Tag Archives: Edward Wasserman

Death of the ombudsman

Media, , , ,

Edward Wasserman, the dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, laments the elimination of The Washington Post‘s ombudsman position:

No matter how the job is structured, ombudsmen generally please no one. While journalists complain that they’re quick on the trigger and unsympathetic to the pressures of deadline-driven news production, outsiders say they’re too soft, and lack the spine to challenge their own employers over the most vexing new practices.

To that is joined now the criticism that they’re simply obsolete. That’s a point The Post itself endorsed when it noted the profusion of tough media commentary from unaffiliated online critics, implying there was no longer a need for The Post itself to weigh in as well.

That’s an interesting point, but I didn’t hear any corresponding commitment to cooperate with these outside inquiries. And I can’t imagine The Post deciding that in light of the ramped-up coverage of Capitol Hill by Politico, The New York Times and others, it need no longer cover Congress.

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Learning the wrong lessons from The Atlantic’s Scientology debacle

Media, Religion, , , , , , ,

UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism dean Edward Wasserman is dismayed over the consensus takeaway from the recent Atlantic advertising snafu, in which a glowing article written and paid for by the Church of Scientology was presented almost exactly as if it were regular journalism:

In the aftermath of this embarrassment, some of the criticism the Atlantic received was surprising, and focused on how poorly the magazine played the “native” game: Nobody, it was said, could mistake the Scientology missive for an article the Atlantic might actually have run. The magazine erred, Charlie Warzel of AdWeek wrote, by “licensing uninteresting and bizarre content that falls well outside the walls of the magazine’s brand.”

Economist magazine managing director Paul Rossi advised publishers to start thinking like ad agencies and get better at concealment: “The real issue is how do  you make content that’s compelling to a reader that doesn’t feel like an ad. That’s the real challenge.”

So the problem was that the deception was inept and easily detected. If that’s it, the solution, it seems, would be to integrate paid persuasion seamlessly into editorial offerings, so that reader resistance is allayed and the ads go down smoothly.

But that’s not it. The more basic problem, as Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman wrote, is an “existential” one. In that regard, “native advertising” succeeds precisely because it’s so skillfully wrought that it’s imperceptible as advertising, and joins the flow of information and commentary that readers accept as part of the chronicle of topical realities that they trust the news media to provide.