Sunday Column: The Times’s Work in Progress

The Times’s Work in Progress

SINCE I started as The Times’s fifth public editor last September, I’ve taken up topics from “false balance” in news articles to negative arts criticism to government secrecy. After six months, 16 Sunday columns and close to 100 blog posts to the Public Editor’s Journal, I thought it would be worthwhile to see where some of the issues I have written about stand now.

QUOTE APPROVAL Early in my tenure, I called for The Times to prohibit the practice of allowing news sources to approve quotations for use in news articles. Times management was already considering such a move, and soon issued such a policy.

Last week, I asked the Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt, how that policy was going, since Washington stories were some of those most affected by the change. “Some in government are less willing to talk to us, and we have lost a few interviews,” he said. “But the cost has been entirely bearable, and the policy is an improvement.”

Reporters still do a great deal of reporting on background and later negotiate with sources to put quotations on the record â€" a practice that the policy allows â€" but “we won’t allow people to edit what they’ve said, after they’ve spoken to us, which often was taking place through a spokesperson,” Mr. Leonhardt said.

I’m glad The Times has made this move; quote approval was an insidious practice that had to end.

THE HAZARDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Twitter and Facebook can be dangerous places for journalists. I wrote about two cases in which problems arose: a sexist Twitter message from the Times magazine freelancer Andrew Goldman to the author Jennifer Weiner, and eyebrow-raising Facebook and Twitter messages by Jodi Rudoren as she began her new post as the Jerusalem bureau chief.

The Times dealt with the situations in quite different ways: by suspending Mr. Goldman from his column for a few weeks and by assigning an editor to work with Ms. Rudoren on her social media efforts. A deputy foreign editor, Michael Slackman, told me that Ms. Rudoren’s social media presence eventually fell off as she dug into her new beat and that she uses it now “primarily to cover the news and far less as a public journal.” When she does post on Facebook and Twitter now, the messages are no longer vetted by an editor, according to the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, but are “monitored,” as are those of other reporters.

Mr. Goldman told me in an e-mail that he had only gradually returned to Twitter: “I learned the hard way that I have a foot that fits remarkably well in my mouth. Now, I’m doing what I should have done all along: let the interviews speak for themselves.”

Last fall, The Times also reissued its social media guidelines and emphasized that they applied to freelancers as well as the newsroom staff. The guidelines are general ones that basically say, “Think first and remember that you represent The Times.”

THE TIMES’S BUSINESS MODEL Like all newspaper companies, The Times is dealing with tough challenges as print advertising â€" long its major source of revenue â€" continues its sharp decline. At the same time, it is reinventing itself as a global digital media company.

In recent months, a new chief executive came on board, 30 newsroom management positions were eliminated in a cost-cutting effort, and The Times announced plans for new ways of finding revenue. One development: The Times will run more events like the DealBook conference, which I questioned last fall because such events sometimes blur the line between journalism and marketing.

Another development is the transformation of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, which will become The International New York Times. And the company has reorganized both its business-side management ranks and its newsroom leadership.

In a recent speech at the University of Michigan, Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said that excellent work would save the day: “Quality, serious journalism that is thoroughly reported, elegantly told and that truly honors the intelligence of its readers is the business model of The New York Times.”

But the challenges are as daunting as they are diverse â€" as The Times found out when its Chinese language Web site, an important part of its global strategy, was blocked by the Chinese government last fall; months later, it remains blocked. Safe arrival on the shore of stable profitability in the digital age won’t be achieved in 2013; it is a long journey, with headwinds all the way.

ACCURACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE One of the low points of the period was The Times’s error-ridden coverage of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. The Times briefly named the wrong person as the gunman online, and, even the next day in print, it made serious errors about how Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School, about his weapons, and about his mother’s role at the school. While other news organizations had the same problems â€" and many far worse â€" readers hold The Times to a higher standard. Since then, editors have met several times to discuss solutions.

“Newtown forced us to ask ourselves some questions and tighten up our practices,” Ian Fisher, the assistant managing editor in charge of the newsroom’s digital report, told me. Mr. Fisher said there would be more reluctance to attribute an important fact to other media organizations, as The Times did when it identified Ryan Lanza as the gunman instead of his brother.

In addition, he said, breaking stories may include “cautionary language” that clearly tells the reader that some facts aren’t yet known. In addition, a more streamlined editing process should reduce the internal confusion that resulted in what Mr. Fisher called “some self-inflicted wounds.” In short, he said, “We took it very seriously.”

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My last print column suggested that the American public’s first knowledge of the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison came from a press leak. As an astute reader pointed out, the United States military, responding to an internal complaint, had announced its investigation before news organizations obtained leaked information that provided much of the detail that so outraged the world.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 24, 2013, on page SR14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Times’s Work in Progress.