Some newspaper ombudsmen prefer to be called "ombuddies," but as the Washington Post's Deborah Howell tells Gelf, "You don't have any friends in this job." That's because ombudsmen are put in the unusual position of critiquing the work of their colleagues and the very institution they work for.
The ombudsman (also known as the "public editor" or "reader representative") serves as an in-house critic and mediator between the paper and the public. The Hartford Courant's Karen Hunter says that her responsibility is "to explain how the newsroom works to readers, and to tell the newsroom how the readers feel about them."
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