The public editor is hired on a five-year non-renewable contract, reports to the readers rather than the editor, and cannot be fired for what she writes. Verity Ashcombe-Doyle spent fourteen years as an ombudsman in the regional press before taking the post. Her column, The Reader's Advocate, is the only place in the paper where the paper is the subject.
Disclosures
Her contract prohibits her from accepting any other work from They Buried during or within two years of her term. She does not attend news meetings.
Work by Ashcombe-Doyle
We removed four labels last week and defended it on the grounds that a reader is never in doubt. One correspondent pointed out where that fails: a screenshot of a document travels without the page around it.
A network study of how alternative narratives propagate placed this newspaper in its dataset without telling us. We asked for our own row, and what came back describes our readers better than our own analytics do.
The public editor read every Nibiru story this newspaper has published since 2019. Fourteen of thirty-one rest on a single contested tablet. Three cite our own back numbers as though they were corroboration.