PRESIDENT'S
MESSAGE
By Stephen Pritchard

Trust is an editor’s most precious commodity. Lose it and your readers, your viewers, your listeners will turn away. Sales drop. Ratings tumble. Businesses fail.

How do editors keep that trust? By maintaining fair and accurate reporting, of course, but also by going a step further and admitting that they don’t always get it right, that they sometimes stumble in their rush to bring you the news.

Newspapers, websites and TV and radio stations are swift to hold to account those who govern us, but are not nearly so swift to be accountable themselves. Too often they show an imperious disdain for those who take issue with them – but they ignore their audience at their peril.

Have you ever been unfairly treated by the media, but don’t know where to turn? Maybe you have read, seen or heard something that you know to be wrong, but don’t know how to get it put right.

You could write a letter to the editor and it might, or might not, be published, or, in some places, you could complain to a press council – a process that might take weeks. Forty years ago, recognising that this was, at best, a haphazard system, newspapers in the United States and Canada began to appoint independent ombudsmen to receive and act on complaints, an idea that has since spread around the globe.

Today, there are ombudsmen working in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America, following the lead set by the US and Canada, but by a cruel irony it is in America today where this system is most under threat.

I take the president’s chair at a time when US ombudsmen are losing their jobs alongside their fellow journalists on newspapers from Florida to California, from Maine to Washington State. As the credit crunch bites, some managements are viewing the position of ombudsman as an indulgence they can no longer afford.

They are wrong. An ombudsman engenders trust in an audience, and trust is a positive asset in any business, but particularly in the media. Readers, viewers or listeners are empowered when they know there is an independent arbiter they can turn to. Remove that post and the audience is left voiceless and suspicious of your motives. If anything, ombudsmen are needed now more than ever.

My newspaper, The Observer in London, polled its readers last year and 77 per cent said the existence of an ombudsman made them feel that the paper was responsive to their views and opinions. The fact that my newspaper is prepared to correct its mistakes and allow criticism of its journalism from within is seen as a positive asset.

Much has been made recently of the instant response to journalism that blogging affords. Readers can argue, challenge, add to the story or simply correct mistakes, the argument goes, so why have an ombudsman?

The answer is a simple. Blogging is no doubt useful and cathartic but it doesn’t offer the complainant an independent adjudication. There is no substitute for a newspaper having broad enough shoulders to admit it was wrong.

Engagement with the audience is the way forward and an ombudsman is key to that engagement. Powerful media organizations that shun this form of self-regulation look defensive, secretive and untrustworthy. If they believe in their journalism, what have they got to hide?

This website explains the work of the men and women who make up the Organization of News Ombudsman. Please take a look around it and feel free to contact any member of ONO. We will do our best to answer your questions about our work. After all, we believe in being transparent.

Stephen Pritchard
ONO President
Readers’ Editor, The Observer
London, England
reader@observer.co.uk

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