Ombudsmen now vital for holding newsrooms accountable
The story traces a Scandinavian idea from 1809 through the first American appointment in 1967 to its modern evolution as news organizations navigate public trust and internal accountability.
The Watcher's Watchdog On a summer morning in 1967, somewhere between the clatter of typewriters and the hum of printing presses, a newspaper publisher in Louisville, Kentucky, made a quiet announcement that would quietly reshape how American journalism thought about its own accountability. Barry Bingham, editor and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and its afternoon sibling the Louisville Times , revealed that his organization had become the first newspaper in the United States to adopt the Scandinavian...
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