Pink slips for newspaper ombudsmen – Can other jobs be far behind?

Reporters hate questions about their work.
Editors do too. They just scapegoat better.
So official question-askers inside the newsroom fill an important position.
Call the position an ombudsman or a reader-representative or a public editor. Call it what you will. The role is not a newsroom popularity contest.
The job is all about journalism credibility:

Make sure the reader can believe the news.
Protect against undue victimization.
Guard against institutional neglect.
Correct the correctable.
Explain the rest.

Forty years ago the first newspaper ombudsman in the country went to work at The Courier-Journal. Now the Louisville newspaper joins a trend to eliminate the “inspector general” position for cost-cutting.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Orlando Sentinel, The Hartford Courant and The Palm Beach Post are other papers dispensing with their public editors, according to C-J Public Editor Pam Platt. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080803/COLUMNISTS10/808030383/1016/OPINION
She riled editors and reporters at The Courier-Journal for the last time and will move to editorial page writing.
Lo, how the machinery for ethics has rusted shut in the information industry. Never did run at optimum.
Norman Isaacs – Stormin’ Norman to his admirers and detractors alike – failed at creating a British-style National News Council in the 1960s and 70s. Isaacs was executive editor of The C-J, an industry leader in responsible journalism and an officer in the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
The New York Times editors especially pooh-poohed the social responsibility idea behind the council. Every paper is its own best policeman, claimed The Times.
Turned out the paper couldn’t even police its own Jayson Blair, the reporter who famously made up news and published the falsehood with a straight face. Ironically The Times created a public editor as part of the clean-up that also cost the news division its two top editors.
Ombudsmen at newspapers were Norman Isaacs’s fall-back position when the Council idea floundered. That’s why The C-J was the first in the country to have one.
Who else speaks for the news consumer?
Everyone in the production of information has a conflict of interest to cultivate, a reputation to protect or a touchy, defensive attitude to nurture.
But not the public’s representative who is removed from the process.
Too late the industry realized the need for what New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta importantly labeled as accountability and transparency – the ethical twins for explaining ourselves as journalists.
As the news industry grew in social prominence, public trust declined. That’s why Norman Isaacs and others saw the need for reform – an idea before its time, as matters turned out.
Now the newspaper arm of journalism withers. You can make a case for loss of public confidence accelerating the economic trend.
Instead of getting riled at ombudsmen, reporters and editors can get riled at their own pink slips.

Food for thought: Have another banana?

Editors who get on their high horse are apt to slip on a fruit peel and go down, steed and all.
We see so many ethical stands. We hear so many grand statements of news as separate from advertising, which journalists call “the dark side.”
Then in the middle of every week we get their food sections, glaring in self-contradiction.
These labor intensive, soft journalism, tepid ventures into consumer reporting, if you can call recipes serious reportage, are a bigger staple than rice and potatoes.
The media critic may lose a job. The book page may disappear. The news bureau may shut down.
Food sections endure.
They wrap supermarket fliers and run grocery coupons. Some peddle wine and spirits or boom high-end restaurants for this nation of foodies.
Now this is the entry point for Harry Highminded, the editor, to blurt at me that eating is news too: “Ever see anyone give up food, heh-heh-heh?”
Well, yes, actually. Famine is increasing. Food riots are starting. Americans are malnourished either through obesity or poverty.
The real news of food is in genetic crops, the biofuels competition for corn and the safety of meat and produce.
News pages covered the massive South Korean protests against American beef imports. How many food editors followed up with coverage of safety in local meat markets?
Or how many check out jail, school and nursing home menus for nutrition?
Or publish health department inspections? Some do, to be sure.
But it’s the unusual food editor who sees a role in questioning advertisers who are the reason the editor has a job.
Media’s hypocrisy over the weekly homage to buying and eating is not a moral cesspool we’ll all drown in. And I’m not on my own high horse.
But it does us all good to admit our hunger for ad revenue isn’t satisfied by pretense at purity.
I agree food is a huge category of news and ripe for investigation and exposition.
Tell me where my milk comes from and why the price is zooming. Explain why Super Wal-Mart is America’s breadbasket but what that’s done to competitive choices. Report on the Food and Drug Administration for scaring us but not protecting us against salmonella in our produce.
Cover nutrition, the real story, not gluttony as typical food sections do.
But don’t try to con me into believing most newspaper food sections are any more than advertising vehicles.
That’s too big a bunch of bananas to swallow on horseback or anywhere else.

Read novels to learn narrative style

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski
HarperCollins, 2008, 566 pp., $25.95

Glimpse the world’s soul. Know death in the midst of living. See tragedy ennoble as in Hamlet.
This is Shakespeare’s plot line, after all, this narrative of Edgar Sawtelle. Oh, don’t mistake the literary art as artifice or as an American imitation or as a literary homage.
David Wroblewski, the first-time author, seizes the most famous drama in world literature for its pattern of eternal meaning. He has a myth to weave, a universal truth told in story form.
So a classic story mold reinforces what you might mistake as ordinary, even as a tale about dogs and their people.
You understand Hamlet better for seeing Edgar Sawtelle rise, discern his place in the mystery of life, avenge his father and suffer his own fall along with everyone around him even as the things that count – that really count – continue on their perpetual way.
Edgar was born in 1958 to a couple who raised and trained an idyllic breed of dogs on their northern Wisconsin farm as Edgar’s grandfather had done before. The house and a barn fitted out as kennel form a living stage. It produces the family story of companionship with each other and with nature. But the farm also is womb for an uncle’s unnatural evil.
A mythic journey of self understanding must take place before Edgar resolves the conflict.
While he’s away we lose the Ophelia character in a manner to break every dog lover’s heart.
Anna Quindlen last year wrote a sad book about pets — Good Dog. Stay. John Grogan wrote Marley & Me, soon to be a movie, based on his newspaper column about his funny, foolish, faithful pet.
Those are animal stories.
The dogs in Edgar Sawtelle’s life are different. They drive the constant, considerable action. They communicate in their canine fashion, because they were born mute like Edgar. In the womb, a seer explains, God told Edgar a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know. So the young man signs. And he acquires wisdom deep inside.
With Edgar we all learn dogs are not the beasts in this story. You wonder what God told them.
Insight and even vision — literally — aren't the brilliance of this narrative. The story, always the story, carries us a remarkable 566 pages.
The natural elements in those north woods plot the way through explanations of things we didn’t know we wanted to know. Breeding and training and even of how to play canasta and the characters buffeted by action in and out of their control and the descriptive details, yes, the wonderful details — those all make this book.
I tell journalists to read novels to learn narrative style. This is the book for them.
Yet The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is not journalism or a Shakespearean knock-off or ordinary fiction.
The thought crosses the mind of Edgar’s mother Trudy: When we accept life, we take contradiction with it.
You wonder if even Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude understood the tragic idea held in this legend, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

George Carlin: A journalist appreciated

We all laughed with George Carlin. Journalists should have taken him more seriously. He had better instincts than many.
Carlin had an ear for usage. Write for the ear, we teach, not the eye. But too few do, producing a stilted tone instead of conversation.
And he thought. He thought about society. He started in radio. He ended in books.
His mastery of words and how to use them rose to the level of philosophy or at least of philology, the love of language and its meaning.
That’s because Carlin always sought the underlying sense and not just superficial correctness, the level where most users of the language stop drilling.
“Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway,” he asked.
That equals my favorite conundrum of how a vacuum bottle knows to keep hot things hot and cold things cold.
Comedians play a special role in our society. They are court jesters where the republic is monarch. They tell us what we need to hear in a way that overcomes our reluctance to listen.
Carlin will receive the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for humor posthumously to underscore his specialness.
Now there’s a pair to tickle St. Peter’s funny bone, Carlin and Twain. Add Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers to the circle. They all represent the poetic truth: “Scratch a humorist, and you’ll find a bitter man.”
Carlin put the thought differently: “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
So, Carlin said about Ronald Reagan’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras: “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”
I am not alone in my respect for the ability to assess others’ use, abuse and misuse of language. The official wordsmith of The New York Times Magazine, William Safire, paid tribute after Carlin died at 71.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06wwln-safire-t.html?ex=1372824000&en=5757a8a4aded95b1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Safire saw a perverse value in “the seven words you can’t use on television” routine by Carlin. By devaluing the shock value of those adolescent obscenities, Safire thought, the performer had done a service to the language.
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html

It took 98 years after his death to get the coverage.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.

Arts and Letters was a horse, no press release at all

The art of the public relations agent comes out in press releases, which generally are artless.
They can be elaborate. They can entice. They can blare, rarely trying the subtle approach.
They are why city editors have messy desks.
They are the stuff of the logo, the release date, the contact information.
No tree should have to give a life for one. No electron should have to spin a tizzy over one.
But press releases are not going away, no more than their authors in media relations departments.
Press releases can be the cry of the Sirens, who seduced the crew of Ulysses on his odyssey. Tough men, they, but prone to have their heads turned by sexy maidens. Or, press releases can be terse, useful guides to the morning line for reporters to take slight notice of and then discard.
So we need to put them into perspective.
New York Times business writer Joanne Kaufman does not. She does dignify the press release with a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/media/30toxic.html?ex=1372478400&en=109705c354560eb5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
We find out the best words a PR writer can use to attract the attention of a journalist for exposure in the media.
A kind of a science as well as a recklessly purported art figures in Ms. Kaufman's article: The proper technique uses words most likely to be picked up by an Internet search engine these days.
We even learn a book by PR stunt planner David Seaman is due out in October, "Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz." Makes you feel dirty just thinking about it.
The biggest little secret in public relations, it turns out, is timing. Make sure the press release comes out on a slow news day, the Times article concludes.
Well, there's no true conclusion. I will supply one. The story is dutifully non-judgmental. I will be, dutifully.
A press release has one value and one only, as a tip sheet. The best ones in my experience are so labelled, "Tip Sheet." Trust it any further and you're liable to tip over. Even phone numbers and addresses are suspect, to be checked and verified while the journalist re-reports any information in the release, which is never to be quoted or treated as valid information from an original source.
Did you get that, young journalist?
Ms. Kaufman did not report the journalistic value of press releases. Allow me. There is none.
Journalism is what a reporter brings to an idea. The idea may come from a tip by a useful press agent. But the journalism is value-added.
Oh, me, oh my!
You will depart this blog post with the thought journalism is an art and public relations is a service industry whose product is mechanical, the press release.
You think correctly.

The Hometowners: Obama and McCain

When you’re hot, you’re hot.
And when you’re not, you’re not.
– Jerry Reed

No one wants to repeat Al Gore’s non-election. He lost Tennessee, his home state.
So GOP nominee-to-be John McCain feels the need to campaign a bit more in Arizona, even though he represents it in the U.S. Senate.
Things slip. People who know you best may not view you as presidential timber. And the minority vote prefers the opponent.
That African American, Native American, Latin American and Asian American electorate counts.
Journalists from those groups saw Democratic nominee-to-be Barack Obama up close and personal at Unity, the combined journalism conference for all four minority groups.
They saw him in “Chicago, Chicago, (his) hometown,” which is generously endowed with admirers of the Illinois senator.
Hot item at the conference was the Chicago-based Ebony cover of Obama as “One of the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.”
He made the list with music mogul Jay-Z, R&B great Marvin Gaye and “the original heartthrob, Billy Dee,” swooned Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell.
Obama fever soared until an editorial in that paper had to remind readers that campaigns are the news, not just the hometown candidate.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism found the Democrat featured in 78 percent of political stories, according to the paper’s observation. McCain mentions came in at only 51 percent.
An oped piece by Jewel Woods, a “gender analyst” for the Renaissance Male Project, claimed even guys have a crush on Obama. It’s his “white collar masculinity.”
Still another columnist compared the candidate’s foreign policy team with The 300. That would be Sparta’s hero-defenders against Persia in the cult movie featuring Bowflex-product, muscle rippling warriors admired by gamer boys.
What’s the fun of Chicago, if you can’t go over the top?
The attention drove Sen. McCain to mock the press.
But cool as the breeze off Lake Michigan, “Obama sizes up Mideast stage” in a Chicago Tribune headline.
A quote by Trib columnist John Kass called McCain “grumpy.”
Editorial Board member Steve Chapman called the man “confused on Iraq.”
And Trib syndicated writer Jonah Goldberg called his pro-surge strategy on the war a loser as the defining issue of his campaign.
Don’t mess with the hometown candidate in other words.
A couple of days’ look at Chicago papers conjures the Jerry Reed lyric when it comes to Sen. Obama: My luck was so good I could do no wrong.

Unjumble this: dreenyipsit

You know about the man who checks the obits every morning to see if he’s there.
I work the Jumble word puzzle to see if my mind is all there.
My wife does the same with the crossword puzzle.
Our grown children tackle sudoku.
There’s the lady whose day just isn’t right until she checks her horoscope and the man who looks for the daily comic he has read ever since he was a little boy.
We’re all hooked on the benign narcotic of the syndicated feature. Newspapers set out to make us return customers. And darned if newsprint is not a lifestyle for some of us.
Journalists are so-o-o-o serious. Their products are news, sports, features, editorials, business coverage and all the rest in life that’s more or less momentous.
Many of them don’t know we really want to read the used truck ads in the classifieds. Or find out the weather in Bangkok. Or check the TV listings.
My local paper ran a gazpacho recipe this morning. Perfect. Now my household knows what to do with the surplus of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers from our garden.
Papers everywhere run food sections one day a week – usually Wednesdays – to wrap around the grocery ads with their coupons and twofer come-on sales. And those are part of the information industry too.
Publishers put out a package, not just coverage of breaking events. Many still provide yesterday’s stock listings, although any investor can check the markets instantly online.
Try to stop a syndicated feature like that and watch the switchboard light up with angry calls from us in the newspaper habit. Don’t even move a feature from its usual spot.
An organizational mind is a measure of good papers. Alter not their internal order.
Serendipity also is a hallmark, though. We wonder what the letter writers are up to today, what the movie critic says, what fantastic hand the bridge column is about. Finding the answers is a random walk through a land of happy discoveries made by happenstance.
You may think or wish this marriage of opposites – an ordered plan wedded to chance delight – is exclusive to newspapers and would keep the competing Internet at bay.
Nope. The World Wide Web is just a many times larger collection of oddities and curiosities and fun features to divert us from its serious content updated instantly. If you think it lacks order, you haven’t put links, feeds, widgets, blog readers and all the other gadgets together on your familiar home page.
There is simultaneous organization and serendipity to a good Web site just like a good newspaper. That’s why online journalism can succeed once the economic model is in place. We habitués can make the move.
Those of us who are grumpy if we don’t work the Jumble every morning now aren’t able to settle into the day’s routine without checking our email.
And when we manage our own homepage, we don’t have to worry that some editor left our favorite feature out that day.
I blog, therefore I am – without having to check the obit page.