MMM #128 Ombudsmen

     Complaints about the media date to the earliest newspapers, and probably back to the first human to carve out a message in stone.

     But the concept of an actual reader/viewer/listener representative on the staff is a relatively recent creation.

     There is, as with everything in the world these days, an official association for them, and the history section of the association's website places the first newspaper ombudsman in the U.S.:

The first press ombudsman appears in the U.S.A. in July 1967, with the function of listening to the complaints of the readers of the Louisville Courier Journal and of the Louisville Times, both in Louisville, Kentucky.

     There is only one Alabama media entity with an ombudsman that I'm aware of...The Anniston Star, long a shining light in the world of journalistic ethics. The paper employs former editor Paul Rilling for that purpose. He is called a "Media Critic", but his columns seem to focus on his own paper as much as anything.



     The media ombudsmen association I linked above has only thirty regular members, and there is some evidence that the days of ombudsmen may be eroding, probably a result of cost cutting as much as anything.

     The Washington Post's ombudsman has resigned, disgusted by the decline in the journalistic quality of the paper. Yet the fact that his final column, expressing that disgust, was even published by the paper says something about the integrity that remains.

     And a venerated volunteer group that tried to investigate reader/viewer/listener complaints about the media, the Minnesota News Council, is folding too.

     On the other hand, The Star and other papers founded a kind of group-critique organization last year called Bama Fact Check.



[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]