Anything but the Ombudsman!

Why newspapers should avoid in-house watchdogs.

Matt Welch from the August/September 2003 issue

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Ombudsmen tend to have a startlingly uniform view of how news organizations and their employees should act and think of themselves. Crime coverage and screaming headlines -- bad. Four-part, 17,500-word series on race relations in a sleepy Southern town -- good. They typically see their position, the newsroom, and the paper itself to be exalted above the readers they are allegedly paid to represent.

"We must educate the public," said keynote speaker and "Conscience of Journalism" Bill Kovach at the Organization of News Ombudsmen convention last year. (Kovach, as Brill's Content's first ombudsman, sat on his hands when Brill launched a business with the largest companies he covered.) "I believe it is vital to the interest of the journalist and the public that we engage in an urgent, forceful, and consistent campaign to educate the public that in a democratic society, the journalist is, in fact, exercising the highest form of citizenship by monitoring events in the community and making the public aware of them and their importance." It speaks volumes about the conformity of ombudsmen that none of the nearly dozen people who wrote about Kovach's speech found this appallingly elitist sentiment worth questioning.

This is not to say that ombudsmen can't or don't do important work. But it is work a company that's responsive to its customers makes sure gets done by every employee, instead of being outsourced to a lone, reviled answer-man. Hiring a public editor is like advertising your monopolist indifference and staffing bloat; it's admitting defeat (or, depending on how you look at it, victory).

The New York Times' greatness was forged by fierce competition in one of the last remaining multi-newspaper markets. It should come out of this crisis swinging -- and leave the ombudsmen to the Swedes.

[Editor's note: Since the writing of this story, The New York Times has announced that it is creating a "public editor" position.]