CPB has appointed Milton Coleman, a former senior editor at the Washington Post, as its ombudsman for the next three years.
Coleman takes over Feb. 1 from Joel Kaplan, a Syracuse University communications professor whose term expires at the end of January.
Coleman
CPB established the independent ombudsman’s office in April 2005 to review and report on issues concerning public media programming.
“Public media has an increasingly important role in our ever more diverse democracy,” Coleman said in the announcement, adding that he hopes to help public media “serve that need in the best of ways.”
Coleman began his career at the Post in 1976 as a reporter covering government and politics. He later rose to city editor and then assistant managing editor in charge of metro news. Coleman became deputy managing editor in 1996. In that position, he created local, national, and international news collaborations with Spanish-language print and broadcast outlets, and helped develop internal newsroom guidelines on standards and ethics. In 2009 he was appointed senior editor, overseeing policies on corrections, standards and ethics. He retired from the newspaper in December 2012.
He has served as a jury chair for the Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism and as a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards. Coleman also was president of the American Society of News Editors from 2010-11, and president of the Inter American Press Association, 2011-12.