Looking Back, One Year Later

This has been a tumultuous year for the news business, and it has left many Post staffers with a case of whiplash -- watching companies die and merge, seeing good journalists laid off or taking buyouts, dealing with bloggers and nasty e-mail. More than 70 staffers took The Post's early-retirement offer.

To look at the glass half empty, The Post will have fewer people reporting on what you need to know, and those who are doing it will have to work harder in three platforms -- print, the Web and radio -- with less space for news.

But to look at the glass half full, the contraction could make The Post crisper, more compact and more readable. A leading reason for canceling subscriptions is "no time to read." Reporters tend to want to write everything they know; I did it myself. Readers want to know only so much. The perfect length is a moving target. From the front page to the last page, The Post needs to be edited to respect readers' time.

My most harrowing experience this year was making a mistake last January in a column about the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The error won't be repeated here, but the backlash was obscene and stunning. Mercifully it went away fairly quickly. Journalists hate to make mistakes; I've never known one made deliberately.

The ombudsman should set an example in accuracy. I should have mentioned Rajiv Chandrasekaran, assistant managing editor for continuous news, in my Dec. 10 column on diversity. And I found out after the column that three Post sportswriters -- all black -- have blogs on washingtonpost.com: Tarik El Bashir, Ivan Carter and Michael Lee. Also, retirement columnist Martha Hamilton's middle initial is M.

Putting out a daily newspaper is a complex and amazing process, a minor miracle that some readers don't understand or appreciate. And readers' needs too often aren't taken into account by those putting out that newspaper. Writing on that will be one of my New Year's resolutions, coming next Sunday.

Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or atombudsman@washpost.com.