Eric Deggans
Apr. 25, 2013
8:14 am
Ask if Robert Lipsyte is going to be particularly critical as ESPN’s new ombudsman, and he mentions a little piece he penned for Slate magazine back in June 2011. The piece dismantles the 763-page oral history of ESPN, “Those … Read more
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Craig Silverman
Apr. 23, 2013
6:50 am
Doug Feaver has no illusions about his new job.
“My primary mission is to respond to readers,” says the Washington Post’s new reader representative.
In other words, he is not an ombudsman.
“This is different — I’m not [charged with] … Read more
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Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 7, 2013
1:31 pm
Washington Post
Doug Feaver "will serve as an advocate for readers, responding to their questions and concerns," the Post
announced today.
- Doug Feaver
Feaver was a career Postie -- a reporter and editor
for 29 years on the Business, Metro and National desks. He then became executive editor of washingtonpost.com in 1998 and retired in 2005. He stayed involved for a few more years with a blog called dot.comments that responded to reader comments on the site.
The Post
just ended its ombudsman program, replacing it with this new reader representative. Unlike Patrick Pexton and other Post ombudsmen of the past, the reader rep is a Post employee (not an independent contractor) and will not have a regular weekly print column.
It seems the primary outlet of expression for Feaver and assistant reader representative Alison Coglianese will be a blog on washingtonpost.com. Feaver is on Twitter (
@feaverdb), but has barely used it since 2011.
Related: Washington City Paper writer
appoints himself as the Post's new ombudsman
Previously:
Pexton: Ombudsman can get answers from reporters who won’t answer readers
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 4, 2013
10:01 am
Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth
announced Friday that the newspaper would not appoint a new ombudsman, because "The world has changed, and we at The Post must change with it."
The paper will instead appoint a "reader representative" to answer communications from readers. "
We know that media writers inside and outside The Post will continue to hold us accountable for what we write, as will our readers, in letters to the editor and online comments on Post articles," Weymouth wrote.
How'd that go over?
The new job "
sounds like a customer relations person," NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos writes.
As often as not, I disagree with complaints. But by taking them seriously, even those made by advocates, I find that it disarms the critics, or at the very least wins their appreciation. Listeners, readers and viewers want above all to know that someone with independent power in the organization is actually listening to them and acting on their complaints.
One, moreover, would be foolish not to listen to an audience as smart as NPR's, and even extremist advocates can be right. Receiving a pro forma response to a complaint, or having your complaint read on air, is a far cry from having someone believable actually investigate your complaint and get to the truth. The online stories cited by Weymouth are at least a public response, which is good, but the stories sound as if they could be written by the public relations department. If they are that way, it is unlikely to win much credibility among readers.
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 27, 2013
3:26 pm
WAMU
During an
exit interview during his last week as The Washington Post's ombudsman, Patrick Pexton told "Kojo Nnamdi Show" guest host Paul Brown that one of the benefits of his job was that he could get answers from reporters who refused to respond to readers' emails. In so doing, he echoed a point he made in a column he wrote about leaving, in which he said the ombudsman is "
often the newsroom's backstop," for reporters who "have more demands on them than ever before to be faster, to write more, to tweet, blog, take photos, videos and all the rest."
Pexton said he thought the Post had a "slightly wrong emphasis" on digital operations, because print brought in more revenue. The care and feeding of those print readers, he said, was a big part of his day. Asked about future plans, Pexton said he would be interested in a "leadership position" at a news organization that believed journalism had a bright future.
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 18, 2013
11:01 am
The Washington Post |
Washingtonian |
The Wrap
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron
makes a good case against the newspaper hiring another ombudsman, Patrick Pexton reports. Pexton will end his two-year term at the end of February.
For one, he said, it is not as if The Post doesn’t come in for criticism, from all quarters, instantly, in this Internet age. ... Secondly, Baron said, there is intense “competition for resources.” ... He’s right again. It is likely that Baron will have to make further cuts in The Post’s newsroom. An ombudsman’s salary is like that of a senior editor’s. It’s a tempting target.
Baron was previously the editor of The Boston Globe, which doesn't have an ombudsman.
“
I’m not sure an ombudsman focused as heavily as they have been on a weekly column makes sense any longer,” Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt told Harry Jaffe earlier this month.
And indeed, former Postie Sharon Waxman writes in The Wrap, digital news sites like hers "
don’t have copy editors, much less ombudsmen. (Instead we have spell check!) In the age of declining budgets, an ombudsman may be a luxury, sad to say."
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Oct. 16, 2012
8:22 am
A little over a month into her job, Margaret Sullivan has been transforming the traditional role of The New York Times public editor — by blogging almost every weekday and using social media to add a mix of voices and … Read more
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Craig Silverman
Sep. 24, 2012
8:07 am
Arthur Brisbane’s New York Times email address has been shut off, and he sounds pretty happy about it.
“I’m trying to decompress,” he told me two days after his stint as the fourth public editor of The New York Times … Read more
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Mallary Jean Tenore
July 17, 2012
12:45 pm
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Bill Mitchell
July 16, 2012
5:21 pm
The new public editor of the New York Times pitched the paper on two main roles in her application for the job:
“smart aggregator” and “forum organizer.”
Margaret M. Sullivan, editor of the Buffalo News
since 1999, credits
“Blur,” the 2010 book by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, for highlighting those roles as essential to journalism in the digital era.
“The criticism and commentary is already going on,” Sullivan said in a telephone interview Monday afternoon. “I want to centralize it in the [public editor’s] blog.” She said she’ll play the role of “forum organizer” by “inviting commentary and letting people use the [public editor’s online] space as a place to come and discuss. And we’ll use multimedia tools to make that happen.”
Unlike the paper’s
previous public editors, who worked under variations of two-year contracts, Sullivan has signed on for four years.
“There’s a possible out after two years for both parties,” she said, but added that there’s also the possibility of extending for a total run of six years if things go well.
“There was some discussion of fine-tuning the role of public editor, sticking around a little longer, digging in a bit more.”
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