting an earful from angry (and sometimes crazed) readers and getting the cold shoulder from angry (and sometimes crazed) colleagues whom they dared to criticize, usually gently, in their columns. In addition, ombudsmen frequently toil in the shadow of public suspicion since they are paid by the same news outlets they are charged with independently evaluating.
For the record, I was the Globe ombudsman for a little more than two years, from 1995 to 1997. It’s fair to say that being an ombudsman or public editor or readers’ representative is not for everyone.
In his new book, Public Editor #1, Dan Okrent recounts his career as the first ombudsman (or, as they call it, “public editor”) at the New York Times. His introductory chapter is titled “Notes On An Unendearing Profession” in which he recounts a telling anecdote about his introductory meeting with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
What was the first question Sulzberger asked of the first person to be paid solely to publicly evaluate the paper’s performance?
“Why on earth would you want to do this?”
Last month, after a little less than a year on the job, Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón — a good guy who saw the job as a chance to create better dialogue between the paper’s journalists and its readers — abruptly left the post to become communications director for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick, a gig that might not last past primary day. Although he didn’t say so, it’s fair to assume that Chacón was less than enthralled by some of the less pleasant chores of the ombudsman’s office.
Even the acronym for the umbrella group — the Organization of News Ombudsmen — is the rather lamentable “ONO,” which, let’s face it, is an exclamation usually uttered when someone acknowledges a terrible mistake (or a noun referring to the destructive force behind the break-up of the world’s greatest band).
But despite all that, we’re beginning to see — if not quite a golden age — at least a flowering of the ombudsmanship movement. In this post–Jayson Blair era, when news outlets are recognizing the greater need for transparency, the ranks of ombudsmen are expanding both nationally and globally. The big psychological breakthrough came when the Times, which had fiercely resisted the concept for years, finally agreed to hire Okrent for the job, in the wake of the Blair fiasco in 2003. Recently, such television outlets as CBS and PBS have either hired ombudsmen or begun employing more ombudsman-ly practices.
Equally important, ombudsmen are generating more attention within their own industry. Recently, the new Times public editor Byron Calame and the Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell have been the focal point of significant controversies or criticism — a phenomenon that is actually a healthy sign in a business that thrives on feuds and furor.
And in one more positive development, Jim Romenesko — proprietor of the most obsessively read Web site in the media universe — began posting Monday roundups of ombudsmen columns a few years ago, giving them considerably greater visibility.
In an e-mail to the Phoenix, Romenesko acknowledged that “I’m interested in what readers are complaining about (or praising), and the various ethical issues addressed by ombuds.”
But he added: “After years of reading these columns, I say to myself: ‘Thank God I don’t have that job! Hundreds of people calling to gripe about Mark Trail being cancelled? I couldn’t deal with it!’”
Slowly swelling ranks
According to material posted on the ONO Web site courtesy of former ombudsman Arthur Nauman, the US ombudsman movement really gathered steam with the growth of the “anti-press mood” in the 1960s. Noted journalist Ben Bagdikian wrote a 1967 piece in Esquire suggesting that ombudsmen might help papers better communicate with their readers, and Times staffer A.H. Raskin authored a piece in his paper calling for a “Department of Internal Criticism.”
That same year, the Louisville Courier-Journal became the first paper in the country to have an ombudsman, and shortly thereafter the Washington Post employed the first ombudsman empowered to comment on how the publication was doing. In 1981, the Post’s Bill Green penned the most-famous ombudsman column in history with his 14,000 word postmortem on the notorious Janet Cooke Pulitzer Prize–winning story about an (invented) eight-year-old heroin addict. The Boston Globe’s Tom Winship was also one of the early editors to name an ombudsman, former editorial-page editor Charlie Whipple, who was selected for the job in the ’70s.
In a nearly decade-old ONO survey, most of the ombudsmen who responded said they write columns evaluating their paper’s performance, and a large majority also said they spoke to community groups. A much smaller number, about 25 percent, said they had actually hosted reader forums or sat in on the daily news meetings at their publications. (Gina Lubrano, who has spent 14 years doing the job at the San Diego Union-Tribune, estimates that in that period of time, the ranks of US ombudsmen in ONO have increased from about 33 to about 40, and the number of foreign ombudsmen has grown to about 23. But she doesn’t see a windfall. “There’s a lot of turmoil going on,” says Lubrano. “Like everything else, it’s a matter of money.”)
The ombudsman column is clearly the most visible aspect of the job — and the subject matter can vary from the inflammatory to the mundane. In a memorable 2004 column, Okrent touched the third rail of his paper’s image by writing a column headlined “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?”
His opening paragraph consisted of four words. “Of course it is.” (In his book, Okrent acknowledged that many of his colleagues found that sentence “too inflammatory.”)
Other recent ombudsman columns have touched on topics ranging from reader anger over a front-page photograph of a fatally injured racehorse to a discussion of the differences between reporting “homicides” and reporting “murders.” Sometimes the subject matter is a hot news story, such as the Raleigh News & Observer public editor Ted Vaden’s examination of the paper’s coverage of the Duke-lacrosse-team rape case. And sometimes the topic is a hot button, such as when NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin addressed complaints that NPR staffers should not be appearing on, and lending credibility to, the conservative-tilting Fox News Channel.
One of the more interesting ombudsman-style experiments is CBS News’s “Public Eye” online feature, which began last September with a goal of “making the operations and deliberations of CBS News more visible and transparent to our readers and viewers.”
One example of how well it’s worked occurred last October, when an e-mailer asked whether Mike Wallace’s appearance at an anti-gun-violence event and his use of an unflattering clip of a 60 Minutes interview with former NRA president Charlton Heston represented a conflict of interest or violation of CBS policy. After discussing the issue with the network’s senior vice-president for standards and special projects, the “Public Eye” concluded that “we won’t be seeing Mr. Wallace doing any more stories involving Second Amendment issues.”
Public Eye editor Vaughn Ververs believes that the mere fact the network is responsive to public concerns serves a real purpose.
“My sense is so far ... that people are willing to at least give you a lot of credit and are very happy to have their complaint addressed,” he says. “The level of vitriol and the anger goes way down just by engaging in the conversation.”
A few big dust-ups
This past January, Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote a column on Jack Abramoff stating that the scandal-ridden lobbyist “had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties.” Her admitted error — in not indicating that Abramoff had directed his Indian clients to give money to both parties, but donated personally only to the GOP — touched off what she called a huge political “firestorm” in which she was largely blamed for toeing the Republican line on Abramoff.
“Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column, e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of the Post’s Web site was shut down,” she wrote. (Among the printable epithets, she was called a “right-wing whore.”)
In explaining his decision to turn off online reader comments, washingtonpost.com executive editor Jim Brady bemoaned the inability to “maintain a civil conversation” in the wake of Howell’s column.
While Howell was the victim of a nasty online mugging, the Times’s Calame, — who is not as gifted a writer or as sweeping a thinker as Okrent — has antagonized some of the media punditariat with his style and subject matter.
Early this year, Sydney Schanberg, then the media writer at the Village Voice, accused Calame of nitpicking in a column critical of the paper’s top executives for not being more forthcoming about the process of producing the Pulitzer-winning story on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps. Slate media critic Jack Shafer offered similar criticism about Calame’s handling of the issue in a distinctly unflattering column in which he assailed the public editor for a “bloodless performance” and compared him to the “assistant principal in charge of detention hall.”
The truth is that ombudsmen tend to leave everyone unsatisfied. Colleagues and bosses are often taken aback by any level of criticism, and the public is usually deprived of the full-throated assault it wants.
Still, the Howell and Calame cases were good omens for ombudsmanship because of the level of attention they generated. More people — both inside and outside the profession — seem to be paying more attention to ombudsmen these days. And for a group of journalists accustomed to working at a thankless task in relative obscurity, it’s a definite step up to work at a thankless task that is registering on the media Richter scale.
