Ombudsman Blog

Was it retaliation?

In a review for The New York Times four years ago, best-selling author Buzz Bissinger criticized a new book by noted writer Allen Barra as lacking “any sustained vitality.”

In a review for The Washington Post several weeks ago, Barra described “Shooting Stars,” Bissinger’s new as-told-to memoir with basketball superstar LeBron James, as “an air ball.”

Now Bissinger wonders if Barra’s critical review for The Post amounts to “payback time” for his “clearly negative” earlier Times review of Barra’s book.

From the moment Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was identified on Thursday as the alleged killer in the Fort Hood shootings, managers at The Post’s Web site knew to expect a flood of anti-Muslim comments.

First, they stopped accepting reader comments on stories between midnight and 6 a.m. Friday out of concern that they couldn’t adequately monitor the initial overnight wave of them. When commenting was allowed to resume Friday morning, The Post had assigned four monitors instead of the normal lone staffer to check for comments that might violate the site’s abuse policies.

Those policies cover a wide range of “inappropriate content,” including any comment that “degrades” on the basis of “ethnicity, national origin (or) religion.”

Even with beefed-up monitoring, abusive comments have slipped through in recent days. Some are ugly.

Apparently, you can do something about the weather.

Among the many reader complaints about The Post’s recent newspaper design changes, none have been louder than those reacting to the new weather layout on the back page of the Metro section. In particular, readers have said the national weather map is so small that it’s almost impossible to read without a magnifying glass.

Editors listened, and the map is expected to be returned to its original size beginning in Tuesday’s paper.

There will be no change to The Post’s online weather page, which permits readers to customize for their precise location and instantly check weather around the nation and the world.

Fans who went to The Post's Web site Monday to read Tom Boswell’s coverage of Sunday’s World Series game were treated to the same incisive, colorful copy they’ve come to expect from one of the nation’s premier baseball columnists.

But those who read Boswell in Monday morning’s newspaper encountered a mess. By my count, the column contained at least 20 typos, grammatical errors or misspellings.

Readers complained.

“I’d like my 75 cents back, please,” wrote reader Mitch Zeller of Olney, who had purchased a copy of Monday’s Post at the Bethesda Metro station. “There is no excuse for such a shoddy product. It’s completely unprofessional; more errors than one would see in a high school or college newspaper.”

Despite a dismal season, The Washington Redskins are still the biggest game in town. But when tens of thousands of Post readers opened their Tuesday papers for coverage of the previous night’s drubbing by the Philadelphia Eagles, they found...nothing.

The same thing happened Wednesday morning for many readers expecting results of the Washington Wizards’ exciting season-opening victory over the Mavericks in Dallas the previous night.

And this morning, many weren’t able to read anything about last night’s World Series game in which the Phillies beat the Yankees 6-1 in New York.

The cause: Earlier deadlines that have been imposed largely because of cost-cutting. The result: Up to 185,000 readers each day didn’t get coverage of the previous night’s game.

Here’s one of the main questions from readers who have offered views on The Post’s print redesign: Do editors care what I think?

That was a common theme in reader e-mails following Sunday’s ombudsman column noting my surprise at how few readers had submitted comments to ideas@washpost.com, the address set up for feedback. As I wrote, through Friday “they totaled fewer than the more than 750 who contacted The Post in the spring after editors eliminated the ‘Judge Parker’ comic strip,” which was subsequently restored.

After Sunday’s column appeared, more than 100 others wrote to ideas@washpost.com and about 50 more e-mailed me. Many said they hadn’t written because they considered the changes a done deal.

“Why waste precious time tilting against a fait accompli?” wrote one. “I generally find the Post’s requests for readers’ comments very disingenuous.”

But there’s evidence editors are listening.

The Post touted some impressive stats on the back page of Monday’s 8-page special section explaining the paper’s extensive design changes.

Among them was a claim that “nearly three times as many Washingtonians age 25-54 read The Post each week than listen to WTOP, the largest audience radio station.”

But Jim Farley, WTOP’s vice president of news and programming, said it was a “bogus claim.”

“They do not print any source for that wildly inaccurate claim,” he wrote me. According to the latest data from media and marketing firm Arbitron, he said, “659,600 people between 25-54 listen to WTOP each week, more than the entire circulation of the newspaper.”

Friends: I'll be on vacation until the week of Oct. 19. The Omblog will resume shortly after I return.

-- Andy Alexander

More than any other story this week, Post readers have responded to Tuesday’s profile of Orly Taitz, who has emerged as a leader of the “birther” movement challenging Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president. But what is fascinating about the reaction from the readers I've heard from is that most aren’t objecting to anything in the 2,500-word story. Rather, they’re angry that there was a story at all.

Bethesda reader Steven Berson complained in an e-mail that it was a “disgrace” that The Post would print such “trash.” He added: “What makes her claim newsworthy?”

More than 40 other readers e-mailed or called with similar objections.

The Post’s recently issued guidelines governing participation in social media have renewed a spirited debate in the industry about the level of transparency by journalists.

The policies are restrictive in that they caution Post reporters and editors against writing anything on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn that might be seen as showing bias or taking sides in public debates. The rationale is that The Post will achieve maximum credibility on its news pages through maintaining neutrality.

But there are a number of respected journalists who believe otherwise and argue that that if journalists shared their views on subjects they cover, readers would trust them more.

One of them is Dan Gillmor, a provocative expert on new media at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We hold different views; I’m a traditionalist on neutrality and endorse the intent of The Post’s guidelines. But in researching last Sunday’s column on social media, I had several exchanges with Dan and thought his views were stimulating about the entire question of newsroom transparency. Here are passages from a lengthy e-mail he sent me, which eventually became a post on his Mediactive blog: