How news ombudsmen build trust in the media
Lessons learned from Albania
In-house ombudsmen training at Gazeta Mapo, Albania.
Across the world, the ongoing economic crisis has had a tremendous impact on media, worsening journalists’ job security, negatively impacting media quality, and hurting the public’s confidence in the media as a watchdog of democracy. The recent UNESCO report World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development reveals that “to varying degrees, the commitment to professional ethics has either stagnated or weakened, due to particular responses to severe competition, the blurring boundaries between editorial and business interests, and the entry of citizen journalists into news production and dissemination.”
As underlined in this UNESCO report, media independence requires both job security and autonomy and also awareness of and commitment to ethics
UNESCO works to enhance journalists’ adherence to professional standards and ethics. The Organization is therefore leading a project in South East Europe and Turkey to further promote freedom of expression and freedom of information through strengthening media self-regulation mechanisms such as news ombudsmen.
News ombudsmen are responsible for liaising between a news outlet’s staff and its users by receiving user comments and complaints and trying to resolve disagreements between the two sides. News ombudsmen have proven attractive to media outlets as they enhance the media’s reputation while reducing costly lawsuits against journalists. Despite their positive impact, such mechanisms have experienced a decline around the world due to business-related cutbacks.
In-house training for Albanian ombudsmen.
In Albania, media accountability to the public remains low. EU recent Progress Reports have highlighted growing economic pressure on the media, lack of work contracts for journalists, and self-censorship among journalists. Albania is among the few countries in the region without a self-regulatory system in place.
To address this situation, UNESCO is currently supporting five Albanian pilot news ombudsmen through the project “Promoting Media Accountability in South East Europe and Turkey”. Given the context of the Albanian media landscape, pilot ombudsmen were selected from among internal staff rather than hiring someone from outside the newsroom in order to facilitate acceptance from newspaper staff of potential future decisions or observations of the ombudsmen.
After studying the functioning of news ombudsmen elsewhere in Europe, the establishment in Albanian media outlets was launched in three phases:
- Communicating the existence of ombudsmen to readers and explaining what he/she does, and how they can be contacted.
- Giving ombudsmen a weekly column related to ethics.
- Providing ombudsmen with the possibility to publish regularly a review of the main complaints of readers.
In addition, in October and November 2013, a series of in-house training sessions regarding the role of ombudsmen were organized in the Albanian news outlets that had agreed to establish pilot news ombudsmen. They gathered journalists and editors from the newsrooms to discuss various ethical issues and the challenges of implementing a code of ethics in a context of fierce competition and the new online environment.
In interviews with UNESCO, Mustafa Nano and Alfred Lela, ethics editor for Respublica portal and ombudsman of the Albanian daily Mapo respectively, shared with us the lessons learned as newly established pilot news ombudsmen and some of the challenges they have encountered in the digital environment.
>> Click here to read the interview with Mustafa Nano and Alfred Lela