A word from the board
Although we may be counting down the minutes to our summer holidays, there is no let-up in the news that drives our colleagues’ working days and fills their inboxes. One of the key issues of our time is the complexity of the coverage of elections in a digital age. It featured in our Cape Town conference at which our AI session has been shown to be the most popular in a survey of attendees. The full results of the survey are on our website.
One of the major issues to emerge in the elections held and others still to come is the difficulties of covering in a fair accurate way the often outrageous oratory of the populist politicians. This problem will be the subject of our next Shoptalk, which is highlighted elsewhere in the newsletter with a link to a column by Soledad Alcaide, Defensora del Lector at El País, who recently had to tackle the issue. There is also news of Miriam Lewin, who has now finished her term as the Defensoria del Público of Argentina and has stepped down from the ONO board. There are also the usual links from colleagues to the best things to read about journalism.
The next newsletter will be out at the beginning of September. Happy holidays!
Margo Smit, president
Jack Nagler, vice president
Elisabeth Ribbans, treasurer
Chris Elliott, executive director
How was it for you?
As part of the board’s efforts to improve our conferences, we surveyed the 21 ONO members who attended the sessions in Cape Town. Thirteen responded, and ONO Vice-President Jack Nagler gave a summary to a meeting of the Board in June. He said the results were generally very positive with delegates clearly appreciating the longer breaks between sessions to meet and talk to other delegates. The most popular session, with more than a 60% approval rate, was the “Dis/misinformation, manipulated photos: AI challenges for ombuds and standards editors”.
Jack congratulated George Claassen and Latiefa Mobara for all their efforts in making the conference successful.
Among the comments in the section on the biggest single benefit for attending:
“Hearing from my colleagues from around the world, learning whether the issues I face on a regular basis are the same issues that they face. It’s beneficial to know that no one individual ombudsperson, standards editor, public/readers editor is alone in their efforts to keep solid, factual journalism on the front burner.”
Click here to see the survey’s full results
Miriam Lewin steps down from the board
After an extraordinary career Miriam Lewin has now finished her term as the Defensoria del Público of Argentina and has stepped down from the ONO board. Before Miriam became a journalist, she was a political activist who was kidnapped in 1977. An introduction to her lecture series in the autumn of 2019 at New York University revealed what happened after she spent a year in a clandestine torture centre in Buenos Aires:
“She then spent another 10 months in the notorious ESMA concentration camp where 5,000 people were killed. She is one of the few survivors. In 1985 she testified as a witness in the trial of former Junta commanders.”
As a print, radio and TV journalist, she has received numerous awards and was also a committed opponent of Javier Milei, the right wing politician elected as president in November, 2023. ONO delivered a public protest in January this year to members of the Argentine government and civil institutions following the submission of a bill to eliminate the office of the Defensoría del Público.
In an email to the ONO board announcing her decision to step down she said:
First and foremost, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your support, especially during these challenging months. It was an honor to participate remotely in this year’s annual general meeting and share our insights on the situation in Argentina, particularly regarding public media, freedom of expression, and the unique circumstances of the Public Defender’s Office.
Miriam Lewin
Of course, my gratitude is not limited to these last six months. Participating in all the shop talks and conferences over the last years, especially in London, nurtured our daily practice.
Although I will no longer be part of ONO’s executive board, I will be happy to remain an associate member…
…The political environment and the threats to freedom of expression make the existence of the Defensoría more necessary than ever. Finally, I encourage you to continue including ombuds and standard editors from Latin American countries, Asia, and Africa to enrich and broaden the debates and viewpoints within such a valuable organization as ONO.
Margo thanked her for her work on the board “sharing your insights, your wisdom and for inspiring us with your strong belief in quality journalism for the benefit of the public…I wish you all the best in these difficult times”.
Shoptalk: how do you cover populist politicians? Sunlight or darkness?
The relentless march towards power of populist politicians in elections across the world causes quite a few problems for colleagues trying to decide how to cover them. Do you starve them of the oxygen of publicity or cover their every quotable and controversial intervention? In Belgium there are some French speaking journalists who impose a cordon sanitaire around their utterances; elsewhere journalists believe in exposure. How do ombuds cope in those circumstances? We can see how one ombuds approached this issue here(please insert link) in a recent column by Soledad Alcaide, Defensora del Lector at El País.
The next ONO Shoptalk will explore these questions and other aspects on September 10 at 12 noon UTC. Speakers to be announced.
Members’ contributions and columns
New York Times
Surgeon General Calls for Warning Labels on Social Media Platforms
It Looked Like a Reliable News Site. It Was an A.I. Chop Shop.
BBC
Pierre Champoux spotted a new piece of research published by the BBC “Embedding the Audience: putting audiences at the heart of Generative AI”. Peter Archer of the BBC said that it was in-depth qualitative research, which asked people about their thoughts, reactions and feelings towards GenAI being used within news, audio and video. Key points include:
“Gen AI is seen as a permanent, significant and disruptive step-change in technology and media.
“There’s nervousness about how Gen AI might be used in media, including how it may impact creative roles.”
Guardian
Debating whether Julian Assange is a journalist is irrelevant. He changed journalism forever
Jeff Bezos once saved the Washington Post. Now he needs to do it again
Global Investigative Journalism Network
‘Smoke and Lies’: How Visual Forensics Disproved Official Accounts of a Deadly Migrant Center Fire
NiemanLab
ChatGPT is hallucinating fake links to its news partners’ biggest investigations
Poynter
Populism is a major threat to democracy, political scientist Steven Levitsky warns
Shut Out: Strategies for good journalism when sources dismiss the press
NiemanReports
The Long, Slow Death of the Newspaper Editorial
Columbia Journalism Review
Let’s Try This Again
The Journalist’s Resource
Readers of online news prefer simple headlines, research suggests. Journalists? Not so much.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Digital News Report 2024
International Journalism Network
7 best practices for covering LGBTQ+ communities through data
Pew Research Center
More than half of Americans are following election news closely, and many are already worn out
American Press Institute
Here are the convening skills journalists are using to build trust and community capital
This is your newsletter!
If you want to share your own experiences or have reports all ONO members should know about, find us at newsombudsmenorg@gmail.com and we will include it in ONO’s next newsletter.
