It always was a delight to speak withDeborah Howell at ONO’s annual meetings. Like fellow deceased Post ombudsmen Joseph Laitin (who had served in five different presidential administrations before he befriended me during my first ONO meeting in 1988),  and Richard Harwood (who used to try to recruit me from my Palm Beach Post to his Post), her wisdom, and wit, will be missed.

While I’m here, I should mention the launch of ONO’s redesigned website, www.newsombudsmen.org. Let us know what you think.

Also, I still am on track to represent ONO to journalists in Baku, Azerbaijan in upcoming months. More on that to come.

For now, think a good thought for her and her family in reading about my colleague Deborah Howell.

From our recent Washington, D.C. conference of the world’s news ombudsmen, I came away thinking that we members of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen don’t have The Answer for newspapers either. At least, not here in the USA.

Our group’s president, Stephen Pritchard, reported that since last year’s meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, U.S. newspapers have lost 12 ombudsmen, including yours truly, to buyouts, retirement, layoffs or some other budget-motivated downsizing. Of course, the overall number of professional news journalists no longer serving U.S. readers is staggering.

This year’s ONO meeting began with a reception at the board rooms of National Public Radio, a tour of NPR’s recording studios and an opportunity to observe a taping of NPR’s trademark All Things Considered.

(See the conference agenda here; a photo slideshow here; the audio and video of a notable panel and the text of some presentations here.)

Our sessions continued at The Washington Post, the Newseum, NPR and The New York Times’ Washington bureau.

And repeatedly, during formal and informal comments over the next three days, colleagues from as far afield as Eastern Europe and South America reported a different story from that in the U.S. — namely, flourishing rather than waning support for newspapers.

During the past decade I reported to Palm Beach Post readers the surging interest in ombudsmanship abroad compared to the U.S. ( for example here and here).

In his post-conference column, Janne Anderson, ombudsman for Stockholm’s TV4, provided the typical kind of report I gave Post readers over the years, including:

“The U.S. ombudsmen are quite worried and the whole conference was colored by this anxiety but also by many discussions and suggestions about how media ombudsmen can survive and whether they will have a future?”

Meanwhile, from the former Soviet republics to East African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania, there is emerging interest in quality news journalism. That’s in contrast to its decline in the U.S., notably showcased in the Judith Miller debacle at The New York Times, and the supine behavior of U.S. news organizations in general, in helping promote our country’s invasion of Iraq.

(For which, our colleagues from elsewhere continue to remind us, there has been little accountability. Sure, there is U.S. newspapers’ Internet-devasted business model. But also too-often damnable performance. But that’s another post.)

A new trend around the world is media organizations emerging from decades of dictatorial repression or state censorship, reaffirming their commitment to be accurate, fair and transparent — and wanting to establish an ombudsman role.

Alicia Shepard, NPR’s ombudsman, spelled this out in her column following last year’s sessions. For example, she quoted Pam Platt, then ONO’s president as well as the public editor at the Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal, the first U.S. newspaper to establish the position: “Ombudsmen are growing in parts of the world where a free press is starting to assert itself.”

Shepard concluded by noting that “the editorial director for Kenya’s Nation Media Group has asked ONO for help in writing a job profile so he can hire an in-house critic. Considering the dozens of polls that repeatedly tell of the media’s loss of credibility in this country, it is unfortunate that more U.S. news outlets aren’t willing to take this same step toward regaining public esteem.”

Similarly, TV4′s Anderson reported this year that “A number of media companies from various countries in Africa want ombudsmen and have requested help from the ONO.”

One result of such interest has been the demand by foreign members that more ONO meetings be held outside the U.S. Reflecting that sentiment, “Next year will be the ONO conference’s 30th anniversary,” wrote my Swedish colleague. “It will be held in Capetown, South Africa.”

In a previous post I mentioned The Coastal Star newspaper, one of the publications in which my freelance work appears, and the Palm Beach Arts Paper. The feedback I’m hearing regarding them and the South Florida Times, another newspaper for which I write, suggests an encouraging future for quality journalism whether delivered via print, broadcast, online or whatever technology provides next.

The big question in the U.S., however, is not news. It still is whether quality newspapers will prove to be the exception rather than the rule.

“I hardly have time to go to the bathroom,” said then-Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell. “Start a blog?”

Before we survey the recent Washington, D.C. meeting of the world’s news ombudsmen, indulge me a look back at our meetings last year in Stockholm and two years ago at Harvard.

Amid all the breaking changes at my former newspaper, I missed ONO’s 2008 Stockholm sessions.

That was regrettable. Not only because I had told my Swedish counterpart, Lilian Ohrstrom, that I really hoped to be present. And because it would have been great to check out her city where colleagues reported the sun didn’t set until around midnight, and rose again around 4 a.m.

What I particularly missed was sharing in the continuum of my colleagues’ thinking regarding what BuzzMachine.com blogger Jeff Jarvis succinctly had summarized during the previous year’s meeting: “The architecture of news is changing, because it can.”

Fortunately, our website carried “Reports from the 2008 ONO Conference.” They’re still available. Including the welcome from Par-Arne Jigenius, former Swedish national press ombudsman, “to the native country of the ombudsman institution” (not to mention the gender-neutral Swedish word).

I also liked what I heard in then-ONO President Pam Platt’s weblog reports. Such as:

“The international nature of the Organization of News Ombudsmen is one of its greatest assets. It is inspiring to meet and talk with people from around the world who are committed to a free and fair press and who advocate for the reader, viewer, user or consumer. We come from different places but there are great common denominators to what we do, and what we encounter on the job.”

There’s plenty more at our website from ONO’s 2008 Stockholm meeting for media watchers who may have missed it. For example, our current president, Stephen Pritchard of the London Observer, shared web developer Joakim Jardenberg’s suggestion that, given the sniping between mainstream media and bloggers, we should “stop calling ourselves ombudsmen and look upon ourselves as nurturers of an online community.”

But looking back yet another year: Unlike at the earlier Istanbul, St. Petersburg FL, London and Sao Paulo meetings of our increasingly international group, I thought our digital focus really crystallized in 2007 in Cambridge, MA.

“Ombudsmen in a Time of Transition” was an appropriate theme.

The sessions at the Nieman Foundation’s Walter Lippmann House headquarters came against the emerging background for newspapers and news ombudsmen of a firmly entrenched phenomenon of blogs.

In addition the Harvard meeting was our first that I had attended in more than 20 years from which we blogged reports to our website — itself another tool ONO did not have 20 years ago.

As my colleague Ms. Howell’s comment above also suggests, blogging news ombudsmen still were the exception. In contrast was ONO member Jose Carlos Abrantes of the 140-year-old Povedor dos Leitores, Diario de Noticia of Lisbon, Portugal: “I am a blogger since 2002 — five years,” he said. “And I have five blogs.”

Most memorable for me were self-described “Blogger Guy” Jarvis’ thought-provoking suggestions — which I blogged for our website — from the session, “Is There a Shared Watchdog Role for the Public, the Blogs & Ombudsmen?”

“We’re better off if we start to see stories as a process rather than a product,” he said. Sometimes, “You put up what you know and say this is what we don’t know, what do you know?”

He also said the best thing a newspaper can contribute to the conversation with its community is facts; so why not solicit some, for example from the countless people who can tell how well computers are being used in a community’s elementary schools.

I still regularly check Jarvis’s thoughts regarding the possibilities for newspapers (he’s not optimistic), and for other kinds of media. Anyone who really cares about all this should check out his July 4 post on “Journalistic narcissism.” Talk about “independence.”

Along with my own report to Palm Beach Post readers, there’s more online from that meeting. For example the thoughts of Alan Rusbridger, editor of the consistently groundbreaking British newspaper The Guardian, which hosted our London meeting. (Here we are at The Guardian’s visitor center, The Newsroom.)

Ms. Platt aptly summarized the Guardian editor’s thoughts on “Ombudsmen in the digital future”:

“The new model of journalism is more fluid, and demands more transparency. Trust, he said, is the only thing in the end that we have going for us, and that calls for ‘a searching examination of what we mean by journalism.’ ”

Although spread too thin myself as a news ombudsman, I was trying to figure how to incorporate a blog while fielding and investigating readers’ concerns, researching and writing columns and editorials, and editing the letters page — all tasks that I enjoyed, and which had value for readers. While I was doing the math on all that, the paper’s major downsizing last year removed me from the equation.

I still envision intriguing possibilities for readers, for my ONO colleagues and those still working to make newspapers work.

And regarding the “blogger vs. MSM (mainstream media) culture war,” I have plenty of thoughts to share in future posts.