Ms. Stead, having served as a reporter, national editor, executive editor and deputy editor, made the case for the role and, during her tenure, replied to thousands of reader emails while chronicling many of the ethical and practical newsroom concerns she mediated. Many news organizations have a public editor, some known as the ombudsman or ombud, as at the CBC; readers’ editor, as at The Guardian; or, like me, standards editor. At around the time Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, the polling company Gallup pegged the proportion of Americans who found mainstream news media essentially trustworthy at about 75 per cent, said Margaret Sullivan, former New York Times public editor, in an address to ONO members in June.