Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s ombudsman (and a former colleague at Newhouse), reports on the ONO, the meeting of ombdsmen at Harvard I attended this week.
Jarvis thinks all ombudsmen ought to blog. His blog is at https://buzzmachine.com. He said bloggers “distrust the institutional voice and trust more the human voice. The more we represent that personal voice, the better.”
That caught me up short. I got a laugh at the meeting when I said, “I hardly have time to go to the bathroom. Start a blog?” Instead of responding to 600 letters, he said “a blog post is more efficient and adds to the conversation.” I’ll think about it.
By the way, it’s a punchline but it’s true: ombudsmen do correct each other a lot.
: LATER: And here is the account of Stephen Pritchard, readers’s editor of the Observer in London.
: LATER STILL: And here‘s Siobhain Butterworth, readers’ editor of the Guardian, with her take: “arvis 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.”
