The irony was stark yet illuminating. On July 22, 2017, when we were having our fifth Open House, the first one in Delhi, there was a report by Jackie Spinner titled “Public editors disappear as media distrust grows” in the Columbia Journalism Review . When I shifted from being a journalist to an ombudsman, my immersive induction to the job came from the United States’s experience. A decade ago, the U.S. had about 40 news ombudsmen and today the number has dwindled to four by most estimates. U.S. publishers seem to believe that an ombudsman is redundant in this era of user-generated content that floods the digital space.
Human intervention
Every Open House we held since 2013 reaffirmed our belief that there is a need for human intervention to retain trust and credibility in this age of anonymous communication. While it is easy to talk about the rules and the codes, the ethics and the laws, and the values and principles that govern journalism among the practitioners, it is difficult to explain the full import of these terms to general readers. The idea of self-regulation is to embed media literacy as an integral part of news. Readers are informed about the changing information landscape like they are informed about the polity, economy and society, a task that cannot be performed by random tweets or passionate posts in cyberspace. While cyberspace may have given an opportunity to many to express themselves, the question that remains unanswered is whether their voices are heard?
What are the requisites of the institution of an independent news ombudsman? It is a four-way covenant that involves the reader, editor, management and the ombudsman, where each agrees to hand over some of powers in exchange for a fair and credible mechanism that ensures accountability. There are fine lines that should be respected and not breached, even inadvertently, for this mechanism to succeed. The toughest part of the job is to draw the line between the polyphony of multiple voices and the cacophony of concurrent monologues.
Some of the frequently asked questions are: how do you process inputs from the readers? What are the responses of the editors and the journalists of The Hindu to the suggestions from the readers? How effective has this system been for the newspaper? It would be extremely presumptuous to assume that the 139-year-old newspaper began listening to its readers only over the last decade once this office came to existence.
However, there is a difference between the earlier feedback mechanism and the current one. Here we try to inform readers when their suggestions could not be implemented for various reasons. For instance, one reader wanted the newspaper to have a daily fact-check column that looks at each statement of politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats. He also wanted us to alert the general public about the trending fake news on social media on a real-time basis. It is a worthwhile suggestion but it needs enormous human and financial resources. Indian English newspapers, with a highly subsidised cover price and facing pressure from digital freebies, can move into this segment only if we have a fair pricing policy.
Another issue that comes up often during the Open House is regarding the ideal content mix for a particular edition. How much of the hyper-local and local news should there be in each edition? What should be the share of national news? Is it possible for a multi-edition newspaper to produce completely different newspapers for various cities? What should be the space for “good news” amidst our daily dose of “bad news”? One of the readers said that the amount of bad news in the newspaper increased his blood pressure and wanted an equal dose of good news.
The institutionalised feedback mechanism has helped to address these concerns in a measured manner. The editorial team, while retaining the core characteristics of The Hindu , has worked out the details to have regional and sub-regional variants to fulfil the requirements of a specific readership in a geographical segment. It is a process where continuity and change are in consonance with each other, where the introduction of a new segment does not subsume the importance of the existing segments. These unobtrusive shifts in emphasis in some of the sections of the newspaper are based on the feedback we have received from the readers.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
