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Pictures of the Day: Tunisia and Elsewhere

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Photos from Tunisia, Yemen, Kashmir and the Philippines.

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The Amazon, Through an Anthropologist’s Eye

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Nicolas Janowski lives in Buenos Aires, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in South America. But in recent years he has spent as much time as he can traveling around a region that is about as different from his home town as can be imagined â€" the western reaches of the Amazon, with its dizzying and imposing mix of jungle, rivers, mountains and savannah extending over Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

The initial result of those labors, which continue, is a photographic essay called “The Liquid Serpent,” referring to an indigenous term for the river that flows through the heart of the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest. The title also offers a glimpse into Mr. Janowski’s conception of the region, which he sees as having magical and mystical qualities. As he puts it in his introduction, “The Amazon is neither man nor animal; she is nature’s hybrid.”

Another clue to Mr. Janowski’s artistic intentions comes from the epigram he chose to open “The Liquid Serpent,” a phrase that comes from Bertolt Brecht: “To understand the world is to understand what in it is able to be transformed.” As he sees it, the Amazon is a region in transformation, in many respects the victim of depredation as more and more people have poured in over recent decades, depleting natural resources. His task, then, is twofold: to register those changes while also finding and documenting those diminishing pockets where tradition, sometimes thousands of years old, has been maintained.

Although Mr. Janowski, 32, works as a freelance photographer, he was trained as an anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in Spain. He then studied photography in France and back home in Argentina, where he won a grant from the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts to document archaeological sites in Argentina. He spoke about “The Liquid Serpent” by telephone this month from Buenos Aires. The conversation has been edited.

Q.

What came first, the anthropologist or the photographer?

A.

Certainly the anthropologist, because that’s what I studied in college, and then spent four years working on in development projects here in Argentina.

Q.

Was it that interest that led directly to your becoming a photographer?

A.

In reality, they were in parallel. The first camera I got was as an adolescent, when I started traveling, and it became my traveling companion. That encouraged my desire to study and to travel around Latin America. So while anthropology came first in practical terms, photography was always present.

I started traveling when I was 16, making a three-month trip from Mexico to Panama as a backpacker. Afterward, I traveled a lot around Peru, on the Altiplano of Bolivia and in Ecuador â€" and in my own country as well, of course.

Q.

When you’re shooting, do you think you retain an anthropologist’s analytical eye and sensibility?

A.

Wow, what a question! The truth is that I’m not sure how to respond. Certainly there’s a humanistic element in the way I look at things. But I don’t think you need to be an anthropologist to look that way at certain people or situations. It’s a way of looking at life that many people have â€" documentary photographers in general have that, regardless of their background. In this case, I think it’s more important to be spiritually open to what you encounter.

DESCRIPTIONNicolas Janowski A witchcraft market in Iquitos, Peru.
Q.

How did this particular project come about?

A.

I was first in the jungle when I was 18 and made a two-month trip into the Amazon aboard a cargo boat. Traveling back then was different from what it is now; nowadays it’s complicated, but back then it was a lot more. I was in the area around the border of Brazil and Peru, and that area left a big impact on me. I always thought that if some day I got the opportunity, I’d like to do a project in the jungle. I didn’t know what it would be about, but that restlessness was left in me.

I work for some travel magazines, and the project was really born and I was first able to work on it when I made another trip to Ecuador, which ended up being the first stage of the project. I was working down on the coast, on a trip on which I had been sent by a magazine, and I took advantage of that to begin my personal project on my own account.

Q.

You say the region had a big impact on you. In what sense?

A.

The first level, for sure, was spiritual. I felt a connection to the exuberance of the jungle â€" it’s got such a strong energy. That’s the first impact on anybody, the voluptuousness of the region. Then, what surprised me a lot was the human qualities of the people who struggle to live there. The jungle is warm, and so are its people. They are friendly and really very polite.

Q.

I notice that on your site you talk about “Amazons” in the plural, rather than the singular. What is the reason for that?

A.

I understand the Amazon to be a region, but one with important distinctions between the lowlands in a place like Bolivia, an urban center like Iquitos in Peru, or Ecuador, where the jungle is still virgin in many respects. The cultures and the languages that are spoken there are also very different, and here I am talking about the original languages of the native inhabitants.

Q.

The subjects of your photographs in this series range from shamans to prostitutes. How did you choose your subjects?

A.

When I started, I asked myself whether at some point this could become a book, and from that point on, each of the three stages on which I’ve worked has had a particular main point. In Ecuador, it was the environmental question and the oil companies, and how that affected the people who live in the region.

As a result of that first trip, I realized that the Amazon is a space in continuous transformation. So when I went to Bolivia early in 2012, to the Beni area, I was still interested in the environment, but also in religious syncretism â€" how communities were being changed as the result of the contact between indigenous people and the settlements that are modifying traditional cultures.

The second stage opened the door to the third, which was that, after having been in two zones that were eminently rural, I wanted the contrast of a markedly urban area. I chose Iquitos, where I spent a month. It’s an isolated city, which you can reach only by boat or plane. There are no roads, so the influence of outside forces is smaller.

DESCRIPTIONNicolas Janowski Napo region, Ecuador.
Q.

The largest piece of the Amazon basin lies within Brazilian territory. But Brazil isn’t included in the photographs you’ve published so far. What is the reason for that?

A.

In reality, this is an ongoing process, and for personal reasons I haven’t traveled in the region so far this year. But I’m going to be going back in December, starting in Peru and heading for Brazil, so that will be my first contact with Brazil.

Thus far, there have been three stages in this project, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know when it is going to end. I guess it will be over whenever I feel it is done, but for now, I’m not in a hurry to finish it. And since I’m financing this myself, it also depends on the cost of trips and getting assignments that can take me there. When I get those, I can plan on going wherever it suits me.

Q.

Let’s talk about the technical challenges you face when you shoot in a climate with such extreme conditions. For instance, how do you deal with the intensity of the sunlight?

A.

In reality, the biggest problem with shooting in the jungle has to do with the humidity.

Q.

That was going to be my next question, because every time I’ve had to shoot in the Amazon, I’ve had awful problems with my equipment going crazy. Especially when it is digital gear.

A.

Of course, that’s a huge problem. By pure luck, I haven’t had that kind of difficulty myself. But to answer your question about the sun, I’m also lucky because a lot of the photographs in this project were taken at night, with me using a flash. I work a lot with flash, sometimes with two sources of light, one natural and one artificial.

Q.

But what do you do when something is happening in harsh daylight and you know you’re not going to be able to capture it later, at the golden hour?

A.

There are two basic questions involved when you’re shooting in the jungle. One is if you’re at higher elevations, where you’ve got cloud cover and generally don’t see the sun. There, the vegetation filters everything. But when you’re out in a clearing, then yes, the light is very strong and the heat so intense that it’s hard to shoot.

Q.

And when it rains, as it does intensely for half the year?

A.

Yeah, that’s another big problem. [Laughs] You have to hope the rain will be intermittent and not constant, making your equipment all wet. Otherwise, you have the options used elsewhere â€" protectors, anti-humidity pouches to draw out as much moisture as possible when you’ve got your equipment stored. You need luck, too, because it’s a constant challenge. [Laughs]

The advantage for me is that I’m doing this project for myself and don’t have a deadline. So when conditions are really bad, I have the luxury of waiting until things improve and won’t damage my equipment. But when you’re on assignment and have two days to get it done, oh boy, that’s a different story. Then you’ve got to get an image, no matter what.

Q.

And in the dry season, dust is always a factor, right? Although I’ve come to think it can really give a special quality to the light.

A.

I’m very much in agreement with that. But I’ve only come to that conclusion in the post-production process, when I’m looking at the images in a hotel room or back at home. At the time you’re shooting, it’s a real nuisance, believe me. [Laughs] But you’re right that it gives the light a special tint, and a semi-mystical quality, too â€" which, of course, is a characteristic of the jungle itself, no?

Q.

Everything you have said makes it sound like you are in this for the long haul, years and years or maybe even decades. Am I correct?

A.

The thing about the jungle is that it continues to call to me. It’s like it’s asking me to keep coming back â€" that’s a little bit how I feel. Look, these are the lungs of the world, and they are here in Latin America. The relations that have existed traditionally are being modified by the exploitation of natural resources. So I think it is important that there be a lot of projects undertaken to show this new reality, and from various points of view â€" documentary, artistic, cinematic, whatever. Because something important is going on, something is changing, and we don’t know where it is going to end up.

DESCRIPTIONNicolas Janowski Bolivia.

“The Liquid Serpent” came to our attention via Fotovisura.

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Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from the Golan Heights, Syria, Iraq and Kenya.

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At National Geographic, 125 Years of Showing Beauty and Tragedy

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An exhibition celebrating the 125th anniversary of National Geographic magazine will open at the Annenberg Space for Photography Oct. 26 and run through April 27, 2014. The show is a modern response to the history of the magazine, with most of the 500 images displayed on digital screens. It was co-curated by Sarah Leen, National Geographic’s newly appointed director of photography, and her husband, Bill Marr, its creative director.

Ms. Leen spoke with James Estrin about the exhibition and her plans for the magazine. Their conversation has been edited.

Q.

Tell me about the exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography.

A.

We did an exhibit with them a few years ago in 2010, when we did our special issue on water. That worked out really well, and they’re terrific to work with. Time passed, and we agreed to do an exhibit that celebrated the 125th anniversary of the magazine and all the great photography during that time.

I had been really worrying about how to do an exhibit in the Annenberg space. Depending on size, it could be 100 or so prints, but with our archives, it’s very easy to just end up doing all the iconic images. There’s pictures that you almost have to do. There’s quite a few that are beloved and really speak about who we are and what we’ve done. And then you’re done! Over 100. There’s so much more, and it was driving me crazy figuring how to make an edit of this.

Bill Marr and I were on a long one-day drive to Indianapolis and thought if we didn’t have the constraints of print, if we didn’t have to do a print exhibit, then the sky’s the limit. And so we started imagining an exhibit in which it’s much more on screens than on print.

Q.

You ended up with how many images?

A.

It’s 500 plus 1. At a certain point, Chris Johns, the editor of the magazine, capped it at 500, because I was just going crazy, there was so much good material. And even now, all I can think of is all the good things I had to leave out.

Q.

You focused a lot on the more recent material. What will we know about National Geographic photography and photographers from this exhibit that we wouldn’t necessarily have known before?

A.

Although there is a fair amount of archival material and old favorites that stand the test of time, I think what you’ll see is how much we’re covering relevant issues and contemporary topics. We’re still doing incredible natural history, science, exploration and archaeology, but we’re also doing geopolitical stories, whether it’s in Cairo or Gaza or Cuba â€" and in the U.S., like the teenage brain or fracking in North Dakota.

It’s not just the topics, it’s also the types of photographers and their vision. I think we’re using the best photographers in the world, especially in the world of photojournalism and social documentary. Also, we’re using incredible landscape photographers and fine-art photographers. So these visions, I think, also make the way we look at things feel fresh and relevant.

DESCRIPTIONMartin Schoeller/AUGUST Image “I like building catalogs of faces that invite people to compare them,” says the photographer Martin Schoeller, who set out on a project to document America’s racial diversity. “When you compare 10, 20, 100 sets of eyes, you see how different they are.” Jordan Spencer, 18, of Grand Prairie, Tex., left, identifies as black and biracial; Celeste Seda, 26, of Brooklyn, identifies as Dominican and Korean.
Q.

When I was growing up, I loved National Geographic, but it was mainly images of exotic people and animals and a certain type of photography. What National Geographic photography is has changed fairly substantially in the last 30 years.

A.

I think so, especially in the last 20 or 25 years. And we still do those things. In this August issue, we have this amazing piece on the Serengeti lions by Nick Nichols, but I think if you look at the way it’s photographed, it feels very contemporary and fresh and sort of re-seen â€" the technology that he employs and the way he sees.

There are still plenty of things that we cull from our core topics, the environmental issues and nature and natural history. We still do exotic cultures, but it’s more about exotic cultures that are trying to live in the 21st century, or fighting environmental degradation or the loss of their language.

Q.

In May, you were promoted to director of photography for the magazine. What do you hope to accomplish in your new role?

A.

Well, I’m managing the photo editor staff of the magazine and working a lot with all the freelance photographers. We also hired Keith Jenkins, who’s the director of photography for the Web. So he and I are partnering.

Our presence is going to be increasingly digital. We have a very robust digital iPad app that’s also on Kindle, so we’re moving a lot of our storytelling into the online arena as Keith and I look to find ways to broaden our reach. And this also gives us a chance to expand our photographic coverage.

I’m looking at how we train our photo editors here to think more about the Web and how to enhance the multimedia skills of our photographers. Now, when we start a story, from the very beginning we have a lot of discussion about multimedia.

Q.

Until now, the photo editors of the magazine didn’t always have that much to do with the Web?

A.

That’s right. And now we’re starting to have a lot more. There’s been new hires and new people that have come in that are really young and fantastic and have really a lot of bright ideas.

DESCRIPTIONGeorge Shiras/National Geographic The photography pioneer George Shiras made the first nighttime wildlife photos. Michigan, 1906.
Q.

What do you want to do differently in print?

A.

What we’ve always been about and what we’ll continue to be about is great storytelling. We want to tell stories in meaningful ways. We want to employ photographers and let their individual voices come through. I’d like to be expanding the way we tell stories, whether it’s portraiture or four-by-five film or essay.

I’d been working on this as a photo editor before I became director of photography. It’s bringing in new voices and new ways of telling stories, always looking out for photographers that have the ability to work for us and have a unique voice.

Q.

You grew up at National Geographic.

A.

I pretty much did. I was a College Photographer of the Year in 1979, and the prize was an internship here. I actually did a magazine assignment under Bob Gilka, who recently passed away.

Q.

How long did you shoot for the Geographic?

A.

Well, after my internship, I went away and worked for newspapers like The Topeka Capital Journal and and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then I came back and started freelancing here around ’89. I did five covers and about 16 magazine stories.

DESCRIPTIONHerbert G. Ponting/National Geographic A sled dog inspected a gramophone during Robert Scott’s 1910 expedition to the South Pole â€" a light note in a sad tale. Scott was beaten to the Pole, and his entire party perished. Antarctica, 1910.
Q.

Why did you become an editor, then? You and I both know how much fun it is to be a photographer.

A.

It is a lot of fun to be a photographer.

When you’re a photographer, often you do a lot of other things besides actual editorial assignment work to make ends meet. So I was doing a lot of teaching and photo research and photo editing, and I really enjoyed it. I found that to be very rewarding. I always kind of thought in the back of my mind that maybe some day I might be interested in doing more of that.

And there just happened to be an opening on the National Geographic’s photo editing staff, which doesn’t happen very often here because everybody really loves their jobs, so nobody leaves. I was actually working on a story at the time. So I applied for the job and they hired me in 2005.

Q.

Is there anything that you learned as a shooter here, or as an intern, that informs what you’re doing now?

A.

Well, I know what it’s like to be on the other side of the camera, to be out there in the field. I am committed to a photographer’s success here. I want the photographers to come in here, especially the newer photographers, and really hit it out of the park â€" really succeed in a very brilliant way.

I do find this place can be very intimidating. Our stories are such long-term assignments, and we ask a lot of our photographers. I find that giving photographers the support and guidance and encouragement they need to succeed here is really important.

I can’t thank the people who helped me, guided me here enough, like the former directors of photography Robert Gilka, Rich Clarkson, Kent Kobersteen and Tom Kennedy. These people, they had your back. I think that’s really, really important.

Q.

What would you hope people walk away from the exhibition in Los Angeles with?

A.

The exhibit and the October issue are built on the theme of “the power of photography.” As an institution, we believe photography has the power to illuminate, educate and, perhaps, to put it rather boldly, change the world. We partner with photographers who are as passionate about this as we are and who are dedicated to using photography to make a difference and to show you the beauty and the tragedy all around us.

DESCRIPTIONMaria Stenzel/National Geographic Suspended above winter sea ice, researchers study an ecosystem resistant to easy observation. Ice-breaking ships and other technologies have opened a new scientific frontier. Antarctica, 1996.

“The Power of Photography: National Geographic 125 Years” will be on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles from Oct. 26 through April 27, 2014.

Follow @AnnenbergSpace, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: Israel and Elsewhere

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Photos from Israel, Jordan, Iraq and India.

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Documenting Elephants’ Compassion, and Their Slaughter

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When Michael Nichols first photographed elephants in the lowland forests of the Central African Republic in 1991, he only caught fleeting moments of them, and at great peril. These sensitive behemoths were so afraid of ivory poachers hunting them down, they thundered off at the slightest hint of human activity.

It took him 16 years to encounter elephants who were not fearful of humans, on the savannah of Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, where they were protected and used to tourists. He spent two years there photographing a group of 600 elephants, gradually comprehending their complex relationships, intelligence and compassion.

When one family mourned the death of a female, the elephants approached and surrounded the corpse, touched it with their trunks, and started swaying back and forth. Matriarchs from nearby elephant families joined in.

“They go to the corpse and they won’t leave it,” Mr. Nichols said. “Even when it’s just bones. Once a year they’ll visit the bones and hold them with their trunk. I would call that mourning.”

His 20-year project, “Earth to Sky,” is being published by Aperture this week. It is a stunningly beautiful book, whose images, many of them taken while on assignment for National Geographic magazine, reflect experiences that had a profound effect on Mr. Nichols.

“These are the most caring and sentient creatures on earth,” he wrote in the book, “yet they suffer so horribly at the hand of man.”

He was helped in the savannah by Daniel Lentipo, a Samburu tribesman who had worked with a researcher from the environmental organization Save the Elephants. Mr. Lentipo could spot and identify almost any elephant, even from a great distance, and knew the individual names that had been bestowed on each. Mr. Nichols and his guide followed a family led by a matriarch named Navajo.

Normally, elephants sleep standing up to be alert to impending danger. But these ones felt comfortable enough that in the middle of the night the whole family lay down and went to sleep “just snoring and farting” around the two men.

DESCRIPTIONMichael Nichols/National Geographic A bull elephant and two females, a mother and daughter, exchanged a friendly greeting in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya.

Mr. Nichols saw complex societal relationships unfold and photographed elders teaching and taking care of young orphans. He also noticed that these elephants were so sensitive to their environment, it was as if they were carrying around an internal weather station. Not to mention a memory â€" you guessed it â€" as good as an elephant’s.

“The old lady’s got to know where they found water 20 years ago during a drought,” he said of the matriarchs. “Elephants are passing on knowledge just like indigenous tribes would or we might today.”

If only humans were as faithful to the past. The volume includes Mr. Nichols’s elegiac black and white photographs (Slides 6 through 10) of a massacre by ivory poachers in Chad in 2006 that he says was the beginning of a full-scale elephant slaughter that continues to today. With each tusk fetching up to $6,000, tens of thousands of elephants throughout Africa are killed for their tusks.

“Ivory simply must be devalued,” Mr. Nichols wrote. “Those who buy it and use it and carve it must be shamed. Elephants are perceptive, conscious and responsive animals; they cannot be terrorized and massacred by a world that calls itself civilized. We have to forget about the absurd indulgence of ivory â€" a useless status symbol â€" and put our focus and resources into the far more complex problem of how elephants and humans can share land in an overtaxed continent.”

He sees this as more than a conservation issue. Both in the jungles and on the plains, ecosystems depend on elephants to clear the land for other animals to use. But there is an “almost spiritual” experience, he said, in seeing large herds of elephants walking freely across Africa’s plains.

“Elephants should be here just because they need to be here,” he said. “The earth is not the earth without them.”

DESCRIPTIONMichael Nichols/National Geographic A young elephant, orphaned by poaching, greeted schoolchildren visiting the Voi Rehabilitation Center in Tsavo East National Park in Kenya.

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It’s Chelsea Manning From Now On in The Times

The Times will begin immediately to call the former Bradley Manning by her preferred name - Chelsea Manning.

An e-mail on Monday night from Susan Wessling, the deputy editor who supervises the copy desk, to newsroom editors said:

“Starting tomorrow, we will move to a new formulation:

… Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning…

‘Private Manning’ on later references, and ‘she’ for the pronoun.”

As I wrote last week, this is a circumstance that has little if any precedent, given Private Manning’s prominence in the news. Over the weekend, the executive editor Jill Abramson, appearing at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association event in Boston, said The Times would go in this direction.

The Huffington Post reported on Tuesday that many news outlets are following the same course.

I’m glad to see The Times make this move and to do so fairly quickly. It’s the right thing to do.



Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Afghanistan, Portugal and Kenya.

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Anonymous Sources on Syrian Weapons and Mayoral Politics Bring Criticism

Just about everybody is in agreement about the use of anonymous sources in news stories. Readers deplore it, public editors shake a finger at it, Times editors and reporters say they try to minimize it. The Times’s “Manual of Style and Usage” calls it “a last resort,” noting that anonymous sources are to be used sparingly, only when the information cannot be provided any other way, and certainly never to smear anyone.

But then Monday’s front page comes along, and there they are â€" anonymous sources in prominent places on important subjects.

The lead article on the page cited “a senior Obama administration official” on a subject that could not be more serious or carry more import: the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria, a situation that is moving the United States toward military action.

Lower on The Times’s front page, an article about Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor of New York City, used anonymous sources more than once to take swipes at the candidate. (My e-mail was also full of readers complaining about other examples of anonymous sources from recent days â€" one in a China story; one in a metropolitan police story. This is clearly an equal-opportunity issue.)

How acceptable are these sources? One reader, Stacy Beam, compared the use of the anonymous source in the Syria article with the use of now-disparaged anonymous sources in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I guess we really haven’t learned too much since the Iraq war, have we? Scott Shane’s Syria article today repeats anonymous government officials (and other international officials who arguably have an agenda) making very, very strong conclusive statements about chemical weapon use without much support. As usual, The New York Times is more than glad to help the most powerful leaders in the world get their message out without having to worry about little things about accountability, counterarguments, other facts and various unknowns that make the administration talking points that speak of “no doubt” about chemical weapon use in Syria seem rather simplistic.

Another reader, Art Holloway, criticized the de Blasio article, saying it “reads like a hit job.” One passage in particular, he said, “would seem to violate every rule about the use of anonymous sources.” That passage read:

“I have never heard anyone say that Bill de Blasio” is an overly demanding boss, said a top Democrat who has frequently worked with Mr. de Blasio and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing relations with him and his aides. “He is probably a little conflict averse,” said the Democrat, who is supporting another candidate.

This was not the only anonymously sourced critical comment in the article.

(I disagree, by the way, that the article read like a “hit job,” though it certainly included criticism.)

I spoke with Scott Shane, one of the authors of the Syria article, and whose work I find consistently strong.  “I could have described it as a White House statement,” he said. “This was not a junior bureaucrat freelancing” or administration sources making assertions about “on the ground” conditions; it was essentially a policy statement.

The use of the phrase “a senior Obama administration official” to describe the sourcing “could be misleading,” Mr. Shane agreed. “The whole point was that this was an official statement.” In retrospect, he believes that it would have been clearer to call it a White House statement, rather than attribute it as the administration preferred, which other news outlets also agreed to do.

“I tried to get that across with saying it was carefully worded,” he said. But readers â€" rightly sensitive to The Times’s lack of skepticism in earlier circumstances â€" can’t be expected to read between those lines. Calling it a White House statement, if that’s what it was, would have been more straightforward and much better.

(In general, The Times’s coverage of Syria, in recent weeks, has avoided the mistakes made before the Iraq war â€" which were less the product of anonymous sources than of flawed reporting. And its editorial page has been appropriately cautious on the same subject.)

The politics editor, Carolyn Ryan, defended the use of the anonymous quotations in the profile of Mr. de Blasio. Of the one mentioned by Mr. Holloway, she said: “The quote is very measured. The person, whose identity the reporter shared with me before the story was published, says that de Blasio is not overly demanding, and is probably ‘a little conflict averse.’ That comment is not a personal or partisan attack. And it aligns with the many interviews we conducted for the story, and certainly with the narrative the story lays out in detail.”

Ms. Ryan also found unobjectionable one of the first quotations in the article, describing a long-winded conference call. “It was amazing that Bill was more than willing to let this go on,” she said.

Ms. Ryan added: “We had multiple accounts of that conference call â€" three interviews about it, and all accounts aligned. The quote brought the anecdote to life. It was one of disbelief, mainly, that Mr. de Blasio allowed the discussion to go on for so long.”

I find the anonymous criticism throughout the article regrettable. It’s possible that no one would say such things on the record; if that’s the case, those comments didn’t belong in the article as direct quotations.

As The Times’s stylebook puts it, “The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper.”

There is a place for anonymously sourced information in news articles. Used sparingly and wisely, it’s a valuable journalistic tool. Sometimes there’s no other way to get out important truths. This wasn’t such a case.



Anonymous Sources on Syrian Weapons and Mayoral Politics Bring Criticism

Just about everybody is in agreement about the use of anonymous sources in news stories. Readers deplore it, public editors shake a finger at it, Times editors and reporters say they try to minimize it. The Times's “Manual of Style and Usage” calls it “a last resort,” noting that anonymous sources are to be used sparingly, only when the information cannot be provided any other way, and certainly never to smear anyone.

But then Monday's front page comes along, and there they are - anonymous sources in prominent places on important subjects.

The lead article on the page cited “a senior Obama administration official” on a subject that could not be more serious or carry more import: the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria, a situation that is moving the United States toward military action.

Lower on The Times's front page, an article about Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor of New York City, used anonymous sources more than once to take swipes at the candidate. (My e-mail was also full of readers complaining about other examples of anonymous sources from recent days - one in a China story; one in a metropolitan police story. This is clearly an equal-opportunity issue.)

How acceptable are these sources? One reader, Stacy Beam, compared the use of the anonymous source in the Syria article with the use of now-disparaged anonymous sources in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I guess we really haven't learned too much since the Iraq war, have we? Scott Shane's Syria article today repeats anonymous government officials (and other international officials who arguably have an agenda) making very, very strong conclusive statements about chemical weapon use without much support. As usual, The New York Times is more than glad to help the most powerful leaders in the world get their message out without having to worry about little things about accountability, counterarguments, other facts and various unknowns that make the administration talking points that speak of “no doubt” about chemical weapon use in Syria seem rather simplistic.

Another reader, Art Holloway, criticized the de Blasio article, saying it “reads like a hit job.” One passage in particular, he said, “would seem to violate every rule about the use of anonymous sources.” That passage read:

“I have never heard anyone say that Bill de Blasio” is an overly demanding boss, said a top Democrat who has frequently worked with Mr. de Blasio and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing relations with him and his aides. “He is probably a little conflict averse,” said the Democrat, who is supporting another candidate.

This was not the only anonymously sourced critical comment in the article.

(I disagree, by the way, that the article read like a “hit job,” though it certainly included criticism.)

I spoke with Scott Shane, one of the authors of the Syria article, and whose work I find consistently strong.  “I could have described it as a White House statement,” he said. “This was not a junior bureaucrat freelancing” or administration sources making assertions about “on the ground” conditions; it was essentially a policy statement.

The use of the phrase “a senior Obama administration official” to describe the sourcing “could be misleading,” Mr. Shane agreed. “The whole point was that this was an official statement.” In retrospect, he believes that it would have been clearer to call it a White House statement, rather than attribute it as the administration preferred, which other news outlets also agreed to do.

“I tried to get that across with saying it was carefully worded,” he said. But readers - rightly sensitive to The Times's lack of skepticism in earlier circumstances - can't be expected to read between those lines. Calling it a White House statement, if that's what it was, would have been more straightforward and much better.

(In general, The Times's coverage of Syria, in recent weeks, has avoided the mistakes made before the Iraq war - which were less the product of anonymous sources than of flawed reporting. And its editorial page has been appropriately cautious on the same subject.)

The politics editor, Carolyn Ryan, defended the use of the anonymous quotations in the profile of Mr. de Blasio. Of the one mentioned by Mr. Holloway, she said: “The quote is very measured. The person, whose identity the reporter shared with me before the story was published, says that de Blasio is not overly demanding, and is probably ‘a little conflict averse.' That comment is not a personal or partisan attack. And it aligns with the many interviews we conducted for the story, and certainly with the narrative the story lays out in detail.”

Ms. Ryan also found unobjectionable one of the first quotations in the article, describing a long-winded conference call. “It was amazing that Bill was more than willing to let this go on,” she said.

Ms. Ryan added: “We had multiple accounts of that conference call - three interviews about it, and all accounts aligned. The quote brought the anecdote to life. It was one of disbelief, mainly, that Mr. de Blasio allowed the discussion to go on for so long.”

I find the anonymous criticism throughout the article regrettable. It's possible that no one would say such things on the record; if that's the case, those comments didn't belong in the article as direct quotations.

As The Times's stylebook puts it, “The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper.”

There is a place for anonymously sourced information in news articles. Used sparingly and wisely, it's a valuable journalistic tool. Sometimes there's no other way to get out important truths. This wasn't such a case.



A Penny Picture Photographer in the American South

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Inside or outside his photo studio, Hugh Mangum created an atmosphere â€" respectful and often playful â€" in which hundreds of men, women and children opened themselves. Though the late-19th-century American South in which he worked was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation and inequality â€" between black and white, men and women, rich and poor â€" Mr. Mangum, who was white, portrayed all of them with candor, humor, confidence and dignity.

Above all, he showed his subjects as individuals, and for that, his work â€" largely unknown â€" is mesmerizing.

Mr. Mangum attracted and cultivated a clientele that drew heavily from both black and white communities â€" a rarity for his time. In the context of turn-of-the century Southern society, segregated by law and custom, the diversity displayed in his negatives is striking. Each client appears as valuable as the next, no story less significant.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University

Though his life was brief â€" he died at 44 â€" it encompassed momentous shifts amid a turbulent and complex period in American history. Mr. Mangum was born in 1877, the year Reconstruction ended. When he died from influenza in 1922, World War I had ended only three years earlier. Those decades included both acclaimed black thinkers like Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, and some of the most difficult years in African-American history.

Although there are no tidy dates separating the phases and forms of racial discrimination, the removal of federal troops at the end of Reconstruction was arguably the advent of Jim Crow laws. Lynching peaked in the 1890s. At the same time, members of the black community, built on the strength of its own values and institutions, cultivated resistance to laws and customs that excluded and devalued them.

I have not found any indications that Mr. Mangum used his photographs for political purposes, but it is likely that many of his subjects did. By the turn of the 20th century, African-Americans were well practiced at engaging the power of photography to challenge racial ideas, as well as to create and celebrate black identity. Mr. Mangum’s subjects used his images to emphasize accomplishments, prosperity, beauty and individuality. They shared them with friends and made them the foundation of family photo albums, ultimately shaping their own identities and those of future generations.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University The photographer, Hugh Mangum, is at top left.

The details in the studio portraits, framed against bare backdrops, are intimately attached to the sitters. A stunning young woman is featured in the top left frame of a negative (Slide 11). Dressed in a casual white cotton dress, she has her stately shoulders and enduring gaze turned away from the camera. Her elegant jaw line; long, arched eyebrows; and composed lips exude a quiet confidence that makes one want to know more about her life.

Another series of exposures (below) shows a woman looking almost woeful at first. But by the third exposure, she leans back, laughing. The sequence is delightful because it is unexpected, maybe even to her. Unbridled emotion was unusual in early-20th-century portraiture, yet this is not an atypical sequence in Mr. Mangum’s photographs.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

Another sequence (Slide 2) shows five women following a similar set of expressions and poses that include a smile, a serious air and hands behind the head, revealing what a typical portrait session with Mr. Mangum might have entailed.

The Penny Picture camera that Mr. Mangum used was ideal for creating inexpensive and accessible novelty portraits. Multiple subjects could be photographed on one negative, reducing cost and labor. Remarkably, the order of the images on the Penny Picture camera negatives reflects the order in which his diverse clientele rotated through the studio, the negatives reasonably representing a day’s work for this gregarious photographer.

As for Mangum the man, there are but scattered records of his life, stored in aging boxes belonging to his granddaughter in Cary, N.C., including letters, sketches, photographic fliers and supply orders, his professional hypnotist card and books in which he left his autograph.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

The most tantalizing remnants are his images. They raise questions about, and offer a glimpse into, both his character and Southern society. Mr. Mangum probably exposed thousands of glass plate negatives, both in professional studios and as an itinerant photographer. Sadly, most of those were destroyed through benign neglect after his death or were lost, as were almost all records of the names and dates associated with them.

The images that remain â€" about 700 glass plate negatives preserved in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library â€" were salvaged from the tobacco pack house on the Mangum family property where the photographer built his first darkroom. For decades, the negatives caught the droppings of chickens and other creatures living in the pack house. Today they are in various states of deterioration. Some are broken and the emulsion is peeling on others, but the hundreds of vibrant personalities in the photographs prevail, engaging our emotions, intellect and imagination.

A century later, Mr. Mangum’s portraits allow us a penetrating gaze into individual faces of the past, and in a larger sense, they offer an unusually revealing glimpse of the early-20th-century American South.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

Sarah Stacke is a photographer based in Brooklyn and Durham, N.C. She is working on a publication about Hugh Mangum’s life and work.

Follow @sarahstacke and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



A Penny Picture Photographer in the American South

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Inside or outside his photo studio, Hugh Mangum created an atmosphere â€" respectful and often playful â€" in which hundreds of men, women and children opened themselves. Though the late-19th-century American South in which he worked was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation and inequality â€" between black and white, men and women, rich and poor â€" Mr. Mangum, who was white, portrayed all of them with candor, humor, confidence and dignity.

Above all, he showed his subjects as individuals, and for that, his work â€" largely unknown â€" is mesmerizing.

Mr. Mangum attracted and cultivated a clientele that drew heavily from both black and white communities â€" a rarity for his time. In the context of turn-of-the century Southern society, segregated by law and custom, the diversity displayed in his negatives is striking. Each client appears as valuable as the next, no story less significant.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University

Though his life was brief â€" he died at 44 â€" it encompassed momentous shifts amid a turbulent and complex period in American history. Mr. Mangum was born in 1877, the year Reconstruction ended. When he died from influenza in 1922, World War I had ended only three years earlier. Those decades included both acclaimed black thinkers like Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, and some of the most difficult years in African-American history.

Although there are no tidy dates separating the phases and forms of racial discrimination, the removal of federal troops at the end of Reconstruction was arguably the advent of Jim Crow laws. Lynching peaked in the 1890s. At the same time, members of the black community, built on the strength of its own values and institutions, cultivated resistance to laws and customs that excluded and devalued them.

I have not found any indications that Mr. Mangum used his photographs for political purposes, but it is likely that many of his subjects did. By the turn of the 20th century, African-Americans were well practiced at engaging the power of photography to challenge racial ideas, as well as to create and celebrate black identity. Mr. Mangum’s subjects used his images to emphasize accomplishments, prosperity, beauty and individuality. They shared them with friends and made them the foundation of family photo albums, ultimately shaping their own identities and those of future generations.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University The photographer, Hugh Mangum, is at top left.

The details in the studio portraits, framed against bare backdrops, are intimately attached to the sitters. A stunning young woman is featured in the top left frame of a negative (Slide 11). Dressed in a casual white cotton dress, she has her stately shoulders and enduring gaze turned away from the camera. Her elegant jaw line; long, arched eyebrows; and composed lips exude a quiet confidence that makes one want to know more about her life.

Another series of exposures (below) shows a woman looking almost woeful at first. But by the third exposure, she leans back, laughing. The sequence is delightful because it is unexpected, maybe even to her. Unbridled emotion was unusual in early-20th-century portraiture, yet this is not an atypical sequence in Mr. Mangum’s photographs.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

Another sequence (Slide 2) shows five women following a similar set of expressions and poses that include a smile, a serious air and hands behind the head, revealing what a typical portrait session with Mr. Mangum might have entailed.

The Penny Picture camera that Mr. Mangum used was ideal for creating inexpensive and accessible novelty portraits. Multiple subjects could be photographed on one negative, reducing cost and labor. Remarkably, the order of the images on the Penny Picture camera negatives reflects the order in which his diverse clientele rotated through the studio, the negatives reasonably representing a day’s work for this gregarious photographer.

As for Mangum the man, there are but scattered records of his life, stored in aging boxes belonging to his granddaughter in Cary, N.C., including letters, sketches, photographic fliers and supply orders, his professional hypnotist card and books in which he left his autograph.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

The most tantalizing remnants are his images. They raise questions about, and offer a glimpse into, both his character and Southern society. Mr. Mangum probably exposed thousands of glass plate negatives, both in professional studios and as an itinerant photographer. Sadly, most of those were destroyed through benign neglect after his death or were lost, as were almost all records of the names and dates associated with them.

The images that remain â€" about 700 glass plate negatives preserved in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library â€" were salvaged from the tobacco pack house on the Mangum family property where the photographer built his first darkroom. For decades, the negatives caught the droppings of chickens and other creatures living in the pack house. Today they are in various states of deterioration. Some are broken and the emulsion is peeling on others, but the hundreds of vibrant personalities in the photographs prevail, engaging our emotions, intellect and imagination.

A century later, Mr. Mangum’s portraits allow us a penetrating gaze into individual faces of the past, and in a larger sense, they offer an unusually revealing glimpse of the early-20th-century American South.

DESCRIPTIONHugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

Sarah Stacke is a photographer based in Brooklyn and Durham, N.C. She is working on a publication about Hugh Mangum’s life and work.

Follow @sarahstacke and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: West Bank and Elsewhere

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Photos from the West Bank, Iraq, Syria and Myanmar.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



A Show of Strength by Middle Eastern Women Photographers

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Despite the cultural limitations many have faced, women have been at the forefront of photography in the Arab world. In societies dominated by men, female photographers are using images to raise questions and explore issues of identity. They’re telling stories â€" often their own.

“I was raised with people trying to tell me what to do and think,” said Newsha Tavakolian, who shoots for The New York Times from Iran. “Now I want those looking at my work to have their own opinions. I don’t want to enforce any ideas or views upon them. They are free.”

Ms. Tavakolian‘s work is included in “She Who Tells a Story,” an exhibition showcasing 12 photographers from the Arab world, all women. She was encouraged to tell her story “in a different way” when she lost her permit to work as a photojournalist in Iran in 2009. Her photography, she said last week via e-mail, has been shaped by limitations.

But, she said: “The obstacles I have faced are not so special, nor have they been overall specific to me: my sisters, my friends and even my mother and grandmother all have to deal with limitations written up in laws or demanded by culture.”

DESCRIPTIONNewsha Tavakolian “Mahsa Vahdat.” 2010.

“She Who Tells a Story” opens at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this week. Four of the artists included are Iranian; three â€" Ms. Tavakolian, Gohar Dashti and Shadi Ghadirian â€" live and work in Iran today. The exhibit also highlights work by Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar and Shirin Neshat, the fourth Iranian artist, who lives in New York.

The curator of the exhibition, Kristen Gresh, noticed something when she started to follow contemporary photography from the Arab world â€" images she was seeing in exhibitions while living in Cairo and Paris.

“It seemed like the strongest work was made by women,” said Ms. Gresh, 37, the museum’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh assistant curator of photographs.

While searching for artists to include in “She Who Tells a Story,” Ms. Gresh had “no specific geographic requirements,” she said. She was simply looking for powerful photographs.

In an introduction to the exhibit, she confronts one challenge it has faced: “Though these photographers challenge stereotypes,” she writes, “the choice to unite them as a group has been seen by some, ironically, as confirming a stereotype.”

But the work of the artists is varied in motivation, subject and form. Ms. Gresh said one uniting theme is the “complexities of identity.”

DESCRIPTIONShadi Ghadirian “Untitled.” 1993.

The phrase “She Who Tells a Story” comes from the word rawiya (which is also the name of a collective of female photographers working in the Middle East). But the exhibit doesn’t tell one story; it tells many.

It begins with work from the 1990s, when Ms. Neshat, in particular, began “breaking boundaries” in terms of representation, Ms. Gresh said. It examines how others have posed similar questions in the years since then â€" and how photographers like Ms. Neshat, who became known internationally in the ’90s, have grown and changed.

For instance, in her earlier work, Ms. Al-Ani, an Iraqi artist, often explored the meaning of the veil. “She feels like today the veiled woman has so many other connotations that she no longer uses the veil as a device,” Ms. Gresh said.

And so the exhibit includes a newer series by Ms. Al-Ani: a film shot from a plane when the sun was at its lowest point in the sky, exposing parts of the landscape that viewers wouldn’t normally see and upsetting the idea that the Middle East is an empty desert.

DESCRIPTIONJananne Al-Ani “Shadow Sites II.” 2011.

Some of the work Ms. Gresh has chosen is more typical of documentary photography. Ms. Matar’s series “A Girl and Her Room” includes portraits of young women in Lebanon and the West Bank posed in their bedrooms (one of which is a small corner of a Palestinian refugee camp).

Ms. Matar’s wider project also includes American subjects. “Girls are girls, no matter where they are, somehow,” Ms. Matar said by telephone from Boston, where she is based. “I mean, they’re going through the same transition, whether they are deciding to wear the veil or whether they are painting their hair pink.”

Ms. Matar, an architect-turned-photographer who was born in Lebanon, said she has always found it important to focus not only on the destruction “but the humanity behind it.”

“It’s refreshing to have this exhibit right now,” she said of “She Who Tells a Story,” “because I think all we’re seeing from the Middle East â€" it’s sadness, it’s death, it’s killing.”

Ms. Gresh agrees. “I think this is a moment to not be focused on the immediate violence and current events,” she said. “Certainly, some of the deeper questions are present in this work. But it’s a very different point of view and it’s from photographers who either are based there or have roots there.”

The image chosen for the cover of the book, by Ms. Dashti, brings daily life together with war in a stark way. Set in a drab landscape dotted with tanks, the photo shows a couple wearing wedding attire in an abandoned car â€" “an uncertain vehicle for embarking on a new life,” Ms. Gresh notes in the book (Slide 1).

The photo comes from Ms. Dashti’s 2008 series “Today’s Life and War,” which includes 10 staged narratives focused on the couple. “It’s very much about untold stories of war,” Ms. Gresh said â€", and about war’s constant presence.

Ms. Tavakolian said that while the exhibit cannot really not change anything about the current situation in Egypt or elsewhere in the region, what it could do is help “provide people with the opportunity to see some different perspectives from the region.”

Her project that is included in the exhibit, “Listen,” includes portraits of six Iranian women mid-song, posed in front of richly colored sequined curtains (above). The singers’ performances, silent here, are forbidden in Iran.

Ms. Tavakolian, formerly an aspiring singer herself, didn’t seek to provide answers with ”Listen.” She had no agenda. “For me, what mattered,” she wrote in an e-mail, “was the art of singing and the emotions of these singers who want to sing but can’t.”

DESCRIPTIONLalla Assia Essaydi “Bullet Revisited #3.” 2012.

“She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World” will open Tuesday at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and remain on view through Jan. 12.

Follow @kerrimac and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



The Public Editor\'s Sunday Column: Covering Clinton\'s Candidacy in Waiting

Covering Clinton's Candidacy in Waiting

WHEN Hillary Clinton joined Twitter in June, her profile described her many roles - as the former first lady of Arkansas and the United States, former secretary of state and New York senator, and as “hair icon” and “pantsuit aficionado.”

And it described her future with three letters: TBD. To be determined.

Mrs. Clinton may consider her future up in the air, but The Times apparently does not. Or at least it's hedging its bets.

Not long after Mrs. Clinton's first tweet, a reporter who had been covering the news media, Amy Chozick, was moved to the political desk to cover the Clintons - particularly Hillary - as a full-time beat.

It's a major use of precious reportorial resources, considering that Mrs. Clinton holds no public office and has not said that she's running for one. And, after all, the next presidential election is more than three years away.

What gives? And for readers - and citizens - what are the potential benefits and the possible pitfalls?

Carolyn Ryan, The Times's political editor, made the case to me for the assignment. Mrs. Clinton, she said, “is the closest thing we have to an incumbent, when we look at 2016.” And getting in early allows The Times to develop sources and get behind the well-honed facade.

“With the Clintons,” she said, “there is a certain opacity and stagecraft and silly coverage elsewhere. Amy can penetrate a lot of that.” She praised Ms. Chozick as a relentless reporter who is “very savvy about power and has a great eye for story.”

Two articles last week give a sense of how she is developing the beat so far. In the first, which appeared on page A11 of most Tuesday editions, Ms. Chozick covered Mrs. Clinton's speech in San Francisco, in which she called for efforts to protect voting rights; it also detailed awards she is receiving. The second piece, which appeared on Wednesday's front page, was more substantive. Co-written with Nicholas Confessore, it examined the finances and shifting focus of the Clinton Foundation, and was an impressive example of enterprise and digging.

Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College and a media critic, said that the Clinton Foundation story began to change his mind about the wisdom of a Clinton beat.

“I haven't been sure there is enough news to sustain a full-time reporter's time,” he told me, “and a dedicated beat creates the incentive to make news.” A full-time Clinton beat at The Times, he said, “could help cement the perception that she is the inevitable Democratic nominee, and effectively serve to pre-anoint her.”

Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, echoed that concern, and raised a related one: “Is it in the public interest to perpetuate the permanent campaign? Should the press resist enabling it?” Both said that they saw positive possibilities, as well, in this effort.

Carl Bernstein, the Watergate reporter who wrote the well-regarded biography of Mrs. Clinton “A Woman In Charge,” told me in a phone interview that she is “really difficult to get a reportorial handle on.”

“She's someone who tries to write her own narrative,” and who, in words from the last chapter of his book, “has a difficult relationship with the truth.” So, The Times's putting an aggressive reporter on Mrs. Clinton early, he said, is a laudable effort to publish “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

But beat coverage, by its nature, is tricky. For every ounce of inside access and insight that is gained by a reporter's day-in and day-out attention, an ounce of independence and objectivity may be lost, notes Sandy Maisel, chairman of the government department at Colby College.

“The question is, does the reporter become captive,” writing largely positive pieces to maintain access, he said. Mr. Maisel praised the foundation story, though, as “not a puff piece and not a hatchet job, just very interesting.”

Ms. Chozick told me last week that her aim is to write a broad range of Clinton-related stories - from quirky to serious.

“I want to write stories that resonate beyond the bubble, that will appeal to my mom in Texas as opposed to Gawker.” She noted that other news organizations, particularly Politico and The Washington Post, are covering Mrs. Clinton heavily now, too. And because her editors, including the executive editor, Jill Abramson, want her to “own” the Clinton beat, “I live in constant fear” of losing a big story to another news outlet.

When The Times - still so influential, even amid today's constant media barrage - brings this kind of pressure to bear, who benefits?

The potential candidate may or may not. Constant tough scrutiny may not be welcome but, on balance, I think The Times's treatment of Mrs. Clinton as an undeclared, free-agent front-runner helps her. She can play her cards close to the vest and still maintain the highest possible profile.

The reader may or may not. If the intense and competitive coverage produces stories that serve the unintended purpose of promoting a candidacy in waiting, the reader-as-citizen loses. If that coverage digs beneath the surface to ferret out what ought to be known, the reader-as-citizen wins.

Jodi Kantor, the political reporter who has covered President Obama and his family for The Times and in her fascinating book, “The Obamas,” sees a simple proposition: Sometimes, she said, “The best campaign coverage happens before the campaign.” Once it begins, “the frozenness, the rigidity and the defensiveness make reporting that much harder,” she told me.

With Mr. Obama only seven months into his second term, and Mrs. Clinton's future still TBD, The Times runs the risk of overdoing it and, in Mr. Nyhan's term, “pre-anointing” a candidate. But it certainly runs no risk of having to make up for lost time.

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 August 18, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Covering Clinton's Candidacy in Waiting.

Who Gets to ‘Snow-Fall\' or ‘Jockey\' at The Times, and Why?

At Wired magazine's annual business conference in New York last May, the executive editor Jill Abramson made the observation that at The Times, “snow-fall” had become a verb.

“Everyone wants to snow-fall now, every day, all desks,” she said.

The reference was to the elaborate Pulitzer-winning multimedia effort from late last year, “Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” As The New Republic wrote this week, the project “marked a significant shift in the culture of the newsroom, where digital blockbusters are now seen as a way to become a star.”

Now there's a new effort in the “Snow Fall” genre: “The Jockey,” written by Barry Bearak, and detailing â€" through words, and Chang W. Lee's photographs and integrated video â€" the experiences and career of Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in America. The writing approaches poetry at times â€" “the serene musicality of hoofbeats and hard breathing” at a sunrise workout â€" and the visuals are inventive and absorbing. You can feel the thoroughbreds surging out of the gate and the steam coming off their coats.

It took many months â€" and many talented people â€" to produce. Like “Snow Fall,” the project has been widely praised, and has brought readers and viewers to The Times that it wouldn't normally have. Jason Stallman, the sports editor, said that numbers for “The Jockey” paled in comparison to those for “Snow Fall,” which everyone knew going in; it's a different kind of project, he said, which appeared in the summer doldrums. He added, “Chasing ‘Snow Fall' numbers is a fool's errand.” That project initially generated more than 3.5 million page views.

As Ad Age wrote, it's also a way for The Times to bring in a new kind of revenue and to experiment with more elegant ways of weaving custom ads into the overall project design. The revenue potential of video production is very much on the mind of the leadership at The Times these days.

Is the finished project â€" gorgeous as it is â€" really worth it, from a journalistic standpoint?

A reader, Bruce Lambert, from Hempstead, N.Y., who is a retired Times reporter, has a reaction to both projects that I found worth considering:

Despite having no personal interest in skiing, I found “Snow Fall's” writing, layout, photos and graphics to be engrossing, almost sweeping me away like the powerful avalanche it portrayed. But after finishing it, I wondered why so much talent, effort and expense was devoted to the story of a few elite athletes in a luxury sport who knowingly and needlessly took risks that turned out so badly.

After a minute or two of the equally visually impressive “The Jockey,” I decided not to expend any more time on this profile of an apparently superb rider in the sport of kings; no offense to those who prepared it so well. Especially at a time of constrained journalistic resources, why has The Times so far chosen only limited feature topics?

Why not, instead, pick an issue of far greater import - global warming, the Great Recession, income-wealth disparity, gun safety, stop-and-frisk, health care financing, Middle East turmoil or fracking, to name a few possibilities.

On Monday, I asked Dean Baquet, the managing editor, why the two major multimedia extravaganzas so far have been sports-related feature stories, and whether â€" as Mr. Lambert wondered â€" they are the most sensible use of resources. Each of the projects, he acknowledged, “took many, many months to produce” and involved writers, editors, graphics and technology people.

“Sports is very visual,” he said, in a way that “document-driven” investigative work is not. Sports stories offer narrative storytelling possibilities that lend themselves to this kind of effort. And the topics are “less competitive” in nature, allowing a long gestation period.

How well will this approach hold up over time?

Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo offered this prediction: “I suspect that years from now, we'll look back at ‘Snow Fall,' ‘The Jockey' and their copycats in the same way we now regard 1990s-era dancing hamster animations - as an example of excess, a moment when designers indulged their creativity because they now have the technical means to do so, and not because it improved the story or readers' understanding of it.”

Even Mr. Baquet admitted that such efforts “could have been handled in 900-word feature stories,” not 10,000 word extravaganzas. But he strongly believes they are worth the resources. Editors pitch ideas at the twice-monthly enterprise meeting, and a group of editors and graphics people make the decisions on who gets to “snow-fall,” with an eye to what projects lend themselves best to the new approach, are worthwhile, and stand a realistic chance of succeeding, given all the elements. Many more are proposed than accepted, he said.

The Times has no intention of slowing down, but the pace isn't particularly fast either. The plan is to produce “four or five” such projects a year, Mr. Baquet said. “We're just learning how to do them. We're not capable of doing zillions yet.” One that's in the works is on a very serious news-related subject, he said, but did not want to go into detail.

My take: I like the innovation - it is nothing short of necessary. And the projects are beautifully executed.

But I'm with Mr. Lambert in hoping that when The Times is fully up to speed, editors will make room, more often than not, for journalistic subjects that really matter, and to balance news value with the expenditure of resources.



How Well Has The Times Advanced a Story That It Didn\'t Break?

Updated, Friday, August 23, 1:41 p.m.

The New York Times did not break the story that has dominated national security news all summer: revelations of widespread surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. I explored the reasons for that in a recent Sunday column.

But how well has The Times done in covering or advancing that story since it first appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post? Is The Times holding its own, gaining or losing ground, and how hard is the paper of record pushing, on this extremely important story?

I'll offer some initial observations, in what may turn out to be a continuing consideration of that question:

1. The Times has broken some notable stories of its own and provided some good analysis. The lead story on Wednesday's front page, by the prolific Charlie Savage, was an example of this, describing how the federal government is developing facial scanning techniques to enhance the surveillance of the future. An earlier story by Mr. Savage, also on the front page, reported that the N.S.A. is not just intercepting e-mail but is “searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” It moved the story forward significantly. Eric Lichtbla u reported in July on the power and secrecy of the nation's surveillance court, contributing a new, important angle. And a valuable analysis piece by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane provided perspective.

In addition, Peter Maass's article on Sunday in The Times Magazine on the video journalist Laura Poitras gave a frightening glimpse of the intimidation brought to bear on those involved in breaking the N.S.A. story.

2. Less positively, The Times sometimes has played down the importance of other papers' reporting on this subject. One example came last week. The Times rewrote a Washington Post blockbuster story on the N.S.A.'s breaking of federal privacy rules, but then buried it in a one-column format on Page A12. The underplaying of a competitor's story is nothing new in journalism but unfortunate nonetheless, given what's at stake for citizens.

In fairness, the story did get good display on The Times's home page when it first broke, and it got a one-sentence mention on the front page of the paper, referring readers to the article inside.

3. On some occasions, The Times has seemed less than intensely interested in the developing story and its ramifications. I wrote recently, for example, about The Times's exclusive interview with President Obama, a 40-minute session in which - astonishingly, in my view - no surveillance issues were raised.

In addition, the articles about the British government's intrusions into press freedom - including the appalling destruction of The Guardian's hard drives - were well written by the London bureau chief Steven Erlanger but played on inside pages of the paper. The headline on one of them, “British Newspaper Has Advantages in Battle With Government Over Secrets,” seemed to miss the larger point of what had happened. One reader, Jim Michie, was angry about The Times's “superficial” treatment of the British assault on the press and wrote to me calling The Times's quiet coverage “amazing and disgraceful.”

4. While The Guardian and The Washington Post have maintained their edge, continuing to break stories, other news organizations who came in later than The Post and The Guardian are digging up other angles: The Wall Street Journal got in the game Wednesday, leading its front page with a story that said the N.S.A. is reaching 75 percent of Americans' Internet communications. And NBC News on Wednesday had a report that an “overwhelmed” N.S.A. still doesn't know the extent of what Edward J. Snowden took from the agency. The NBC report was widely picked up elsewhere.

And notably, it was not a mainstream news organization like The Times, but a free speech and privacy rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sued to obtain the court ruling that made front-page news on Thursday: A federal judge in 2011 found that N.S.A. surveillance had violated the United States Constitution.

I asked Dean Baquet, the managing editor at The Times, to respond to these observations. He told me that he thinks The Times has done a good job of advancing the story and disagrees that it has played down the stories of its competitors. “Once you get past the first stories by The Guardian and The Post, no one has broken more ground than we have,” he said, admitting that the first stories were by far the most significant.

He disagreed with the premise that The Times's interest has been anything less than intense. “We reacted the way you're supposed to react when you get scooped,” he said. “They beat us, that's life. We've followed it and we've had some significant stories.”

I've heard a great deal from Times readers on this subject. Here are two e-mails - making quite different points - that give a sense of a frustrated tone that is becoming familiar to me on this subject.

John Shepard of Horsham, Pa., who describes himself as “an old soldier and defense contractor,” wrote that he would like to read deeper, more explanatory coverage of the surveillance revelations: “As a regular online reader of The Times, I find that something has been missing from the reporting on the materials leaked by Edward Snowden over the past few weeks. Much of the reporting - both in The Times and other media - has focused on Snowden, his statements, his movements and his travel status. Little, at least that I have seen, has been said about the materials Snowden has released.” He described himself as tired of the “hyperventilation” and looking for deeper answers from The Times.

And George Hickey, “a decades-long fan” of The Times, wrote that he had become disenchanted: ”The New York Times today is not The New York Times of the Pentagon Papers era. Although The Times still does good journalism you have lost a good deal of courage and are much too compliant with government demands/requests to be completely trusted. The American government is creating a police state and you are not resisting nearly enough.”

Mr. Baquet took issue with Mr. Hickey's statement when I read it to him, calling it “an unfair criticism,” and pointing to a number of stories in recent years - including many disclosures from WikiLeaks - that have shown the paper's willingness to push back against the government.  He also noted that it was The Times, in 2005, that broke the original story, by James Risen and Mr. Lichtblau, of a government spying on its citizens in the Pulitzer-winning story about warrantless wiretapping. It took courage to print that, he noted, even considering the much-criticized long delay while The Times considered the government's request not to publish.

So this is a mixed report. But like many readers, I would like to see a greater and more consistent sense of urgency reflected on The Times's news pages in dealing with this subject, which has such profound implications for civil liberties, for press freedom, for the privacy of American citizens and for democracy.  This story is not going away. Given The Times's resources and reporting talent, there's still plenty of opportunity to make up ground.

Updated, Friday, August 23, 1:41 p.m.
On Friday, Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, reported that The Times will work with the Guardian on further Snowden stories. Noting that The Times and the Guardian have collaborated successfully in the past, he wrote: “The decision to publish the revelations concerning the British intelligence service jointly with the Times may give the Guardian leverage in its battle with the British government, which is trying to prevent the stories' publication. It may also relate to the stronger protections for free speech and press freedom under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; Britain has no such protections, and its Official Secrets Act is aimed at keeping government secrets secret.”

It will be fascinating to see what comes from this encouraging development.



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