Ombudsmen and the bottom line

http://newsombudsmen.org/articles/ombudsmen-on-ombudsmen/ombudsmen-and-the-bottom-line 23 1995

(This article is reprinted from the October 1995 issue of The World and I.)

By Lynne Enders Glaser

From a newspaper’s standpoint, having a designated person on staff to hear and respond to readers adds more to its worth than good will.

It boosts the bottom line.

Now, I can’t prove that through time-and-motion studies or court-case analyses that I’ve read. But, using an empirical base, I believe that valid economic argument exists for the news ombudsman, and it’s my hope that the financial types who control most of this nation’s dailies will someday wake up to that fact.

If they don’t on their own, then hopefully their readers ultimately will embrace the concept of fair and impartial representation, and apply whatever pressure it takes to bring that about. If ethical arguments don’t work, I suggest citing the potential reduction in lawsuits, improved circulation and increased advertising revenues as a trio of practical reasons.

Of this country’s 1,600 or so daily newspapers, only about 35 have an ombudsman, reader representative, reader advocate or public editor on staff to address the complaints, concerns, ideas and questions that readers have right and reason to raise.

The first news ombudsman was appointed by the Courier-Journal, in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1967. My own publication, the Fresno (California) Bee, assigned the task of responding to readers and writing an occasional column on the newspaper’s foibles to a senior editor for short periods in the mid-1970s and 1980s. It established a full-time position, divorced from newsroom management, in December 1990.

Before I present an economic case for the reader representative, I want to share my own bias: I think that newspapers ought to have an ombuds because, as a public trust, they truly care what readers think and because they are passionately concerned about credibility and quality. Still, as a reader advocate and president of the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO), I’m willing to talk money for a cause.

Enhancing papers’ credibility

In this country, credibility and salability have gone hand in hand.

Credibility is the stuff on which the reputation of a newspaper is based, and that credibility — or lack of it — just logically influences the numbers for circulation and advertising sales. Journalistic credibility is built on such things as accuracy, balance, absence of bias, tone, placement, independence, taste and sensitivity. All of these are subjects that a newspaper ombuds routinely is asked to address. “I have seen evidence that the presence of a news ombudsman does indeed prod reporters and editors to [do] more careful, more thoughtful work,” said veteran ombudsman Arthur C. Nauman of the Sacramento Bee during a symposium on press self-regulation in South Korea last year.

“Yes, they know that if their work is slipshod, they might very well find themselves being scolded in print [through a column in their own paper] by the ombudsman. That is a strong motivation for good work.” Said Nauman earlier, “…A frank admission of errors can be good for credibility — and credibility, after all, is a newspaper’s prime asset.”

“Any time that a newspaper makes an effort to reach out and improve its accountability, it has to generate more public faith in that paper,” said Joann Byrd, who in June completed a three-year stint as ombudsman for The Washington Post and now teaches journalism ethics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“And I presume that if the public has faith in a newspaper, it is more likely to subscribe to that paper and to continue to subscribe,” says Byrd. Newspapers that invest in an ombudsman are public-service oriented, says Byrd.

“My presumption,” says Byrd, “has always been, in the first place, that the people who are calling just might be right and, in the second, that they deserve to have somebody answer the phone and listen to what they have to say.”

Nipping lawsuits in the bud

Defending against a lawsuit costs an average of “well over $100,000,’ according to media lawyer and newspaper executive Gary Pruitt.

“A newspaper is much better off if suits simply aren’t brought against it,’ said Pruitt, who is president and chief operating officer of McClatchy Newspapers Inc., which publishes the Bee.

The ombudsman, says Pruitt, “has the ability to practice preventative law without practicing law at all.”

This happens because the ombudsman serves as an active listener who has no direct involvement in the product that is under attack. Contrast the objectivity here with the natural defensiveness of reporters, photographers and editors who created the product. An ombudsman has nothing to win or lose because there’s no attachment.

Of 23 ombudsmen who responded to a 1993 ONO survey, only two said they received salaries between $100,000 and $125,000, the highest bracket. The largest number, seven, drew between $50,000 and $62,499 a year, and they were on papers with daily circulations ranging from 125,000 to 400,000 plus. By comparison, New York University Prof. Richard P. Cunningham figures that his active listening and subsequent action kept “from two to a half-dozen” readers from filing suits against the Minneapolis Tribune during his eight years there as the reader representative.

At the Fresno Bee, I am willing to bet that I save at least one case a year from litigation. That seems conservative. According to my last annual report, I handled 4,003 calls, letters and personal contacts from April 30, 1994, to this May 1.

Cunningham, who teaches press ethics, has written about news councils and ombudsmen as agents for appeasing angry readers. His analysis appears in the book “Beyond the Courtoom: Alternatives for Resolving Press Disputes.”

The ombudsman helps ward off lawsuits, in part, because -readers feel that they are being taken seriously and that the ombudsman really will find out what’s wrong,’ Cunningham said in a recent interview.

The objective listener

The ombudsman represents “somebody who can listen to the community with a different ear” than would a reporter, photographer or editor, Cunningham says. “He or she can effectively interpret the newspaper’s positions to the community and interpret the community’s positions to the newspaper.”

Robert Steele, author and teacher, says that “as difficult as it is to prove,” he believes that the reader representative “provides a substantive benefit to a newspaper when it comes to deterring legal action.”

“If you head off even one legal action, you are saving some significant dollars in terms of the cost of defending yourself — even if the paper wins, which it almost always does,” says Steele, who is director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Steele points to a study of 164 filings that is part of the Iowa Libel Research Project. The study, presented at ONO’s 1985 annual conference, is available as the book “Libel Law and The Press: Myth and Reality.”

“We found that typically the complainants go to the news source first, and it is the failure to deal them there that usually produces the suit,” says Gilbert Cranberg, one of three authors of the book and a former editor of the editorial pages at the Des Moines Register.

“When the complainants approach the news source, they are generally not in a great mood,” Cranberg says. “But after dealing with it, they are really angry — because they feel they’ve been met by a great deal of arrogance and unconcern.

“We found that people who wrote or edited the story usually dealt with the complaint and they displayed a great deal of defensiveness. We recommended that some distance be created between the complainant and the people who deal with the problem, or the problem as the complainant sees it.”

Thus, says Cranberg, “we made a case for the ombudsman.”

Results of the Iowa study are “somewhat skewed because people are not apt to admit they sued because they are greedy or mean spirited or litigious,” says Pruitt.

“Still, the element of truth is: That if readers are treated respectfully, if they are listened to and they feel they are truly being heard, this goes a long way toward taking a legal complaint outside of litigation,” says Pruitt.

“Most of the time, people sue over the issue of fairness. Legal standards are based upon fairness, and suits are based on deviation from those standards. An ombudsman makes the paper, as an institution, treat people more fairly.”

Beyond the realm of lawsuits, the reader representative offers “an intangible savings when it comes to the credibility aspect,” says Steele of the Poynter Institute. “Any time that you have a lawsuit filed, it is a kick in the shins of journalism.”

Ad sales and honesty

At the end of a pamphlet that explains my job to readers, I used a quote from a 1990 article in the Washington Journalism Review by Charles W. Bailey, who is a former editor of the Minneapolis Tribune and was Cunningham’s boss.

“The ombudsman’s job is not to make himself, or his editor, or even his newspaper either popular or beloved,” writes Bailey. “His job is to retain (or regain) the respect of readers. It’s not a wholly disinterested goal: In the long run, respect is the only sentiment that will keep the public reading, believing, supporting — and buying — a newspaper.”

And purchasing ad space, I add. Certainly, that has been “the American experience,” adds Pruitt, my former boss as publisher of the Fresno Bee. Journalism texts report that “historically, in this country, advertisers have bought space in those newspapers considered honest and reliable rather than those that don’t have the same commitments and traditions,” says Cunningham. “If that is true — and there is no doubt in my mind that it is — then there is every reason to believe that it will keep being true in the future.”

So, is improving the bottom line good reason to appoint a news ombudsman? Obviously, it’s not my first consideration, and others I’ve quoted said the same thing.

“The primary purpose of the ombudsman should be to serve the public and to scrutinize journalism as an independent voice,” says Steele. “The scrutiny angle should be the principle one.

“Newspapers are among the most powerful organizations in the community, not unlike local utilities, banks and government, and they should be scrutinized to the same degree that the others are scrutinized.”

A reader representative benefits that effort.

But if the ethereal approach isn’t your cup of tea, then — as a proponent of this concept — I’m willing to say, “Give your bottom line a boost.”

Not the norm

Some major newspapers employ ombudsmen — but many see fit to do without. Here is a partial list:

Some that have one

The Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
Philadelphia Inquirer
Orange County Register
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Boston Globe
Detroit News
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
San Diego Union -Tribune
Portland Oregonian
Salt Lake Tribune

Some That Don’t

USA Today
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Atlanta Constitution
Christian Science Monitor
Houston Chronicle
Dallas Morning News
Miami Herald
Seattle Times
Washington Times

Ethics augmenting profits

• The newspaper ombudsman listens to reader complaints and suggestions.
• He writes regular columns critiquing the newspaper’s lapses in journalistic rigor or pushing for editorial improvements.
• By building the publication’s credibility, he tends to promote reader loyalty, stimulate circulation and boost ad sales.
• By serving as an honest and objective sounding board for irate readers, he deters expensive lawsuits.

Lynne Enders Glaser was appointed as ombudsman of The Fresno (Calif.) Bee in 1990 after 30 years of newsroom experience. She was president of The Organization of News Ombudsmen in 1995-96.