Ombuddy

First Seminar! woot woot. I will never, ever, forget this day.

(brief pause to reference my notes)

OK. Today, we had as our guest Mr. Andy Alexander, ombudsman from The Washington Post.

Mr. Alexander was actually a pretty likable guy. Instead of talking down or preaching to the lowly students, he basically let us amateurs spend the entire class asking him questions. And can I just say how proud I am of our essentially entirely German/Norwegian class for asking a slew of hard-hitting, A+ questions? (note: The foreigners asked disgustingly better ones than any of us Americans - way to represent, natives)

So Double-A (mmhmm, bffolife) was from Ohio, worked for a paper there, then headed to Aussieland for a "yonk", after which he flew to Vietnam, then eventually ended up in foreign correspondence - for which he's traveled to over 50 countries in the last 30 or so years.


Now, as ombudsman, he's sort of like one giant check for The Washington Post - he kind of represents the people, voices their concerns, and does some self-correcting/verifying of the paper as well. That means the poor man has to deal with an unfortunate number of very tactless, obnoxious, overly-eccentric (read psycho) Post readers, not to mention the staff, who often understandably does not approve of his good-intentioned corrections.

Good thing the time limit on ombudsman is 2 years. I seriously don't know how a person can take that much crap from everyone at once and still maintain his sanity. I'm sure he's probably about ready to retire on a desert island or in some forbidden forest completely secluded from the human kind.

I can barely stand the metro at rush hour, listening to one mind-numbing complaint after another, (granted a good 50% of that could very well be me mistaking my own whining for an external source), and this guy gets 90 calls from 'passionate' readers a day, ripping on how the middle name of someones great aunt Justine is Sara 'spelled with an A, NOT an H!' !?

Props, Mr. Alexander, I salute you.

And here's the lucky fellow with Professor Gil Klein - what charming fellows :)

PS: Did you know the most profitable year for newspapers was 2000? Who'dathunkit.