Reflections on my time as the Star’s public editor

For two years, I’ve been lucky to serve as the Star’s public editor. Truth is, I’ve had an army of helpers.

Most mornings, readers’ emails would be landing in the public editor inbox before I had taken my first sip of coffee. Many are loyal readers and experienced consumers of news. They are alert to any lapse in journalistic standards: grammar and typos, advertisements that look like news, opinion columns that weren’t properly labelled, headlines that weren’t true to the facts in a story.

As I’ve noted, in the daily miracle of producing volumes of news for the print edition and the website, the Star gets most things right. But it is not infallible.

As I move on to a new role at the Star as the editorial page editor, some reflections on my time as public editor. It impressed upon me the importance of listening to readers. A big part of each day was spent responding to concerns and queries and correcting errors, which is an integral part of the commitment to trusted news.

The readers were not always right. For example, there were disagreements about the focus of a story, or the right of a columnist to express what — to some — was too controversial an opinion. These exchanges were an important aspect of the job, allowing me to hear what’s on the minds of readers, and in turn helping them understand journalistic practices.

We can’t take for granted that people understand the ethical standards that underpin journalism, the process of verifying and confirming information, the requirement for fairness or the wide latitude opinion columnists are given to express their views. The annual You Be The Editor survey was a fun way to give readers a sense of the decisions that confront journalists and editors daily. The more we can explain all that, the better we can help people differentiate trusted news from the information chaos on social media.

My time in the job was marked by the pandemic, and the topic dominated many of those interactions. Reader suggestions and queries helped the Star adjust how it presented COVID data each day and gave us ideas for followup articles.

But there were others who challenged our coverage and called into question statements by public health experts and medical professionals, preferring instead to believe something they had read on Facebook. They made false claims questioning the effectiveness or safety of vaccines and other public health measures.

It underscored to me the critical role of journalism as a reliable source of information, as we navigated our way through successive waves of the pandemic.

This period also saw a rise in attacks on media outlets and the journalists who work for them — fuelled, I think, by partisan politics and the pandemic.

No one is claiming that media organizations should be above criticism. Far from it. The very role of the public editor is to ensure that concerns and complaints about the Star’s journalism get attention, and that corrective action is taken when warranted.

But there is little about these attacks that is well-meaning. The ugly online harassment and abuse of journalists is racist, misogynistic and threatening. It’s done deliberately to discredit journalists and their work, and chill further reporting.

It’s important for readers to know this is happening — here in Canada, every single day. We all have a role in protecting the right of journalists to do their jobs. Our civic debates and discourse depend on it.

This job reinforced to me that editors matter. There are fewer of them because of the economic woes that have shrunk newsrooms. A good editor will hone a story’s focus, trim the excess, ask the questions they know readers want answered and catch the spelling mistakes that irritate to no end. Money well spent, I say.

Like my predecessor Kathy English, I wrote about the imperative for the Star and other media organizations to improve the diversity of newsrooms, the stories we tell and the voices journalists select to be in those stories. We must reflect the community we aspire to serve.

I was pleased to work with others to craft a new policy for newsroom decisions around removing content. It’s an important step that better recognizes the harm that an old story can have on an individual’s personal and professional life.

I was less successful in curing the case of the invisible captions. To view the captions for the photos that appear on the Star website, you have to click on the blue information symbol. As readers frequently told me, it’s not intuitive and they would often wonder where the caption is. I would much prefer those captions are displayed.

I’m gratified the public editor role will continue in the capable hands of long-time Star journalist Donovan Vincent. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Donovan dating back to journalism school. He brings to the job decades of experience.

My thanks to the journalists, editors and photojournalists in the Star’s newsroom. They handled my queries with good-natured professionalism, in the spirit of correcting the record and learning from mistakes. Thank you to two newsroom colleagues in particular, Brian Bradley and Maithily Panchalingam, who I have worked with in the public editor’s office.

My sincere thanks to all the readers who reached out. I’ve enjoyed our exchanges. It’s obvious that many of you care and appreciate the Star’s mission of providing trusted news. We take that trust to heart.

Bruce Campion-Smith is the Star’s outgoing public editor.