Anniversary journalism, as I’ve noted before, is a tricky proposition. At its best, it’s an opportunity to look back on an important event and provide the rich perspective that can only come with time. At its worst, it’s empty - a mere regurgitation of what happened with little that is new or fresh added.
Some news organizations are responding to the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war this week with major journalistic projects. Most notable, perhaps, is The Guardian’s impressive effort - dozens of stories and graphics that have been appearing for the past several days.
As an article on The International Herald Tribune’s Rendezvous blog noted this month, The Guardian alo “unveiled the results of a yearlong investigation purporting to show that United States military advisers, with the knowledge and support of many senior officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and disgraced Gen. David Petraeus, oversaw a vast program of torture inside Iraqi prisons.â€
The Times, at least on the news side, is not going that route. So far, the anniversary has mostly been noted on the opinion side, where some columnists have taken up the subject and through a six-part online series called “A War, Before and After.†On Wednesday, the Op-Ed page will feature offerings from two contributors â€" one an American combat veteran and leading military strategist, the other an Iraqi writer who has stayed in Iraq since 2003.
On the news side, no stories have a! ppeared in print to date. The At War blog has a series this week from those directly affected by the invasion.
I asked Dean Baquet, a managing editor, about the low-key approach. He said that while a few stories are planned, editors did not see a need for a major project or special section, as they did with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“The war itself has been dissected to a tremendous degree,†he told me. “You have to have something new or fresh to say.†He would not provide specifics about the articles that are planned, but said there might be one or two that would make their way onto the front page this week.
Is The Times’s own role in the run-up to the war a part of this relative reticence, as some readers have suggested to me Is there reluctance to revisit a painful period in the paper’s history
Mr. Baquet said that’s not a factor.
“The Times has probably acknowledged its own mistakes from that period more than anyone,†he said. “We certainly haven’t been shy about doing that. We’re doing the stories that make sense to us and that offer our readers something worthwhile.â€
Once those stories are online, I’ll will update this post with links to those articles.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 18, 2013
An earlier version of this post misspelled the given name of a managing editor at The New York Times. He is Dean Baquet.
