Ombudsmen: A Rare Find in Online News
Web Editors Disagree on Best Way to Reach Readers, Evaluate Performance
Beth Pinsker
Special to Consumer Reports WebWatch
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When a major story is breaking, news Web sites such as MSNBC.com and The New York Times online update their content every few seconds. Headlines go up, pictures come down, original reporting is added to wire stories, then that version gets replaced by another reporter's full story. Not all the changes keep up with each other, meaning a picture sometimes gets a wrong caption for a few minutes, or links are confused. Reader reaction flies in quickly, too, as a global audience can merely hit an e-mail link to send a comment or complaint.
There are few fixed conventions in the infrastructure of online news to deal with these issues. Some sites run corrections, some don't. Some feature mastheads — a publication's listing of its staff and operations — and clearly define their affiliations. With others it's hard to know who runs the site and its sources of information. Some deal primarily with their local communities, but others have worldwide audiences with competing interests. Some respond to all reader mail, some pick only selected communications, or host moderated chats, or have open bulletin boards.
Two years ago, when MSNBC.com's then editor-in-chief and senior vice president Merrill Brown saw the unique challenges of online news, he decided his site needed a person on staff to make sense of it all. He wanted somebody responsible for listening to reader concerns and also help the editorial staff put coverage into perspective.
What Brown wanted was an ombudsman. Also known as a reader representative or public editor, an ombudsman acts as a liaison between readers and a news organization, explaining to the public how the news is generated and relaying the public's concerns to the staff. Brown convinced longtime Los Angeles Times editor Dan Fisher to delay retirement and become the first, and so far only, online news ombudsman. Fisher's tenure at MSNBC.com lasted just over 13 months, ending in June 2002, during which he wrote a semi-weekly column.
"I found myself being drawn into subjects where I was doing classic ombudsman work — not commenting on MSNBC.com's work only, but the way journalism works in general," Fisher says from his home in Woodinville, Wash., where he is now fully retired.
Fisher never had any counterparts during his tenure. In the offline world, there have only ever been about 40 ombudsmen working at one time at American newspapers since the 1960s, and hardly any in broadcasting.
Many editors at online news sites see the value in having an objective observer watching over their operations and explaining their methodology to the public. But in this world of crunched budgets, the emphasis is on having more reporters, more ad sales people, and more news resources. Many online news and content sites also don't invest in ombudsmen, experts say, because sites now produce very little original content — particularly Web sites for newspapers. There's little reason for an online ombudsman if the newspaper already has one, since the newspaper's Web site likely is little more than an extension of the print edition, plus updates from wire services.
"I never had anything but positive feelings for the endeavor, but with limited resources," says MSNBC.com's executive producer of news coverage, Robert Aglow. [Disclosure: Robert Aglow is a member of the Consumer Reports WebWatch advisory board.]
Seeking Other Online Options
Some Web editors and publishers debate the usefulness of a reader advocate for news and content sites, preferring to use other communication tools unique to the Internet — such as e-mail. Neil Chase, the editor-in-chief of business news Web site CBSMarketwatch.com and board member of the Online News Association, says he doesn't see the need for an ombudsman online. Instead, CBSMarketwatch.com publishes corrections when there are mistakes and features a page for letters to the editor. Chase also assigns a person to check incoming e-mail from readers and forward messages to appropriate editors and writers.
Other sites are trying to use bulletin boards, moderated chats and letters pages to communicate with readers. For example, when Joshua Fouts, editor of Online Journalism Review, wanted feedback on a new Web design, he set up a bulletin board and solicited comments. "We found it to be an excellent way of keeping in touch with the needs of the readers," he says.
Nevertheless, Fouts acknowledges there are limitations to merely inviting reader responses. "From an organizational perspective, I'd swear by the value of ombudsmen," he says.
Jon Rochmis, executive editor at Wired News, says message boards on Wired.com are active with readers sounding off about the latest computer issues. But he agrees something more is needed. Responding to readers' concerns within the forum doesn't distinguish ranting from answers, Rochlis says. "It begs for a response from the regulated site to the reader."
"The medium is utterly unique in that it requires this level of engagement," Merrill Brown says from Seattle, Wash., where he is a senior vice president at RealNetworks, an online multimedia software company. "It's the speed and accessibility. A foreign government is seeing our headline treatment in utterly real time. With a newspaper or even a national newscast, that's not the case."
Credibility At Risk
One factor that could end up trumping money in this equation and bringing ombudsmen into fashion in the online world is credibility.
"The media knows it has a problem with credibility," says Sanders LaMont, the ombudsman at the Sacramento Bee and head of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, an international non-profit trade organization. The bar is even higher for Web sites, he says, since some people don't believe anything they read online. [For related information on consumer attitudes about news and information sites, please see Consumer Reports WebWatch's first research report: A Matter of Trust: What Users Want From Web Sites.]
In the race to post breaking news, Lamont sees dangers looming. "If several big and popular Web sites bit on a scam or on something phony," he says, "or were conned or made a bad judgment about something, that might generate public protest enough to do something, and you'll see sites hire ombudsmen as a response."
More than a few people agree with Lamont that a major systemic foul-up could force sites to hire somebody to explain themselves to their readers. In October, 2002, for instance, a hoax study about the premature extinction of blondes was published by British newspapers, U.S. television broadcast networks and Web sites before the story was retracted.
When he was at MSNBC.com, Fisher was extremely concerned about what happened to mistakes like these on the site. The one thing constant in news production in print, broadcast and radio is that once you put something out there, you can't take it back. Because it exists on some record, if you make a mistake, you have to formally issue a correction. Not so in the online news world. Anyone who has ever saved over a file accidentally knows anything can be wiped out irrevocably.
"Online news has the thinnest of safety nets," Fisher says. "We had one situation with a story on the Middle East that used the same URL over and over. There was a photo change as the site was updated that came before a text change. So there was a photo of a Palestinian funeral over a headline and a story that was about something else. That infuriates people, and that's a legitimate issue for an ombudsman."
University of Kansas journalism professor Ann M. Brill, also director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Online Editing Program, an educational internship program for students, says the urge to change copy without explanation works the other way around as well. She got a call recently from a woman who was accused of a crime and later exonerated. "She wanted me to purge the story of her accusation from the archives of our online news site," she says. Brill, who also teaches media ethics, wouldn't do it.
An ombudsman could be a credible source to explain these situations, Brill says, which is not the same as having a third party host a moderated online forum or having an editor answer questions directly.
If the experiment at MSNBC.com proved anything to Fisher, it was there needed to be more creative thinking about how to mold the concept of an ombudsman to fit online needs. "I wrote a memo when I was finished [working as an ombudsman at MSNBC.com] that said perhaps we need to rethink the definition of what an ombudsman is," he says. "Maybe we need to look at it more broadly as the role of a media columnist. I think there would be plenty of material."
How To Make Your Voice Heard
If you have a question or comment about something you've seen on an online news site and want to contact an editor or writer, it may take some digging. Here are some suggestions of where to look on a news site for appropriate contact information or feedback tools:
Mastheads: Mastheads, a publication's staff listing, are harder to find online than in a newspaper or magazine. If sites include mastheads, you will probably find them linked to from the "About Us" or "Media Kit" pages, as the online version of the political news and opinion publication The Weekly Standard does. Online mastheads usually just list online staff, and not the staff of the affiliated print or broadcast outlet, as The New York Times does. The New York Times Online also will send a list of available staff e-mail addresses upon request.
"Contact Us" Links: Most of the time these links are just a way for a reader to e-mail a traditional letter to the editor. MNSBC.com and USA Today are two examples of online news sites in which the "contact us" list goes further, giving specific departmental information as to where you can direct your question or complaint.
Many sites also offer links to staffers' e-mail addresses (but not those of content partners), usually within each feature story or news article. For example, the Detroit Free Press offers phone numbers and e-mail addresses for its columnists at the end of each column.
Bulletin Boards, Forums, Discussions and Chat: There are many different ways for news and content sites to interact with readers beyond just static letters. Salon.com is one example of a news and content site that offers several community functions, including bulletin boards and live chats.
Corrections: While not a direct feedback mechanism, a "Corrections" page acknowledges to readers when a news site has made a mistake. The pioneer of the online corrections page is News.com, which has a link at the bottom of the home page labeled "Corrections." The New York Times offers a link to its corrections page from its home page, under the "News" navigation column. But most other sites have the link buried deeper into the site. The Washington Post link is on the "News" page itself, one level away from the home page. And sometimes, as on CNN.com and MSNBC.com, it's impossible to find a corrections page at all.
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Beth Pinsker is a freelancer writer in New York whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Wired magazine and many others. She was formerly a reporter at Inside.com, editor in chief of The Independent Film and Video Monthly, and a film critic at The Dallas Morning News
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