Boston Phoenix media columnist (and former Boston Globe ombudsman) Mark Jurkowitz wrote his latest column about ombudsman. Some excerpts from his interesting column:
...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.
...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.
...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.”)...
