By Mario Vitor Santos
Brazilian iG- Internet Group

Mario Vitor Santos is the ombudsman for the Internet site, iG, in Brazil. He gave this presentation to delegates at the ONO conference in Stockholm:

First, I would like to thank the organizers of this conference (Lilian Ohrstrom, Janne Anderson and Thonborg von Krogh) for inviting me to speak about my work as the first internet-only ombudsman of an website. I am also grateful to ONO, Gina and Pam especially, for the immediate acceptation of my affiliation to the ONO ranks.

After eleven years I am back, which I never thought could happen. As some of you remember, I have been the press ombudsman for Folha de S.Paulo for two terms (from 1991-93 and during the year of 97). So this is the fourth annual conference that I attend. And this is special also because I [being not an internet person] am still learning how to do my job at the internet. My mindset is still the one of a person from the print media and this adaptation is not so simple.

And when I was asked to talk about this theme (New media and New methods) I was so excited that I did not thought much before accepting. Then I found out that I did not know enough to make a talk about the internet. Then I decided to go on any way and discovered that this was an opportunity to summarize and weigh in what I do. My first one-year term as ombudsman ends up next week and I was just invited to continue by the iG's CEO Caio Tulio Costa, who is also a former ombudsman. Actually he was the first news ombudsman in Brazil. If I recollect the facts right, ombudsmanship was introduced in Brazil after a suggestion of Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, who is now also an ombudsman of Folha and is with us here. According to the rules of ombudsmanship at iG, I may stay for a total of three years in the position. And I did not work at iG before being invited to be its ombudsman.

Let me start from the conclusion then. As ombudsman of iG I did not have the opportunity to exercise any really new methods. When I need I refer to the same set of procedures used for decades by ombudsmen from the print and electronic media, all of them well represented in this meeting.

What I have been doing at iG (which stands for the Brazilian Internet Group) is the same of what I learned to do in the "old" media. I mostly follow what others ombudsmen do and what they did before me.

iG is not distinctively different from the others of the kind. I think it still does not have a very strong identity as provider of news. It is working on it, but I must say that I am not sure if it s going in the right direction. Sometimes it does and sometimes doesn't. Many people in Brazil know iG's brand and consume its news in different platforms and places, but some of them does not really distinguish it clearly from Uol, Terra or G1, its competitors.

The major issue, though, is that these main portals express the changes that we all see taking place everyday in our business.

• Changes in the way news are produced, edited and labeled
• Changes on the public's understanding of what is "news".
• The incorporation of an entire new audience to the news brought about by the internet.
• The ability given to non-journalists to create, produce and even publish information on our news sites.

This together makes, as we all know, the internet a very useful, but also a very confusing place to users.

Most of all, instead of what the major internet sites say, they are not efficiently open to the public. They do not sufficiently take readers demands into consideration.

The internet needs journalistic values, patterns, quality and self-regulation. It demands the adoption of standards to be cherished by a larger community as its own. It needs a sort of culture that is taken for granted by print and eletronic media.

The ombudsmen are tools for helping to address these issues. In this sense, the ombudsman's work may be of more value to the internet than it have been to the traditional media.

Ombudsmen in the internet do what the others do. They read, watch, compare, and listen to readers. They investigate mistakes and wrong procedures. They demand corrections and they answer to readers.

We try to echo their opinions when the reader wants balanced information, but also when they want just the truth. But I argue in favor of the eternal values of sound journalism, and sometimes that makes me go against the publics passionate demands. Such as many others in the business, iG tries, but I am not sure if it really does, to make news a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer. Information is mostly still handed down from above.

iG is now the second biggest destination of the internet users in Brazil. It is significant there. But Google has 600 million/month.

The vast majority of iG's news originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or someone else's video camera or cell phone. The editors try to link to other stories inside the portal, but almost never to other areas outside iG's group of partners that provide its content. Only a small fraction of the newsroom is dedicated to digging up original news stories. Most of it is involved with editing, scanning the internet, updating and managing.

Many different sections of iG look as if they were the same. The templates do not vary much. The colors are patterned. In these sections, you rarely face a real surprise. It is hard for the reader to develop a sense of special identification with this journalism.

iG's editors repurpotes content sent by partners, often with a catchy title and a "customer" leaning orientation. The range of subjects is vast.

It all goes to different platforms.

It is much more than only news, but it tries to incorporate content produced by users. But the level of quality of it generally low.

iG belongs to a big telecommunications company (Brasil Telecom) that is in being bought by an even bigger competitor in a controversial negotiation that involves changes in legislation and even presidential approval. That seems to be already decided at the highest level (Lula), but details are not clear, and iG does not report and criticize enough about the issue and its implications.

In Brazil, websites originated from traditional quality newsgroups face strong competition from news venues created by telephone companies. All of them combine news and entertainment.

In contrast to what happens in other countries newspaper sales is also growing as a whole in Brazil. Quality papers, though, grow at a much slower pace. The number of homes that have access to the internet is booming, but not as much the advertising. In these context, ombudsmans may be seen also as a part of a branding strategy and product placement in the market place, which may be legitimate or not, depending on how it is conceived and done..

Accordingly you write and publish a set of groud rules.

But we keep publishing false breaking news. as the one last week about a false plane crash in São Paulo, a city traumatized by terrible accidents near its downton Congonhas airport.. Even CNN aired the wrong news, which is no excuse.

Some major mistakes such as these are followed by corretions. But they are not always thorough. These one tries to transfer responsibility to the press office of the Brazlian airfields operating body.

On a daily basis I write media criticism, focused mainly on iG's news. The ombudsman has mainly a moral role and does perform any execuive role in the hierarchy of iG's newsroom.

In ths first year, iG's reader's representative office received more than five thousand manifestations from readers. The majority of them dealt with issues not directly related to the news content.

One case alone, the firing of a very outspoken and controversial journalist, Paulo Henrique Amorim, generated a campaign of complaints to the ombudsman and a boycott movement against iG. The ombudsman blog published all the complaints and critized the way the journalist was fired and how the public was informed about it.

You are right when you open your pages to the public and incentivate the horizontal connections offered by social networks. But you also face the risk of publishing every kind of problematic content, even of a criminal nature.  One of iG's free home-pages invited the reader to punish his/her enemies, and explained routines to produce real bombs. The page was discovered by a chemical engineer who was looking at the Google for references of a certain chemical substance. He got in touch with us and it was taken off the air.

Of course, as it happens all the time, readers can use iG's tools to place al sort of material, even sex . But journalism in the internet can get childish and manipulative to the point of using ambiguous pictures out of context just in order to attribute public wrong behaviour to authorities.

I am telling you this to state that the internet, and iG is not an exception in the Brazilian internet environment, where the news media frequently mixes news with all kind of content.

I come from a different background than the one I am facing now. I am still struggling. Although much encouraged by the fascinating opportunities the internet opens to our societies and our profession, I feel many times still confused by the limitless and somewhat chaotic landscape, like a dinossaur that came from an era of higher trees, cooler temperatures and a smaller but recognizable territory to fight for.

I am sure I am not alone.

Thank you