Open door: The readers’ editor on … the open and organic business of
journalism
SIOBHAIN BUTTERWORTH

The Guardian – United Kingdom
Published: May 28, 2007

Journalism can mean different things depending on where and how you
access it. News may be spun, biased, censored, truthful, incomplete
and life-threatening. These issues were discussed at Harvard last week
at a gathering of ombudsmen (assume throughout that I mean women
too). There are not many of us – the Organisation of News Ombudsmen
has under 100 members – and the annual conference was an opportunity
to compare notes.

Accounts from Turkey and Russia were gloomy. Yavuz Baydar, readers’
representative for the Sabah newspaper in Istanbul, talked about the
murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink who, before his death
in January, was charged three times under article 301 of the Turkish
Code with the offence of insulting Turkishness. Today in Turkey 15
journalists need bodyguards.

Russian journalism was already in trouble before the murder of Anna
Politkovskaya, said Andrei Richter, the director of the Moscow Media
Law and Policy Institute, but her death accelerated some trends in
Russian journalism. "A uniform approach to content" has developed –
which means stories about Putin’s hard work, anti-western rhetoric and
the ridiculing of Belarus, Estonia and other countries that have
fallen out with the Kremlin. The government says it doesn’t control
the media but the authorities can make life difficult. Editors may be
subjected to repeated tax checks and one newspaper couldn’t operate
when its computers were confiscated – the police claimed they’d been
tipped off that its software was illegal. Richter told the group that
self-censorship sends publications downmarket – they turn into "yellow
newspapers" filled with sensational stories and gossip.

As a result, journalism becomes discredited and this plays into the
government’s hands. Newspapers are an important source of news in
Russia, where TV channels are state-owned and the internet has a low
penetration. Only 10-12 million people, out of a population of 150
million, are online.

Elsewhere, the web is front of mind and ONO invited the Guardian’s
editor, Alan Rusbridger and BuzzMachine blogger, Jeff Jarvis, to share
their thoughts about online journalism. On the subject of news
organisations’ reluctance to appoint ombudsmen, Rusbridger said he
realised it is "a very radical move to place even a few inches of your
paper out of your control" but there is a conflict in an editor
commissioning journalism and sitting in judgment on it.
The web challenges ideas about editorial responsibility. "It’s
impossible now for editors to monitor even a quarter of the
content. The editor can’t read everything in advance or even after
publication," he said. "Access to information is no longer the
exclusive preserve of journalists, readers can check journalism
against publicly available information. That means millions of
fact-checkers."

Many sites include user-generated content; it is difficult to say what
journalism is and easier to say what it isn’t. "It is not about the
tablet of stone", Rusbridger said. "Journalism becomes a never-ending
organic business of placing material in the public domain, of adding
to it, clarifying it, correcting it . . . everything we do will be
more contestable, more open to challenge and alternative
interpretation."

Journalists pursuing truth incrementally rather than delivering it
pre-packaged was something of a leitmotif. Jeff Jarvis told us "the
architecture of news is changing and it would be better to see stories
as a process and not a product. It’s not finished, we can add to it."

Listening to this it occurred to me that ombudsmen should expect what
they write to be corrected, analysed and added to, like any other
information that finds its way into the online world. Ombudsmen may
not be in the business of handing down tablets of stone either, but
what we can do is hold journalism up to sunlight (the best
disinfectant, as US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said) and
under a microscope.

Jarvis urged us to "jump into the blogging pool, the water is
fine". With this encouragement I plan to experiment with a Thursday
blog about issues for the Guardian and its readers.

We had a number of complaints about the lead story published on May 22
with the headline, "Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force
US out of Iraq". I will be writing about that next week.

reader@guardian.co.uk