The position of readers’ editor is ‘placed most unusually in the no man’s land between journalist and reader,’ Alan Rusbridger writes in preface. “It’s a pretty good vantage point. He combines an outsider’s distance with an insider’s perspective. He explains us to them, and them to us. Sometimes he manages the even harder job of explaining us to us.”

Mayes’ job is “to collect, consider, investigate, respond to, and where appropriate come to a conclusion about readers’ comments, concerns, and complaints in a prompt and timely manner, from a position of independence within the paper.”

A shift, this is, from the ‘tomorrow is another day’ attitude that journalists have traditionally had towards error and complaint, “therefore leaving behind them what they hoped was a more or less invisible trail of unresolved, if mostly minor, grievance.”

Rusbridger talks about the two sides of journalists, the positive and the negative. The bright side is that most journalists “genuinely do care about getting at the truth. They have high ethical standards, they think deeply about their trade. Some of them are extraordinarily dogged, persistent and brave. Their reporting is frequently extremely robust… A select few of them put their lives in danger because they care about the free flow of unpolluted information.”

The flip side is that most people in the business of news like to pretend to be “humble truth seekers. We want people to believe we tell it as it is — all the news that’s fit to print (or, increasingly, not print).”

One of the essays in the book speaks of how some readers demand to know what happens to people who make mistakes. “Is anyone ever disciplined, fired, executed?” Mayes responds: “Well, not really, or perhaps I should say, not as far as I know. The column is called ‘Corrections and clarifications’, not Crime and Punishment. The aim is to focus on the error or the source of the confusion and it is not a function of the column to pillory the individual responsible for the mistake.”

In another essay, he discusses plagiarism, ‘an ugly, tainting word’. “The capital offence would be where the plagiarising writer has done little more than replace the name of the original author with his or her own.” Easy, but foolish, you’d agree, because a simple search on the Net would give the game away.

“At the lower end of the scale is the deeply embedded practice of simply lifting without attribution from ‘cuttings’, or now from the much more readily available electronic equivalent.” Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, in other words, for the keyboard shortcuts of the cut-and-paste sequence.

“Journalists sometimes call this process ‘research’. It often involves the relaying of unchecked facts from sources not shared with the reader.” The practice has hung around historically like an occupational disease, frets Mayes. “It is probably ineradicable.”

A book that can stimulate introspection.

D. MURALI

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