May 21st 2007 Thank you for asking me to come and talk to ONO today. Some people have a false impression of editors leading glamorous lives. In truth -- as most of you know -- we are social outcasts and very rarely get invited anywhere.

George Bernard Shaw knew this and once wrote that lighthouse keepers with wireless sets knew more of what was going on in the world than editors, who remained chained to their desks and rarely met real human beings at all.

There's something in this -- though, of course there is a small satisfaction in the fact that editors have outlasted lighthouse keepers, who have themselves have been replaced by new technologies. It may happen to editors one day too -- that’s partly what we're all talking about this week. But in a sense GBS was airing a rather Web 2.0 thought -- an early articulation of the wisdom of crowds theory. Editors fool themselves if they think they know very much more than their readers.

This is a gathering of news ombudsmen and women from around the world, meeting at a time of unprecedented change in what we, as journalists, do. That's the theme of the conference.

When we started having a readers' editor at The Guardian some 10 years ago I thought we were joining a natural tide: that there was an inevitability about media organisations becoming more transparent and accountable. I think I was rash enough to predict (in the foreword to one of Ian's many books) that, within five years, every single major newspaper in Britain would have some form of readers' editor or ombudsman -- a figure independent of the editor who could represent the views of both readers and subjects.

I was wrong. One or two newspapers have opened little chinks into what they do. The BBC has moved a long way. But, of newspapers in the UK, still only The Guardian and Observer have a truly independent court of appeals for readers -- or, indeed, for anyone wanting to challenge or complain about the journalism.

It's interesting to speculate as to why not. There are, I think, two main explanations as to why editors are still reluctant to take the plunge.

1) The first is that the editor him/herself is responsible for the content and that outsourcing the complaints department is a way of outsourcing responsibility. I don't think this is a negligible argument. The editor is, indeed, ultimately responsible -- morally and in law -- for everything published in his or her name. It would be wrong if s/he washed his hands of all incoming complaints and concerns, or became distanced or anaesthetised from what readers felt by not having day to day dealings with them.

But there are three or four obvious points to be made about this explanation

A) There is self-evidently a conflict in an editor being responsible both for commissioning the journalism and for sitting in judgement on it. No editor is perfect. Some of the most successful editors are driven by driving personal conviction, strong beliefs (sometimes, whisper it softly, even prejudices) and a near obsessional pursuit of causes. That's fine -- and often produces journalism of great passion, energy and insight. But it just looks increasingly at odds with widely accepted notions of governance, accountability and transparency to have immense power -- that of prosecutor, judge and jury -- all effectively concentrated in the hands of one person. It becomes more singular still in an age when journalism moves away from mere observation to something closer to advocacy or, in some cases, pursuit.

The conventional response to people who raise this point is the market one: no-one need buy the product if they don't like it. In that sense every editor is accountable to his or her readers. Which is true up to a point.

But you do have to consider that in some places, in some areas or in some categories of publication in some parts of the world there are effective monopolies. Yours might be the only serious upmarket paper in town. You might be a public service broadcaster. Your media organisation might have such financial and political clout that it squeezes the life out of the opposition.

As large media organisations swallow up smaller ones the diversity of voice will become rarer. And so will the ability or willingness of segments of the media to monitor each other. One particularly dominant player could effectively stifle scrutiny. Saturday's New York Times had an interesting story about the system of "favour banking" supposedly operated on a gossip column in another New York paper. Large sums of cash could allegedly ensure that an item about X or Y would not appear. We will have to see how much truth there is in the story, but at least the NYT was there to report it. In many cities and towns there is effectively little competition, giving editors even more untrammeled powers.

B. The second objection to the editor being left alone to arbitrate on his or her own journalism lies in the changing nature of editing itself. The sheer volume of content being produced around the clock by many modern newspapers -- in print, online, in text, audio and video, in blogs, talk boards, podcasts, in bumper weekend editions and magazines across six or seven days a week -- means it is utterly impossible for many editors to monitor more than a fraction of what is being put out in his or her name, either in advance or even (as used to be commonly the case) retrospectively. So, while technically responsible for all the content, it is light years away from the world of, say, 20 or 30 years ago, when on many days a diligent editor could hope to read most, if not all, of a 20 or 30 page newspaper in advance of publication -- though, I suspect, even then there were few broadsheet editors who managed it regularly.

Because we don't often see inside newsrooms we don't see the pressure on senior journalists and editors. A former editor of the Daily Mail, Mike Randall, wrote in his autobiography about his surprise at “the number of decisions that had to be taken in any one day. I once kept a check and my score was 200. They might range from the selection of the main front-page story to the resolution of a reporter's financial problems but they all had to be made by the editor. On the News Chronicle Michael Curtis maintained that if 50 per cent of his daily decisions, most of them taken against the clock, proved to be right, he had done well. He reckoned that any editor who scored higher than that was either a genius or uncommonly lucky. Richard Crossman once told me he thought being an editor was harder than being a cabinet minister but easier than being a prime minister. I did not demur."

As we move further down the Web 2.0 road -- ever more content being hosted or distributed by newspaper websites and beyond -- that situation will become more acute. Many newspapers encourage their staff to blog -- that is, send out material under the masthead of a news organisation -- which has never been touched by an editor.

The Telegraph in London has just launched a service by which readers can publish their own blogs on the Telegraph's site. Now there is little meaningful sense in which Will Lewis is responsible for that content. He hasn't read most, if any, of it. He didn't commission it. He doesn't know if a word of it is true or not. But I would be surprised if at some point something that appears on one of those blogs doesn't end up on his desk as a complaint at some stage.

C. The third point follows on from the second. How on earth is any editor supposed on be aware of slips, errors or injustices perpetrated in his or her name? It's all very well nobly to take responsibility for it all -- but what are the systems in place to monitor this deluge of content? Anyone with a well-flagged fully-functioning and independent complaints system in place will know that it surfaces thousands of concerns a year. Many are relatively trivial -- or they may seem trivial to us. Some are not. But I can say with confidence that we were picking up only a fraction of them in the days when you had to write a letter to the editor in order to make your concerns known. So I don't think the argument that the editor must be the person who both commissions editorial content and sits in judgement on it can really survive for much longer.

2. The next explanation why editors resist having an independent ombudsman or equivalent is doubtless the loss of control implied. The traditional model of a newspaper over the centuries is usually a top down one -- with a proprietor or publishers at the pinnacle. This model gave the editor an immense amount of power. Of course, there has always been recourse to the law for people who were unhappy about what had been written. In Britain we have a form of voluntary self-regulation. But (depending on the owner) editors have been omnipotent figures, in sole charge of who is allowed a voice in their newspaper and who isn't.

It is, I now appreciate better, a very radical move to place even a few inches of your own newspaper beyond your direct control. It does mean that your judgements, actions, ethical standards and journalism can be held up to the light. The more space you allow, the more prominent you make it and the more you give licence for someone to make their own judgements about the journalism, the more you lose your previously omnipotent control.

And, of course, it makes you think twice in advance. All reporters will tell you: if they know their work and methods are going to be held up to independent scrutiny it makes you think twice. That, of course, is the very argument we, as an industry in Britain, make for self-regulation via the Press Complaints Commission. The fear of an adverse adjudication keeps people on the straight and narrow. But there's a difference in some minds between a centralised mediation service and the much more devolved form of regulation or scrutiny involved in having an ombudsman.

Those, I think, are the main reasons why ombudsmen have yet to catch on more widely in Britain and, doubtless, abroad. Of course, there are others, including cost. We've discovered that having a readers' editor's office, staffed five days a week and handling several thousand complaints a year, is not cheap. At a time when all media organisations are looking for ways of cutting cost, you have to believe - even if you regard it as little more than an exercise in customer relations -- that it is worth it.

But, of course, to file ombudsmen under "customer relations" is to underestimate the role they play. I think the existence of an independent ombudsman within a news organisation speaks to recognition of a profound shift in how we -- and the wider public -- think of journalism.

Since a free press first evolved we have derived our authority from a feeling - a sense, a pretence -- that journalism is, if not infallible, something close to it. We speak of ourselves as being interested in the truth, the real truth. We're truth seekers, we're truth tellers, and we tell truth to power.

As a marketing proposition, it had its merits, even if the claim has probably always been treated with some scepticism -- and is increasingly so today. Some journalists have always been a bit uneasy with this narrative of what we do. They know that "the truth" is a troublesome concept. Since this is the Walter Lippman building (and since he once wrote for the Manchester Guardian) it seems appropriate to quote him. He wrote as long ago as 1922, "If we assume that news and truth are two words for the same thing we shall, I believe, arrive nowhere."

Here's not the place for arguments about the desirability, or possibility, of objective journalism: we could be here all week and not agree. But if "the truth" were so easily obtainable on the day -- with rolling news, within the hour -- then there would be no need for historians. As journalists, we're doing well if we confine ourselves to being truthful about what we know, which is often (through no fault of our own) fairly circumscribed. We're doing better if we're also truthful about what we don't know. We should always be uneasy at grandiose boasts that we're revealing The Truth.

This is especially so the more news organisations have moved away from the role of being simple, relatively passive reporters. Once upon a time news reporters would sit at the back of public meetings, or in parliamentary press galleries, and produce a higher form of stenography. We saw our role as recorders, independent witnesses. We may wonder, looking back through yellowing newspaper files, at the public's appetite for all that verbatim reporting of speeches and meetings. But those newspapers sold in very large quantities.

In time that function became either partly surplus to requirement -- newer technologies came along -- or else too costly or else too irrelevant. It's a mantra now that people are too "time-poor" to read yards of text about

parliamentary debates or, indeed, virtually anything. People still make speeches, but we report them less and less. We collude with politicians in producing and publishing bites.

The trend over many years now -- at least in Britain, but, I think more broadly - has been to shorter articles, more features, more opinion, more commentary, more campaigning, more about the personal and emotional life. Many journalists are not content with sitting back and being passive witnesses. They want to be players.

There was virtually no debate in Britain when, two or three years ago, the editor of one of our five main national quality papers said he now thought of his title as a viewspaper rather a newspaper. It was this was simply an interesting variant on an established theme. Viewspaper? Newspaper? Take your choice.

Again, this is not the occasion to debate the merits of these various trends in journalism. But it's perhaps inevitable that, the more you move from reporting to advocacy, campaigning and persuasion, the more people will question you. Any force in society which attempts to exert active strong influence can't be surprised to find people wanting to question everything from your motives to your methods.

In other words, handing down tablets of stone and telling people "this is how it is” is a less persuasive proposition than it once was. It's laborious to recite the numerous surveys of trust, which show that journalists are not invariably regarded as dealers of the unclouded truth. As an industry, we tend to react to such surveys with disdain or hurt or contempt.

In the words or the Millwall football chant, "No-one Likes us, we don't care."

But I think the message these surveys convey is not necessarily that people think we're despicable people who make it all up (though they may believe that about some journalists on some papers). I think it's rather that the public at large have a rather more honest assessment of what journalism is than we give them credit for. In other words, I think such surveys capture a rather sophisticated sense of what we do -- which in the privacy of the newsroom, or the pub, we know ourselves, but which we think we're keeping secret from everyone else. There are a number of reasons why this pretence is no longer sustainable.

1) The first is that the readers, users -- call them what you will - have now got such good real time access to much of the information which was once our exclusive preserve. By that I mean that the traditional news media were, on the day, (and, indeed, for most people at all) the only source of information. A speech, a debate, a report, a scientific paper - most people had few independent ways of verifying a newspaper or broadcast account, certainly on the day it was published or broadcast. Now a huge amount of information is simultaneously released on official websites, enabling millions of people to check your version of events against the original.

What does that mean? It means that inquiring, suspicious or specialist readers (by which I mean people with a particular interest in a particular subject) will swiftly be able to test your journalism for accuracy or bias against any published information. Of course, we still have sources of information not available to just anyone. But today there are millions of fact checkers out there. Millions of them have their own blogs or websites. So we can refuse systematically to correct or clarify our journalism, but we would be foolish to imagine that it will therefore go uncorrected or unclarified. It will: all that will happen is that it will take place elsewhere.

And, of course, that will still happen even if you do have your own processes in place. The question editors have to face is: is it not a bit uncomfortable knowing that your failings may be revealed and widely discussed elsewhere, with not a word appearing in your own newspaper or on your own channel? Which is the road to building trust -- engaging or ignoring?

2) A second reason why the tablet of stone era journalism is over is that, increasingly, the people on whom we report will not simply publish material so that people can consume it in an unmediated form: they will go further and actively use these new channels of communication to question us, if not actively discredit us. A recent example was the so-called video-ambushing of a BBC reporter who lost his cool, to put it mildly, while interviewing a leading scientologist. The Church of Scientology published the clip on Youtube in advance of the BBC Panorama programme itself.

Now imagine such a video clip being used against any of your own newspaper reporters. It wouldn't have to be as dramatic as that: it could simply be someone issuing a full transcript of an interview which appeared to show highly selective or misleading use of quotes on the part of a newspaper. Such situations happen already and will occur more and more frequently, leaving editors to ponder how to respond: will they do so via press offices or PR campaigns -- to try and win a battle of spin? Or is there a virtue in greater transparency and independent examination in our own papers and publishing platforms?

In this case the BBC responded by posting its own version of an interview with the scientologist over whom John Sweeney lost his temper. The producer of Panorama also appeared on the BBC's own news programme to talk about both the programme and the outburst? and also showing the incident as filmed by the BBC which, while still shocking, has a slightly different context from the Scientologists? own film. How happy would editors be to publish all on record source material for all stories and all interviews on the web? A little while back I did an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a subtle and at times quite a dense thinker. I was aware that was he was saying was open to a number of interpretations.

We ran a story based on the interview (1) and an edited extract from it (2). On the web we ran audio clips (3) and the full interview transcript (4) so that readers could make up their own minds. Greater openness can lead to more trust? so long as you are behaving in a trustful manner. But, again, we have to be prepared for some loss of control. The interviewer who very selectively quotes disconnected parts of an interview, or who is underhand in winning confidence or who constructs an elaborate psychological analysis on the basis of a chance remark, is soon going to be exposed.

What all this points to is a new age in which the old model -- we pushed the stuff out and took little notice of the response -- is over. You would have to be a very unobservant journalist these days not to see that the entrails of mainstream journalism are picked over by millions of bloggers -- at the last count Technorati claimed to be monitoring 71 million individual weblogs -- on an hourly basis.

In a sense this is comforting: it shows that what we do -- and what we write - still matters and continues to stir up emotions, debate and controversies. But I think it will be increasingly odd if raging debates about newspapers exist purely in a digital space, with not a word of it being allowed into print.

But, in a sense I think this is all rather old fashioned debate because, in truth, a passionate debate is raging out there in a way which many mainstream journalists have not quite yet appreciated. At times it feels more like a cacophony than a debate, it's true. But various technological and economic forces are bearing down on what we do so forcefully and, frankly, so fast, that the very nature of journalism is being challenged in fundamental ways that have yet to filter back into more conventional print-focused newsrooms.

As with all these developments, so-called old media has a decision to make -- whether to stand aloof from them and basically say "that's not what we do." Or else to try it out on the basis that it might, indeed, not be what we do, but there are some things we can learn from it, or which might impact on us. And of course there is a third possibility: that we try it out and decide that that's exactly what we should be doing.

Let's have a whistle-stop look at the sorts of things going on out there which might be called journalism, though often not as it's conventionally been understood. And my apologies in advance for all of you who know all this stuff. The audience probably contains some people who don't follow it closely, but it also contains Jeff Jarvis, a man who invented half of it. So please bear with me.

In the world out there -- the digital world without legacy assets and costs and infrastructures -- there is a huge energy around networks of people, usually not highly-paid media professionals, but amateurs, or groups of amateurs directed by professionals, seeking new ways of disseminating, aggregating and assessing information. No-one has yet found a satisfactory name for it, so “citizen journalism”, or "networked publishing" has to do for the time being.

You might group the experiments into four different types.

• Hyperlocal
• User generated news sites
• User generated comment or discussion sites
• Crowdsourcing

Actually, most so-called "citizen journalism" sites exhibit a combination of characteristics that make it hard to group them into strictly defined categories.

Many sites allow their users to comment on articles written by professional journalists. This is not really citizen journalism, which is more about the citizen actually writing the story, or contributing to its content, or -- at the very least - being able to influence which stories are displayed on the site.

The first trend is towards Hyperlocal

-- These are online news site -- often the internet version of a local paper -- which contains user generated content produced by local residents. The advantage is that they often report on topics that conventional newspapers tend to ignore.

-- Hyperlocal-- news sites tend to focus on one community but, as is the case with the BBC's Action Network, can be a collective of local stories/concerns generated by non professional users on a nationwide scale. This site aims to equip the audience with some of the tools of political activism. Editorial staff exercise very limited editorial control

-- Here's Backfence.com: A site, founded by an ex-Washingtonpost.com editor, which provides user-generated local news, information, blogs and advertising through citizen journalism. It provides opportunities for people to share information with their community. The founder describes it as "talking with friends about the latest local news

Many of you will know of the Northwest Voice

Launched by the Bakersfield Californian, a local daily newspaper with a circulation of about 65,000. The site has one editor but no paid writers. It employs only four people full-time and gets most of its content from readers. Moving on to user generated news, there are a number of sites now publishing national and international news stories written by citizen journalists. Some, like Newsvine and sypderweb, contain a mixture of user generated content and traditional media stories. A few, like ohymynews.com, publish content almost exclusively written by non professionals.

-- OhmyNews's motto is "Every Citizen is a Reporter."

It's been around since 2000. Based in South Korea, it has a staff of 95 traditional reporters and editors who write about 20% of its content, with around 42,000 citizen contributors who together produce about 160 articles a day. In July 2005 Ohmynews went international and now has over 900 reporters from 85 countries. Unlike the vast majority of citizen journalist sites, Ohmynews pays contributors money for their stories.

Traditional media companies have not stood idly by as these revolutionary experiments take place and gather speed. Some managements may be motivated by cost, some by fear of losing market and advertising. Some, I think, are genuinely excited by the journalistic possibilities and the competitive advantage that can come from involving so-called citizen reporters.

An obvious example is CNN's I-Reports, which allow citizen journalists to submit their stories, video, audio and pictures into the site.

Submissions are also considered for CNN Exchange, a new area of CNN's online focusing exclusively on user-submitted content.

Here's a page soliciting material around servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a far more effective method of gaining first hand pictures and comments than old fashioned methods of sending reporters and photographers to knock on doors.

Here’s a User-generated citizen journalism site specifically related to the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Editors say they are only there to "weed out obvious fabulists and reject unsupported sensationalism". It claims to publish news not opinion.

Here’s an English-language citizens' journalism site based in India.

This is trying an interesting "reward system" for contributors -- it includes giving an ABC news network badge for citizens who submit a variety of content.

This is Newsvine, which incorporates news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. The main page gives a clear overview of all the news submitted from the Associated Press and the Newsvine users, along with buttons to vote and comment on stories.

Content is divided into -- The Wire, which is news from sources such as the Associated Press, and “The Vine", which is user submitted content.

Members can vote and comment on any news item. Each article has its own separate chatroom which allows members to discuss the article in real-time.

Every user also gets their own profile and column.

This is Spyderweb -- Another news site where content is controlled by the user. Users can post, vote and comment on stories which are displayed on the page in order of popularity.

And this is wikinews -- Articles written by users are open to instant revision by others. The writing process is completely public. Anyone at any time can compose a new Wikinews article, edit an existing one and see an inventory of all prior changes. t is committed to being neutral. No opinion pieces are allowed. The article "Unrest in Belize," written by the user Belizian based on his observation of the recent protests there, was the site's first scoop. It appeared in Wikinews 12 hours before it was reported by a wire service.

This is a German hybrid newspaper in which a small team of professional journalists trains and moderates a team of hundreds of amateurs

Another variant is italk news -- Run by a team of between five and 10 people in San Francisco. Contributions are displayed according to an automated reader voting system. The more readers like a piece, the higher it is displayed on the home page. Submissions and vetted, edited and fact checked by the staff team, and podcasts and video content will be introduced soon. Next up is Global Voices

Global Voices is an international, volunteer-led project which collects, summarises, and gives context to self-published content found on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs from around the world. It is technically an aggregation site which promotes and orders user generated content from other sources. It has a commercial relationship with Reuters, which integrates some of GV's content onto its site. In September 2006 it was awarded $10,000 and the Knight-Batten "Innovations in Journalism' grand prize. Moving on to User generated comment

User generated comment sites technically include most individual blogs. But some sites are collaborative social networks which give people the opportunity to submit their own comment pieces, register their opinion and respond to the opinions of others.

One of the most popular examples of a collaborative blog is the Dailykos, which has between 14 million and 24 million visits per month.

Founded in 2002, it was one of the first such sites to allow users to vote on content.

Then there's Opinion Republic, which allows users to express their opinions on virtually any topic. The site was founded in 2005 by a professional market researcher as an experimental project. Unlike typical polls, this is a dynamic and ever-changing assessment of public opinion. Users can also create their own polls for use on their own website.

And, finally, there are the new experiments in so-called crowdsourcing - a word describing the attempt to tap into the collective mind of the public in order to further journalistic aims.

It tests the principal -- fairly widely advanced by web theorists - that some people in the audience know more than even the smartest reporters and editors.

Crowdsourcing can either involve transferring editorial control onto the citizens (e.g. by asking them to conduct an interview which will form part of a larger article) or not (e.g. by signing up members of the public as "sources" who can tip off professional reporters).

Public Insight Journalism is an attempt by Minnesota Public Radio to plug into the public's knowledge. To date over 24,000 people have volunteered to become a "public source" for MPR. Through surveys and email, they share information with the station. The network is growing by around 1,000 sources a month.

MPR reporters here have used the network for stories on crime in Minneapolis, obstacles faced by women entrepreneurs, advances in green architecture, rising middle-class insecurity, and religion at the office. Another example is Assignment Zero.

An attempt by NYU’s Jay Rosen to create an open-platform reporting tool. Its aim is to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web.

The site's "Newsroom" is comprised of the Assignment Desk, where contributors can learn about what has been covered and pick up an assignment; the Exchange, where people can talk through the story and offer new ideas; and The Scoop, where the editor comments on the day's developments.

So there are just a few snapshots of some of the things that are going on in the digital sphere as people -- some journalists, some non-journalists -- try to investigate new forms of reporting.

What they all have in common is a more level playing field between journalists (where they are involved at all) and readers; a blurring of the distinction between publisher and recipient; more transparency; more collaboration; more give and take. The sense of editorial content being produced behind high castle walls is quite foreign to this new world.

Now, of course, there are all the obvious objections to much of those examples: most of them centre on matters of trust. How can you evaluate the work of amateurs, some of them anonymous, very few of them with any kind of journalistic training? How could anyone place trust in this kind of journalism? Well, one answer is that this one of the main questions they're grappling with themselves -- hence experiments in teaming up professional journalists with material derived from this huge potential pool of sources. Hence experiments in searching for more and more sophisticated ranking systems, so that the so-called wisdom of crowds can serve as a method for sorting out journalistic wheat from chaff

These experiments are in their infancy and of course sceptics, not to mention net-enthusiasts, don't find it difficult to pick holes in what's going on. Those of us working in established news organisations can derive some comfort from what we know about the value of traditional journalism at its best and in the trust invested in our brands. But we know this too: trust has to be re-earned all the time. It's emphatically not a one-off thing which, once earned, exists in perpetuity. And -- sorry to labour this point again -- most opinion surveys don't stand out for the trust readers / viewers place in many forms of mainstream media. Trust, not only in the brand, but in each and every single piece of copy, will become more and more important the more media becomes disaggregated. A Which I hope brings me back to these established news organisations and how they continue to keep the trust that is essential for them to compete in a world in which many of the other aspects of what they do can be done as well, or better, or faster, or more interactively, elsewhere.

In a 24/7 world -- which is what we're all moving to - it has to begin with a searching examination of what journalism is. This is a debate which must surely be happening in all newspapers which are trying to dip any kind of a toe into the digital world.

Let's try a few things conventional journalism is not:

• It's not about delivering the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. No-one believes that any more if they ever did.
• It's not an infallible way of ascertaining what is going wrong around us.
• It's not defined by an arbitrary moment in the 24 hour clock to suit the historic schedules of print plants, distribution chains and wholesale delivery.
• It's rarely something about which we, as journalists, have exclusive knowledge of, or access, to.

It is something more fluid -- a much more iterative thing than the tablet of stone. It is about us saying "this is how it seems to us; it's not the definitive word on the subject by any means; some of you will know more about this; we can collaborate to try and get closer to the truth on this story; this is how you can contribute."

Those who have heard me speak before may have heard me quote a passage from a speech the Washington Post columnist David Broder made nearly 30 years ago:

I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made... that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours... distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you... to read it in about an hour. If we labeled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: But it's the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected updated version...? I first read that as a reporter in Washington in 1987 and it still strikes me as the best description of what a newspaper is. And is, even more so today. The greater the speed required of us in the digital world -- and speed does matter, but never at the expense of accuracy or fairness or anything which would imperil trust -- the more we should be honest about the tentative nature of what is possible.

Journalism becomes a never ending organic business of placing material in the public domain, of adding to it, clarifying it, correcting it, adding something here, subtracting something there, editing, contextualising, analysing, responding. Everything we do will be more contestable, more open to challenge and alternative interpretation.

It throws up big questions. Many of you are having to deal with about the nature of the record we thus create: not a file of once-a-day papers accessible in bound volumes in public libraries, but a record that is simultaneously permanent and, potentially, permanently-changing. How do you record and capture all those changes? When we publish something that's wrong is it better invisibly to mend it so that the mistake is removed from the permanent record, or is it more important to record or capture the fact of the untrue publication as well as the correction or clarification?

These are enormous conceptual shifts in what we do. They are difficult to work out, enormously difficult to manage and involving quite painful re-engineering of traditional workforces and re-allocation of resources.

The question is: how will big mainstream news organisations -- a foot -- sometimes awkwardly - in each camp cope with these issues? How will they negotiate the apparent contrast between the moated castle of the old world, where even a readers' editor or ombudsman seems a step too far, with the wide open spaces of the new world? On the Guardian we've recently hired four moderators to help deal with the tidal wave of user-generated comment our comment is free site now gets

We've hired a head of communities and user experience to help us devise strategies and implementation for developing user interaction on the site. Her job is also to sit between editorial, technical and commercial wings of the operation to represent the "user" when we're making decisions about content or applications. And, of course, we still have a readers' editor -- a new readers' editor in Siobhain Butterworth.

Readers' editors or ombudsmen -- and women- also face a challenge. They can explains us to them, and them to us. Sometimes they manage the even harder job of explaining us to us. Through hundreds of columns Ian Mayes helped Guardian journalists understand better how we were seen by our readers. Just as often he did something to explain particular decisions or judgements to our readers. Occasionally he would criticise or defend an article or editorial call. More often he would simply hold it up the light and examine it.

It's sometimes an awkward place to be, involving real-time mediation, examination and explanation. It's not to be confused with customer relations, yet in most news organisations, in terms of the actual journalism it's the best we offer. Increasingly, the readers' editor on the Guardian helps us think about what it is we do: she would be failing in her job if she weren't frequently ahead of us, if only because you can see things more clearly from a distance.

I don't think ombudsmen are a panacea to all the challenges this new digital age is throwing up. But -- to return to my starting point -- I think a refusal to have some kind of independent system embedded within news organisations, as we all come under more and more intense scrutiny, looks increasingly odd.

More strength, in other words, to ONO. Long may you flourish and I wish you all luck in your own attempts to grapple with these thorny, but fascinating and really important issues.

Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian delivered this address May 21, 2007, during the 2007 conference of The Organization of News Ombudsmen at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.