Not wanting to be left out of the current rush of stories offering predictions for the new year, I asked Kathy English, the new executive director of the international Organization of News Ombuds and Standards Editors, what we should expect in 2026.
The short answer: It’s unlikely standards editors will get any more rest than we did in 2025.
Ms. English speaks with authority – she worked briefly in 2006 with The Globe and Mail’s first public editor, Sylvia Stead, before moving into a 13-year run as the Toronto Star’s public editor. She has navigated some difficult terrain during her long career.
“I did a lot of jobs in journalism over 40 years and this one was the toughest,” she told me on a video call.
When she began as public editor, news organizations were still figuring out how to apply their standards and practices to digital reporting.
“We had to learn: How do we do online corrections? What do we do when someone wants content taken down from the web – the unpublishing dilemma? I felt that all of those online challenges were things that we had to figure out as standards editors, as those who uphold the standards and ethics of journalism,” she said.
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In pursuit of answers, Ms. English served on the ethics advisory committee of the Canadian Association of Journalists, which in 2011 released a report outlining best practices for unpublishing (it should be done rarely and only when there is a very good reason) and online corrections (transparently, and as quickly as possible, published in a place that is easy to find). These issues remain important for journalistic ethics and are addressed in The Globe’s Editorial Code of Conduct as well.
I asked her what she sees as the greatest challenges for newsroom standards-bearers today.
The primary issue, Ms. English said, is one that began early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as misinformation swirled and some members of the public accused the press of publishing “fake news” about the medical ethics of vaccine mandates and other preventative measures. Sylvia Stead wrote in February, 2022, about the increase in angry, even threatening, complaints she had been receiving: “Most of those complaining don’t seem to be [Globe] readers, and they are reacting to headlines they saw on social media. While it’s a small number of people, their tone is nastier than I have ever seen.”
A July, 2020, Statistics Canada survey found that during the first few months of the pandemic, “96% of Canadians who used the Internet to find information saw COVID-19 information that they suspected was misleading, false or inaccurate.” Yet, only 21 per cent said they “always” checked the accuracy of information and only 37 per cent said they “often” checked. More than half (53 per cent) said they shared information they found online without knowing whether it was accurate.
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It didn’t help that news media missed the opportunity to offer the public a more transparent view of how COVID-19 unfolded, as Carleton University journalism professor and scientist Sarah Everts told me in 2024.
Early news stories reflected what researchers thought at the time – which was that the virus landed on surfaces. Later, when scientists had learned that the virus spread primarily through the air, and the news reported this new information without fully explaining the scientific process, some members of the public believed the change was a reason to distrust the media.
People started “fact-checking” mainstream news organizations with unverified information they had read online. And, as Ms. English recalls, standards editors “began to see then that we were in a world where people could not agree on what a fact was.”
American journalist Glenn Kessler, who penned The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column from 2011 until he quit the paper in July, 2025, has observed this shift as well. “I often received a slew of angry emails whenever I harshly rated a Democratic politician for making a false claim. The more Pinocchios – our rating system for falsehoods – the more I would be dismissed as a right-wing hack,” he wrote on Substack.
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“ ‘Why don’t you fact-check Donald Trump?’ readers would ask – even though I did on a regular basis. By contrast, readers rarely said I was unfair when I fact-checked Republicans.”
Ms. English recalled that when she was investigating a reader’s query about a published article, “I would say to the reporter: ‘How do you know what you know? How do you know what you are stating as a fact for our readers? What is the evidence of what you know?’ Well, now people can’t even agree on that evidence, and that makes the role so, so challenging.”
The prevalence of deepfakes and use of artificial intelligence have cast suspicion on videos that would once have been considered incontrovertible. And as newsrooms continue to grapple with how to use AI tools legitimately to aid in the reporting and presentation of news, Ms. English also noted that “readers are going to have questions like, is this real? Did a human being create this content?”
It’s the duty of standards editors (and, Ms. English notes, there are still fewer than 100 news organizations around the world that employ a journalist in this role) to answer those questions. “You just keep telling readers what matters,” she said, “what matters to the organization and to its journalists, and to you as the person who is upholding accountability.”