WHOSE SIDE?

posted by James Reel

    One thing that has long bugged me about the Arizona Daily Star, one of my ex-employers, is the Sunday “Reader Advocate” column. The Star just doesn’t understand what the person in that position is supposed to do.
    Consider this key sentence from Debbie Kornmiller’s most recent column, concerning the dozen guiding principles recently set forth by the paper’s publisher: “I will write each month, starting in November, about a different principle and how we are serving our community.” If Debbie were truly the reader advocate, she’d be writing about how the paper is not serving its community. She’s supposed to be the newsroom watchdog, catching errors in judgment and fact and writing on behalf of the paper’s subscribers. Debbie does sometimes write about newsroom errors, but the column almost always winds up being a defense of what was done, or maybe a summary of the noble steps the staff took to correct the situation. I can understand why she prints reader comments only occasionally—the public comments appended to online stories are shamefully unintelligent, so she obviously doesn’t have much to work with—but that doesn’t excuse her from generating her own objections to what the Star does, and offering more than an account of how the chain of command occasionally breaks down. She merely explains; she doesn’t act. And, really, how often do we need her to explain how the weather page is being revamped, or how the crossword puzzle got put in the wrong place, or why the TV listings are inaccurate? These are about the least important elements of the newspaper, yet they dominate her column.
    Debbie, whom I like personally, isn’t functioning as a reader advocate. She’s a newsroom apologist. I miss crusty old Leo Della Betta, who had the job back in the pre-gender-neutral days when it was called “ombudsman.”