The final print column by Arthur S. Brisbane in his capacity as New York Times public editor—a position created in the wake of 2003′s Jayson Blair scandal, making him only the fourth ombudsman in the paper’s history—ran on August 26th. The final day of his term is today, August 31. But one can only imagine that the Times is eager for this day—and his tenure with the paper—to end. Read More
Blogging for the Washington Post probably isn’t that bad. Still, the Post‘s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, felt the paper deserved a spanking after the recent resignation of BlogPost blogger Elizabeth Flock. In his opinion piece regarding Ms. Flock’s resignation following what amounted to a (minor and perhaps unintended) plagiarism scandal, Mr. Pexton detailed the unrealistic demands made on young journalists who find themselves fielding blogging duties at a major newspaper. He noted BlogPost was expected to garner up to 2 million hits a month, with Ms. Flock publishing 5-6 posts a day. She wasn’t writing simple paragraphs hitting major points in a story either, but full-on 500-word pieces aggregated from multiple sources.
Traffic expectations and heavy workload contributed to Ms. Flock’s two mistakes, which included re-writing a Discovery News post without crediting the source, the incident that led to her resignation. “[Ms. Flock] said it was only a matter of time before she made a third one; the pressures were just too great,” wrote Mr. Pexton. Read More
It’s been a week since NPR hastily fired senior news analyst Juan Williams for comments made on “The O’Reilly Factor,” but in just that time the ombudsman’s office at the public radio network has received 22,769 emails, Alicia C. Shepard wrote today in her column.
Shepard noted that most of the emails were Read More
New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett sent a memo to the staff earlier this week about anonymous sourcing. It was a pretty standard memo indeed. Just a few reminders really:
Remember that under our rules, at least one editor must know the identity of an anonymous source. (As standards editor, I Read More
