Creating a Guide for News Ombudsmen

I am in the process of writing a guidebook for new and aspiring ombudsmen on behalf of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. Hence my less than frequent postings on this blog. Thanks to all for forbearance...It shouldn't be much longer.

As I think of all the elements that go into the role of an independent news ombudsman, I am constantly reminded of how the role is both robust and subtle.

Robust because the claims and counter-claims of the public can be as intense as any dialogue in the public sphere.

Subtle because an ombudsman needs to parse and dissect the elements and nuances in any argument no matter how intense they may be. It is also a relentless job that offers few ways to separate oneself from the onslaught. Members of the public may complain (as is their right). But it is their one and only missive to the ombudsman. The O receives dozens every day and the ability to deal with them all in a reasoned and proportional way is the essence of the job.

So in the writing of the handbook, I'm constantly reminded of the little ways in which ombudsman try to keep calm and carry on. A walk around the block, a cup of green tea, an adjacent Chinese gong which could be struck at times of duress (my assistant could hear it some days a bit too often) and a life outside of work were all helpful. But the return to the reality of a growing inbox of emails was always there.

But the real comfort was in knowing that the public still cared enough about good journalism to want to write to the ombudsman.

CBC Radio: Losing Audiences in a Losing Strategy?

A recent unpublished poll from the Ottawa-based Canadian Media Research Inc. shows that CBC Radio continues to lose some of its longtime audiences, due largely to its music programming strategy.

The survey taken in February 2011 indicates that the strategy of playing more Canadian indie and pop music on Radio Two is still not working after almost three years of trying.

CBC Radio has long been considered the jewel in the crown of Canadian public broadcasting. Brand loyalty to radio has always been deeper than for CBC TV.

Now that seems to be on the verge of change as audiences for what was once a solid news, classical and jazz service continue to fall, with some listeners migrating to the all-information service on Radio One. Others say they are losing their secular religion and migrating to online news and satellite radio from sources like the BBC World Service and NPR.

It's these growing doubts that are so disturbing.

Details about the survey will be published soon, but here is a sampling of the conclusions:

• Core listenership (heavy users) remain loyal to CBC Radio and believe the service is better now than in the past.
• Light users now constitute 50% of the audience for CBC Radio. They value local news and weather above all.
• CBC Radio listeners are not smartphone users. If they have the devices, they do not use them to text or to stream audio.
• Listeners to CBC Radio One are heavy users of cbc.ca. Most of the audience for the CBC website comes from CBC Radio.
• CBC Radio listeners find the frequent sport reports and updates "annoying." They also dislike hearing promos for CBC Television on CBC Radio.
• The "lost audience" for CBC Radio Two would return if classical music programming could be restored.

This survey leaves the CBC with a few hard choices:

1. It could abandon its present music strategy and return to serve a demographic that values the CBC for what it was and what it could be.
2. It could decide that as a public broadcaster, being all things to all audiences is not possible when money is tight.
3. It could move Canadian and indie music to the net where that elusive demographic lives anyway.
4. It could restore news and information as a priority to CBC Radio and Television which is the CBC's mandate anyway and would more clearly differentiate CBC from the rest.
5. Or it could continue along, and wait for the federal government to force the CBC to make those choices through draconian budget cuts.

Risky Business for All Journalists: Foreign Reporting

The recent sexual assault on CBS News' Lara Logan by a Cairo mob while on assignment brought out a lot of nervous discussion about the wisdom of sending female reporters into harm's way.

While there have been mercifully few suggestions that foreign reporting should be limited to men, much of the discussion has been about the need for all reporters - men and women - need to be assured of their safety. Unfortunately, this is not always done.

The foreign desk at all news organizations has always had a special responsibility to make sure that risks are minimized and that correspondents are given the appropriate training in advance of their assignments. At CBC Radio News in the early 1990s, all ten of our foreign correspondents were women. We tried to assure their safety in all situations. In retrospect, while we did not hear of any sexual incidents, I wonder if the correspondents wouldn't mention it for fear they might appear to lack the necessary "toughness" in front of management.

Reporters always need to be ready to handle the worst situations. But as western media have reduced the amount of overseas reporting, I suspect many news organizations have been hesitant about spending the money needed give their reporters the prep they need.

NPR has in the past refused to give its correspondents the kind of training needed for dangerous assignments. Some of this was due to the foreign desk's old school macho approach to reporting. I hope this has changed by now. The CBC has allowed some training but the real leader in this has been the BBC.

This was especially true when the CBC's Melissa Fung was kidnapped on assignment and held for a month by "bandits' in Afghanistan. The CBC won't comment about her pre-assignment training or her post-rescue recovery. According to some in the CBC, more could have been done both before and after her ordeal.

The International News Safety Institute has developed a series of excellent training programs including one specifically for women journalists. Another has been developed by the BBC and is run by women, for women. Both are especially effective, not in avoiding violence entirely, but certainly in dealing with it when it happens.

Judith Matloff explored the issue in 2007 in a powerful and disturbing Columbia Review of Journalism article titled "Unspoken."

Matloff explains: "Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do. But there is one area where they differ from the boys - sexual harassment and rape. Female reporters are targets in lawless places where guns are common and punishment rare. Yet the compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don't tell their bosses. Groping hands and lewd come-ons are stoically accepted as part of the job, especially in places where western women are viewed as promiscuous. War zones in particular seem to invite unwanted advances, and sometimes the creeps can be the drivers, guards, and even the sources that one depends on to do the job. Often they are drunk. But female journalists tend to grit their teeth and keep on working, unless it gets worse." 

The overt violence in Egypt has also elicited quiet anxieties in many newsrooms about reporting in Arab and Muslim countries where sexual oppression and cultural tensions are increasingly directed against western reporters. 


Hopefully, this will not dissuade journalists from reporting from that part of the world. But the psychopathology of the Egyptian mobs indicates that political change and sexual violence are intertwined when foreign reporters in general and female reporters specifically are trying to do their jobs.


Might Al Jazeera have any suggestions about how to handle this? Possibly not, since AJE has so far, not even mentioned the incident.

Toronto to Cairo and Back: The Inventiveness of Students

My class at Centennial College in Toronto is made up of a dozen grad students in a fast-track journalism program. But instead of getting into the academic minutiae of teaching multi-platform journalism which is what my class is about, we decided to leap into the events going on in Egypt.

The result is a terrific website created by these students, called ToronTOCairo. Since most media are covering the broad strokes of the story, we decided to see if we can create some of the connective tissue between young people in Toronto and their cohort in Cairo.

We are using the usual multi-platform content of text, audio and video. But we are also pushing hard with User Generated Content (UGC) as well: flickr, tweets, facebook and tumblr.

The goal is to see what kinds of dialogue we can discover. So far, the twitter feeds are working and we are hearing from Cairenes only 24 hours after launching. Other media notably, The Toronto Star have commented favorably.

This story has legs and who knows where it will take us over the coming weeks.

WikiLeaks: Is Mainstream Media Having "Buyer's Remorse?"

Recent articles by Bill Keller of the New York Times and Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian seem to expressing if not second thoughts, then at least a measured reappraisal about the long term value of WikiLeaks.

It's not that the basic goals of governmental accountability are bad. Far from it. But the manner in which Julian Assange has conducted his operation has caused a surge of stomach acid in newsrooms around Europe and North America.

No doubt that WikiLeaks has revealed some interesting cables about US foreign policy. This is especially true concerning the war in Afghanistan. But frankly, the news from WikiLeaks is not that stunning or even that consequential.

Assange's hearing in England over allegations that he is wanted in a rape case in Sweden has done much to sully whatever positive effect has emerged from WikiLeaks.

Both the Times and the Guardian have published articles about Assange that have raised doubts about the wisdom of partnerships between mainstream media and Assange.

Tonight on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, John Burns of the Times has added his own perspective from the court in London where the extradition hearing is being held.

Burns notes that Wikileaks has "taken an increasingly polemical stand, at least in the person of Assange, who's very much - WikiLeaks and Assange are, if you will, coterminous. He is WikiLeaks, to all extents and purposes and he has taken to public platforms and declared that his purpose in doing - in releasing these documents is in effect an assault on the United States, which he describes as being the biggest threat to democracy in the world and so on and so forth, and to hasten, if he can, an end to the war in Afghanistan, which puts him in the position rather more of being a politician than of being a journalist and it puts him in a very polemical position which has, by the way, alienated large numbers of his own associates in WikiLeaks..."

WikiLeaks is first draft journalism in much the same way that C-Span and the Parliamentary Channel are. There is a lot there, but it takes mature and seasoned journalists to sort it out. The Times, the Guardian and others have done precisely the right thing in making sense of the documents.

But what seems to be giving MSM journalists hives is the Assange-factor: this somewhat opaque and highly polemical self-promoter who is finally more open about his political attitudes than he has been before.

There will be more leaks, and possibly even more Assange-type characters who will come forward offering journalistic treasures. MSM needs to figure out a way that the next run of  odd and somewhat insecure messengers does not distort the more important and valuable message of public accountability and good journalism.

As journalism strives to deal with allegations of bias, Assange comes out and says that he actually DOES have an agenda. That is unfortunate, and clearly there is a measure of "buyer's remorse" from the two most important English-language newspapers about having entered into this arrangement with Assange.

The CBC's "New" Regional Strategy

CBC President Hubert Lacoix

CBC President Hubert Lacroix announced on February 1 that the CBC is launching a new strategy to boost its service to the regions over the next five years. Entitled "Everyone, Every Way," it plans to add new local radio stations and expand its online presence by a doubling of investment in digital services over the next five years. The money, he says will come from further "efficiencies and cuts."

"What we'd like to do is expand our presence in the regions," Lacroix is quoted as saying.  "You can't be a national broadcaster — I've said this since the moment I walked in — without being deeply, deeply rooted in the regions."

This is good news coming from a national public broadcaster that, in the past, has tried to be a media "playa" by getting ratings hits. The CBC has tried to show the the federal government (which largely funds the CBC) that it is worth every penny of its $1 billion annual budget for one reason: it delivers eyeballs to advertisers, just like the big boys do in commercial TV.

CBC Radio on the other hand, remains non-commercial, but it too has tried to appeal to the same media market with more pop music and host driven interview shows.

While the ratings for some of the new TV offerings have been undoubted hits, the value of the CBC to Canadians seems more questionable than ever. Its popular television fare seem rooted in reality TV from ten years ago, while the CBC has doubled-down on hockey and related spin-offs which have proven to be popular in this hockey-mad country, but that affection for sports does not seem to be transferred to an appreciation for the CBC itself.

More problematic are the changes to CBC News. Budget and staff cutbacks have been done by a deliberate focusing on news on the cheap: crime, traffic and weather. The once highly contextual coverage is looking and sounding pretty thin these days, with excited banter compensating for a lack of depth.

On CBC Radio, music programming (mostly indie and pop and decidedly Canadian) has seen a huge audience decline as classical music - so loved by the core audience - has been largely abandoned.

The CBC overall continues to struggling to find a role that is both unique and popular in a fractured media landscape. Not an easy task.

While the Lacroix announcement may have played well inside CBC HQ on Front Street, it probably garnered less support among that once loyal, core audience. These longtime supporters of the public broadcaster are feeling dissed and abandoned and they are actively looking for alternatives.

CBC management dismissed this core as being out of date and elitist, especially under former VP Richard Stursburg whose quest for popularity and ratings deformed the traditional appeal of the CBC. Stursburg was fired by Lacroix last summer, allegedly over disagreeing precisely this change in direction toward the regions.

So what does it mean and what might it portend?

First, the "regions" is code at the CBC for "not coming from Toronto."

This is not always a bad thing, although some network-centric programmers in Toronto would surely disagree. If the regions were able to really have programming input that served a local audience, it might be even better.

I once suggested to a previous CBC VP that the scheduling might best be handed over to the stations, leaving local managers to decide what worked best for their audiences. Said VP looked as though I had uttered something truly obscene. At the CBC, "serving the regions" means giving local stations the right to accept whatever Toronto tells them to broadcast.

Second, the idea of more local radio is a good one, provided that the content is there to support it. The notion that local radio could originate from internet streaming live programming is a good way of expanding service while minimizing costs. The question of who listens to their computer over breakfast still needs to be assessed.

Third, while this is all good in principle, some tough questions facing the CBC are still not being addressed.

They are some to start with:

• What is the role of the public broadcaster in 2011? 
• Can service be expanded without diluting quality? 
• Should the CBC be expected to provide everything to everyone as per "Everyone Every Way" with its present budget? 
• If the CBC had to make hard choices about what it should be (without being forced to by the federal government) what would it look like and sound like? 
• Finally, what can be done to restore public trust and support for the CBC?

Management has said that a CBC version of PBS or TVO (the Ontario public TV broadcaster) is not an option, but they never say why. My guess is that if they ever openly considered that route, the federal government would quickly agree and slash the budget. Which is bound to happen, especially if the Conservatives win a majority in Parliament.

But without considering other options, "Everyone Every Way" is a step in the right direction, but the CBC is only forestalling the inevitable.

Which may not be so bad after all.

 

Ryerson Radio and Government Regulators: A Cautionary Tale

Ryerson University in Toronto has hosted a student radio station for almost 20 years.

CKLN has been a source of indie music, radical discussion groups and student activism since the early 1980s. That is as it should be.

Originally a jazz station known as CJRT, that station was sold to a group of jazz aficionados and it now operates as a quasi-public radio station. It has some advertising, and it solicits donations from the public.

Although Ryerson and CKLN have had a tenuous relationship, student union fees of $10 per student go to support the station. Ryerson University has had no say in the governance of the station and the journalism school at Ryerson has a separate radio program that essentially bypasses CKLN. The same is true for the Department of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson.

So it came as a surprise to most people when the federal broadcast regulator, the CRTC, (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) suddenly removed the license of the station, telling them to cease broadcasting by February 12.

This was unusual for a couple of reasons, but the motivations behind it could be instructive.

First, the CRTC has rarely lifted a broadcast license. The last time, several years ago was over a morning zoo format of a Quebec City station. It was airing racist and sexist exchanges that many found offensive. So did the CRTC and so the station was taken off the air. CKLN clearly did not fall into that level of breach of service.

Second, the stated reasons for shutting down CKLN was because the station had failed to keep accurate logs and records. This is important because music royalties went unpaid and artists have been complaining to the CRTC about this with increasing stridency.

Third, internal station politics at CKLN had reached a point where the station appeared to be increasingly dysfunctional. Reports of internecine battles over politics and gender were reaching a boiling point and some fist fights were noted among staffers who were accusing one another of being insufficiently leftist or exceedingly sexist. 

Is it the role of the regulator to intervene and essentially micro-manage a campus radio station? Seems odd considering how all too often dysfunctional media management seems to prevail and thrive.

So if the CRTC does not reverse itself, a radio license has suddenly become available in one of the hottest media markets in North America. Some questions need answers:

1. Is this CRTC intervention a sign of things to come from what has been a very laissez-faire regulator? Should other broadcasters be looking at their own management practices now?

2. Will one of the domestic "bigs" (Rogers, Bell, Sun Media, CBC) try to move in and scoop up the license?

3. Or will a non-Canadian entity (Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR) be interested to try its luck with a new brand of informational media and if so, will the free-market advocates at the Toronto stations object?