One of the earliest lessons I learnt as the ombudsman of this newspaper was at the annual conference of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen in Los Angeles in 2013. Fellow ombudsmen, who had more experience and exposure in interacting with readers and addressing their queries, said, to be an effective interlocutor between the newspaper and its readers, one needs to constantly interact with readers. They were unanimous that mails from readers capture views only partially as they are mostly restricted to a specific act of omission or commission either in reporting or in the opinion pages. Only by becoming an active listener and picking up the nuances in their articulations can an ombudsman convey to the editorial the expectations of readers. Ombudsmanship is not just an act of carrying out periodic corrections and clarifications or writing a regular column, it is a proactive position to amplify the requirements of readers to the editorial. Its role is not confined to providing a forum for readers to express themselves but to create an institutional mechanism for their voices to be heard by those who decide editorial content.
Taking a cue from that meet, we have been organising open houses in various cities where there is an edition of this newspaper. The first was in Chennai, where The Hindu is headquartered; the second was in Bengaluru; and the third in Hyderabad.
The fourth open house
It gives me great pleasure to invite our readers for the fourth open house to be held in Mumbai on Saturday (November 26, 2016) to mark the first anniversary of the newspaper’s foray into the western region. I request interested readers to send an email to this office with a brief biographical note not exceeding 100 words.
While we encourage readers not to seek anonymity in expressing their views during the meet, we are also aware that some readers, either due to personal or professional reasons, may not be able to fully articulate their ideas if anonymity is not granted. These readers can invoke the Chatham House Rule, which reads: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” Why the Chatham House Rule? It enables people to speak as individuals, express views that may differ from the views of the organisations they belong to, and thereby encourage free discussion. Speakers are free to voice their own opinions without concern for their personal reputation or their official duties and affiliations.
A fine balance
The Hindu ’s 138-year-long journey can be characterised as one which has seen a fine balance between retaining the core values and cardinal principles of journalism on the one hand and addressing the demands of a changing society on the other. The first editorial of this newspaper, “Ourselves”, published on September 20, 1878, is a priceless document as it spelt out what this newspaper would do in the years to come. It said that the aim of the newspaper is to promote “harmony” and “union” (unity) among the people of India and a secular editorial policy of maintaining the “strictest neutrality” in matters relating to religion while offering fair criticism and comment “when religious questions involve interests of a political and social character”.
There is an impressive continuity between “Ourselves” and the present binding “Living our Values: Code of Editorial Values”, adopted by the publishers of this newspaper in 2011. A much larger story is the constant changes that were made to keep the newspaper contemporary. The Hindu started as a weekly, became a thrice-a-week publication, and metamorphosed into an evening broadsheet in 1889. When the anti-colonial struggle peaked, it became a morning daily. With every new technology, the newspaper underwent a change to narrow the time gap between events and reportage of those events. Almost every decade saw a change in design, and introduction of new fonts. Periodically new sections were introduced, some old sections were revised and tweaked, some were amalgamated and those that became redundant were eliminated.
The open house gives readers an opportunity to interact with the Editor and his senior team to understand how this newspaper works. It provides a platform for the editorial team to learn about the needs, expectations and requirements of readers. The Office of the Readers’ Editor restricts its role to that of a facilitator in this interaction. Some young readers ask: why do we need face-to-face interaction when we can write letters or use social media?
At the cost of repeating myself, I must confess that that I do not have any analytics or measuring tools to quantify what the newspaper gains by directly interacting with its readers. More than once, I tried to tabulate the gains of the open house but soon gave up as the table failed to capture that wonderful human attribute called emotion. The organic relationship between a newspaper and its readers goes beyond gains. It is a qualitative attribute that encompasses trust, credibility, shared concerns and a common good. At the end of every open house, both editors and readers have felt that they gained something valuable.
readers.editor@thehindu.co.in
