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Laurie Goodstein covers one of the most scrutinized beats at The Times. As national religion correspondent, her recent articles on Pope Francis have been the topic of plenty of conversation and discussion â€" and have had very heavy readership.
The article I'm writing about now garnered nearly 1,500 reader comments and a long perch on the most e-mailed list.  It reported on the pope's surprising interview with a Jesuit publication in which he said that the Roman Catholic Church was unduly obsessed with subjects like homosexuality, birth control and abortion.  The article went online first on Thursday, Sept. 19, then appeared in print on Friday, Sept. 20.
Ms. Goodstein wrote to me this week, hoping to clarify my discussion in a recent blog post of that article's evolution.  My post took up the frequent changes made to news stories online in the course of a daily news cycle.
“I'm concerned that your column leaves the impression that the piece was intentionally softened or tweaked, perhaps because of some outside pressure, when that was not at all the case,†she wrote.
I was responding to an e-mail from a reader, Kevin Loker, who gave several examples of where language had changed substantially in her story. He wondered whether an editor's note might be in order to describe why those changes â€" which he saw as softening â€" were made. (For example, he noted that words like “in remarkably blunt language†were removed, as were sentences including: “The 12,000-word interview ranges widely, and may confirm what many Catholics already suspected: that the chameleon-like Francis bears little resemblance to those on the church's theological or political right wing.†Another sentence that was in the early version and not in the later version was: “Those who seek a broad revival of the Tridentine Mass have been among Francis's harshest critics, and those remarks are not likely to comfort them.â€)
I asked Ms. Goodstein if I could share her note with readers of this blog, because it helps to explain how the online editing process works. She agreed, saying that although her note was meant for me, it might “lift the curtain†for readers about how breaking stories evolve through online changes. She wrote:
The changes in that article were not done, as the reader suggests, to soften the language or the headline. It was entirely because of the timing in the roll-out of that story. Here's how it came down:
I wrote the first version on Wednesday night, because the Jesuit publication slipped me and two or three other reporters an advance copy of the interview with Pope Francis very late Wednesday afternoon. We ran that story as soon as the embargo lifted, at 11 a.m. on Thursday. Because of the heads-up, we had a story far more complete than most of our competitors. But because of the embargo, I could not do any additional reporting or interviews with other sources about the pope's comments â€" because no one else had yet gotten wind of the pope's interview.
The pope's interview caused an immediate sensation, and I spent the day interviewing sources and gathering reaction. So the next version of the story, which was posted on the Web later that day and ran in the next day's paper, reflected that reporting. It was a total “writethru,†merging the news of the pope's interview with the news of its impact.
A “writethru†is not polishing or tweaking a story â€" it is a rewrite to update and reflect new information.
I've written before that when an early version of a story is substantially rewritten â€" when it is really a new story rather than a revised version of the first one â€" a new URL should be assigned by an editor so that both can be archived. That doesn't always happen, and did not here, but it would have been a good idea.
Ms. Goodstein's note also brings up the matter of embargoes on news stories â€" an interesting topic, but one for another day.
Many readers have written to me recently, given the federal budget crisis, to make a simple request: Please advocate for news stories that put large numbers in context. If The Times does not do that, they say, it is part of the problem, and if it does do so, other news organizations are very likely to follow suit.
George Markell of San Francisco is one of these. He wrote:
I agree that The New York Times should report federal spending items as a percentage of the budget, not just in dollars. I'm a retired copy editor, and I think this would be very helpful to your readers.
Of course, not everybody has been quite so restrained about it. A headline in Nation of Change put it this way: “Tea Party and New York Times Shut Down Government.â€
I'm all for anything that makes The Times clearer and more useful to its readers. This is a completely reasonable request with obvious benefits to all.
Toward that end, I just finished speaking with David Leonhardt, someone who is well positioned to do something about this. Not only is he the Washington bureau chief, but he also is a Pulitzer Prize-winning economics writer. (Mr. Leonhardt even majored in applied mathematics in college but, as he notes, that didn't keep him from making a rather public math error: “I once confused million and billion on the front page of The New York Times.â€)
He agrees that there is a problem, and told me that The Times is already working on a solution. A small group of editors is “thinking through a whole set of issues about how we present numbers,†he told me. The results, he said, will probably be determined within a couple of months. They might take the form of new entries to the stylebook, announcements within newsroom departments or e-mails laying out new guidelines to the whole news staff.
“The readers are right,†he told me. “We should do better.â€
Part of the problem, he said, is that “the human mind isn't equipped†to deal with very large numbers. When people see these numbers, he said, they read it as “a lot of money†or “a really big number.â€
One answer, as many have suggested, is expressing individual budget figures â€" consistently â€" as a percentage of the whole. Another, he said, is in making comparisons. For example, he said, a $10 billion figure might be put in context by comparing it with other costs, like the annual defense and Social Security budgets.
“It begins to help people understand,†Mr. Leonhardt said.
And while he noted that the recent pressure for change is “coming from the left,†specifically the economist-writer Dean Baker and MoveOn.org â€" which now has more than 18,000 signatures on a petition - this is not a partisan issue.
“Math has neither a conservative nor a liberal bias,†Mr. Leonhardt said.
The Times began grappling with the numbers questions a few months ago, he said, as the time neared for the conversion of The International Herald Tribune to The International New York Times. Many countries report economic data differently than does the United States, and that has to be explained and reconciled, Mr. Leonhardt said.
In the meantime, he said, Washington reporters have already been reminded to add percentages whenever they use large budget numbers, and a new stylebook entry has been written on one of the subtopics, inflation.
It won't be easy to make these changes happen consistently, especially in stories written on deadline. But, from the reader's point of view, the effort will be worthwhile â€" and the sooner, the better.
Maura Casey, a Times reader and a former member of The Times editorial board, was one of the readers who was unhappy with a question posed Sunday in the Book Review's weekly Bookends feature: “Where Is the Great American Novel by a Woman?â€
Actually, she was more than unhappy, more like downright angry. She wrote to me about it, saying she found it “specious, condescending, sexist, and to be making an assumption that is utterly uncalled for.†(The assumption is that there is no Great American Novel written by a woman.)
She added:
Can we please pause and remember that the last American who won a Nobel Prize in Literature was Toni Morrison, a member of the Female Persuasion? How about Harper Lee, whose “To Kill a Mockingbird†has been a must-read for 50 years?
Who dreams up such drivel as this question? Is the Book Review an adolescent male treehouse, complete with a sign saying, “No Girls Allowed†complete, of course, with a backward “s�
Finally, substitute “Where is the Great American Novel by a Black?†and the question is exposed for its flawed and insulting assumption. But somehow it's O.K. for the paper of record and the oldest book review in America to dis half of humanity.
I talked Monday morning about this with Pamela Paul, who this year was appointed the Book Review's second female editor.
Ms. Paul told me that the question was posed because it was provocative, not because the Book Review endorses the idea that no woman has written the Great American Novel.
“It is a question that people ask,†Ms. Paul said. “People seem to think of the great American novel as somehow male, so the question was meant to challenge that.â€
She said she does not believe that the same question arises about black authors, or at least she hasn't heard it discussed, but she freely admitted that none of this was based on empirical evidence.
As it happens, both of the authors who take on the “Bookends†question â€" Jennifer Szalai and Mohsin Hamid - challenge the relevancy of the Great America Novel altogether. Many of the readers in the online comments do, too.
And Ms. Szalai noted that John William De Forest, a 19th-century novelist and one of the first to use the phrase, “praised only one book for having ‘a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking and plenty of strong feeling': ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,' by Harriet Beecher Stowe.â€
Mr. Hamid suggested that a glance at one's bookshelves might answer the question with titles by authors like Barbara Kingsolver and Ursula K. Le Guin.
As for the broader question of whether the Book Review is a boys club, Ms. Paul noted that her staff members are actually more female than male at the moment. Since taking over as editor in April, she has made a point of making the Book Review more inclusive and diverse, and is doing so effectively.
“I'm trying to find books and reviewers that are reflective of our readership,†she said. “We have a global audience now, and in general we are trying to be very broad.â€
Here's my take: The question has provoked some interesting discussion and two good answers by the writers. But there could still have been a lively discussion - without feeding a faulty assumption - if the question had been phrased differently. Here's my (admittedly inelegant) stab at it: “Who Are the Top Women Contenders for Great American Novelist?â€
MOST of the time, Michael Powell writes the Gotham column for the news pages of The Times, in which his liberal politics - that's his own description - may be understood, though not made explicit.
But occasionally, the veteran reporter turns his attention to a larger, investigative article, as with one published this month on the front page. It told of how a case accusing law-enforcement officials of misconduct in a small New Jersey town was quashed, reportedly because of political influence. The main target of the indictment, according to the article, was a political ally of the state's governor, Chris Christie, a nationally prominent Republican running for re-election.
After the article appeared, I received a letter of complaint from Michael Drewniak, the governor's spokesman. His objections are to this specific article, but they raise larger questions that I found worth considering.
Journalism is changing drastically, and the once-prized quality of objectivity is increasingly dismissed by some as outdated and pointless. Journalists like Glenn Greenwald or Laura Poitras, who both worked with Edward J. Snowden in publishing revelations about government surveillance, are proud, rather than apologetic, about their passionate advocacy on matters of civil liberties. So Mr. Drewniak's questions present an opportunity for discussion.
The entire story, writes Mr. Drewniak, “strains to make tenuous connections,†and ignores the valid nonpolitical reasons that the indictment was dismissed. He objected strenuously to Mr. Powell's writing this story not as a column but as a news story. That switch “is questionable and unsettling in terms of his ability or desire to be fair and impartial.†And he faults Times editors for allowing him to do so.
I asked Mr. Powell, as well as the politics editor, Carolyn Ryan, and the managing editor, Dean Baquet, about these complaints, and the larger issues. Mr. Powell told me that he reported the story as thoroughly and fairly as possible, and that he sees no problem in moving occasionally from columnist to reporter; the editors told me that they paid particular attention to the tone and substance of the story because of Mr. Powell's usual role. They say that a reported column, like Gotham, on the news pages is not the same as an opinion column on the Op-Ed page; it is intended to contain not opinion so much as reported analysis, written in a columnist's voice.
Mr. Powell said that with a 28-year history of reporting, he feels confident about producing a solid, fair investigative piece. What's more, he said, “I think that objectivity is a farce - something that makes no intellectual sense whatsoever. Fairness, however, is something that I take very, very, very seriously.â€
The important question for journalists to ask themselves, Mr. Powell said, is “Am I intellectually honest enough to confront my own biases?â€
In general, The Times has enforced a strict definition of impartiality. Its internal guidelines say that reporters can't be politically active and editors have told me that the less readers know about reporters' political beliefs, the better.
The Associated Press has a similar set of rules, as do many newspapers. The A.P.'s standards editor, Tom Kent, has cautioned against treating impartiality as “easy road kill in the rush to new journalistic techniques.†Some prominent journalists have gone so far as to say that, to preserve neutrality, they don't even vote.
Would Times readers have been better off if Mr. Powell had taken his early reporting on this story and handed it off to a reporter, or reporting team, whose personal politics would not come under fire?
Ms. Ryan says no. She told me that Mr. Powell, with his reportorial skills and deep knowledge of New York and New Jersey, was the right choice, noting that he managed to get several members of a grand jury to speak to him - not an easy feat. She also noted that this is not a first: Mr. Powell and other news-side (as opposed to Op-Ed) columnists have stepped away from their columns to write investigative pieces before.
“There's no question that Michael was the right person to write this story,†she said. Mr. Baquet told me that the story withstood “a very high level of scrutiny†that helped ensure its thoroughness and balance.
Mr. Drewniak's objections do not include any factual errors. He complained, though, of “gross omissions†and “unsubstantiated leaps of faith,†and wrote of fighting an uphill battle, during the reporting process, against Mr. Powell's “preset narrative.†He gave me many examples of columns in which Mr. Powell criticized Mr. Christie, once calling him “congenitally pugilistic,†and, as recently as January, writing that the governor “can be rude and petty and play a mean game of politics.†Asked about this, Mr. Powell and Ms. Ryan noted that the column had also sometimes presented Mr. Christie in a favorable light.
The journalism world is changing. In the broadest terms, transparency (lifting the curtain so that readers see and understand the process and the players) has become more important; traditional objectivity (the idea that reporters should appear to have no beliefs) less so. Within the whirlwind, journalists need to hold on tight to accuracy, intellectual honesty, rigorous reporting and fairness - values that can never go out of style.
Investigative stories, by their nature, will make some people unhappy. Ideally, the reporter's politics and opinions would not provide ammunition for those who complain or criticize afterward.
But in the end, the proof is in the story itself. Is it accurate? Is it fair? Does it dig up something worth knowing that we didn't know before? From all I can tell, Mr. Powell's article meets those crucial standards.
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 appears in print on October 27, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: As Media Change, Fairness Stays Same.
Reports about racial profiling at Barneys New York, the upscale store, have appeared in The Detroit News, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, USA Today and other newspapers throughout the nation and world, but not in the pages of The Times â€" despite the store's location in Manhattan.
The story involves high-profile figures like Jay Z, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the actor Robert Brown of the HBO series “Treme.†A second retail outlet, Macy's, has become part of the story.
Readers are wondering why The Times seems to be ignoring the situation, which has been picked up by the major wire services and published around the globe.
Marilyn Abbott wrote:
Other newspapers, including those abroad, have been reporting for several days about racism at New York upscale department stores.
The latest story found in The Daily News concerns the actor, Robert Brown of “Treme,†and how he was arrested at Macy's during the summer while purchasing a $1,000 watch for his mother. For the past several days, I have searched for the name Barneys, looked at the N.Y./Region, but found nothing regarding these stories.Why?
Another reader, Miriam Weiss of Astoria, Queens, summarized the story and noted that it has been covered in news outlets throughout the country, and as far away as Australia. But, she noted, “The Times apparently considers it not fit to print.†She, too, wants to know why.
I asked the Metro editor, Wendell Jamieson, about the lack of coverage, except for two single-sentence references in The Times's daily “New York Today†report.
Mr. Jamieson â€" no stranger to news that plays big in the tabloids - has worked at other New York City papers, including The Daily News, which has given the story a great deal of attention.
In an initial email, he responded as follows: “This is one of those cases where a competitor has made a campaign out of it. I can't figure a way for us to move the story forward. The suits are rather old and we don't know about their veracity.â€
I pressed him on these points. Even though it's a competitor's story, don't the readers of The Times deserve to know about it from their newspaper? If The Times is unsure of the veracity of the accusations, I wrote to him, isn't some digging in order here? And finally, I asked, is it really his thinking not to pursue the story at all?
He responded, noting that this is “the eternal question†in New York media.
This town is full of competitors chasing their own stories. Do we follow every one? We'd never get to do our own. In this case, you have an aggressive competitor - an honorable one, where I worked happily for five years - taking a series of lawsuits and turning them into a nonstop campaign. Such campaigns have long been tabloid staples. We've read the stories and haven't seen a way in for us. They have a he said, she said quality at the moment, and I'm not sure how we could get around that. We very well might write about it in the future, but there would have to be a smart way for us to move the story ahead, or a newsbreak - like a resignation or a major change in store policy.
My take: The Times doesn't have to turn this into a campaign or publish daily front-page articles about it. But the subject is a serious one â€" allegations of racial profiling â€" one that The Times has devoted plenty of its own resources to in the coverage of the city's “stop-and-frisk†police practices, which were successfully challenged in court.  And, while The Times can't cover every story, this one is newsworthy.
At the very least, The Times could publish a wire-service story, summarizing the situation. But it's also worthy of a deeper look. If there are concerns about the “he said, she said†aspect of what's been written elsewhere so far, why not get under the surface to report it fully and energetically?
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 28, 2013
An earlier version of this blog post misspelled the Metro editor's surname. It is Jamieson, not Jamiesen.
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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Eugene Richards is a documentary photographer who has published 16 books, including “Dorchester Days,†a personal view of the working-class neighborhood in Boston where he grew up; “Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue,†on the ravages of drug abuse; and “War Is Personal,†about Iraq war veterans returning to the United States.
He is currently raising money on Kickstarter to finance “Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down,†his new book of photographs and writing that comes out of his experiences in the Arkansas delta 40 years ago. He is also planning a traveling exhibition and a short film.
His conversation with James Estrin has been edited.
So, what are you doing?
A year ago I went to a Vista (Volunteers in Service to America) reunion in Wynne, Ark., which was kind of odd, because they had kicked me out of Vista. But I liked the people, and afterwards I wandered around the delta again.
I don't know what I was thinking. I knew better. In some ways, I think of the delta as kind of home - the beginning for me, because when you go home, or try to go home, you always look for what was there. And, of course, it's never there anymore, no matter where you're from.
How did you get to the delta? What were you thinking?
To me the delta was in some ways an accident. In the mid-1960s, I was in R.O.T.C. at Northeastern University, but I couldn't go to Vietnam, so I made that decision to cut up my draft card and send it in. And I sat back and waited to go to prison. But no one ever came. I don't know if they didn't care or if they just didn't want to lock up any more resisters.
I ended up taking photography classes with Minor White at M.I.T., and then I got a letter in the mail from Teddy Kennedy's office asking if I wanted to join Vista. It never said in lieu of the draft, but they knew my history and they invited me to join.
I went to Augusta, Ark., which is a beautiful little town that looks like a storybook tale of a town with beautiful trees, and proceeded to screw up. That sounds very interesting, but in reality it was things like bringing black and white kids to the beach, together, which you didn't do. So it didn't take much to rock the boat. One of the things that sunk my boat with Vista was that I got sent two black women from another part of Arkansas as volunteers to help me with my program.
We did have an altercation one time, in Arkansas, when I went to get a cup of coffee in my Vista vehicle and the girls came in and sat next to me, and the guy took out a gun. He brought us outside. I don't remember how I took it away from him. But another Vista volunteer who was there remembers the guy's wife coming out and yelling, “Don't be stupid!†at her husband. So he was dead serious that black and white people do not sit at a counter.
The boss at Vista called me in and sat me down and said, “I'm reading all these things now that you're sleeping with black girls.†And I said, “No, I would give anything - they're across the hall, one of the girls is beautiful, and it's killing me.''
Anyway, I got a dossier and after a year and a half, they said, “You really have to leave Vista.†It was partially because they thought I was sleeping with the girls, but also because of fights I was getting into as well as other things.
I did get in altercations, but I started none of them. Like going to church one morning and meeting a guy who actually cut me with a razor.
You left Vista; then what?
I loved it there, so I was really disappointed. I stayed a couple of years and with a couple of other former Vista volunteers I started a storefront social service organization, and then ultimately a little newspaper called Many Voices. It was basically a black community newspaper that reported on whatever was happening. We lasted a couple years and then money problems happened and also infighting over the direction - some of us were more aggressive than others.
You were photographing during those two years?
I was. It was basically for the newspaper.
After publishing “Dorchester Days†in 1978 you were teaching at the International Center of Photography and you said that the delta book wasn't really your voice.
If I had any disappointment about the book, it was because it was so focused on the impoverishment of the people, which it had to be at the time. Many of the more subtle aspects of life weren't there. And when I went back, the tragedy of it all is, most of the things that made the delta so profoundly significant, including the church life, the juke joints and the music - they're largely gone.
There is a town, Helena, that has a blues festival, but the actual clubs are all closed. We used to go sneak into the juke joints, but once they realized white people were there you were eventually asked to leave. I could last until 11:30 or so and they would ask me to get out before the cops came and gave everybody a hard time - but you know, the music would drive you crazy.
I stayed until '72, and I went back to Dorchester. So the black and white pictures you're seeing here in the new delta book are the ones that were never published in my first book, “Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta.†These are the outtakes. I went back through them and saw pictures a little differently than I did before, so these were the ones that never made it.
Eugene Richards Waiting. Brinkley, Ark. 1970.Do you look at pictures differently today than when you made the first book?
Some of the pictures I included in the first book were really other people's pictures. It's typical of when you're beginning as a photographer, and you don't want to admit it. This was a time of kind of a classicism in photography of rural America.
But they really weren't your photos because you never photographed that way again.
No, but I knew it then, too. What's wrong with the first book is that while there are pictures in there that I feel are my photographs, there are also pictures that are really other people's photographs too.
By the time I got home to Dorchester, I had started looking at people like Robert Frank, Cartier-Bresson and other street photographers who were trying other ways of seeing things.
But I already had gone my own way. I liked the idea of exploring the frame - in a way that wasn't all sanctified.
When I looked back through the contact sheets from Arkansas, you could see it. There's a lot of pictures in there that are just two or three frames away from the ones that were in the first book.
In the first book, some of the photos are obvious. When I think about the rest of your work, none of the images are obvious. When you first published “Dorchester Days,†it took a while for me to process the idea that you can take photographs like that - that those are even photographs. The original photos were shot from 1969 to '71, but you went back for National Geographic in 2010. What was that like seeing it in color and taking a new look?
Oh, it's tremendously different. I was so close to the sharecropper culture. It's all gone, of course, the houses are gone, they've all been burnt down - there used to be hundreds upon hundreds of them along the road. They're purposely gone, though I found occasional ones, here and there.
Well, the things that changed were amazing to me.
Everyone left. Not the sharecroppers - but their children and grandchildren. Now, it's all done with tractors and there's no work for people. It's basically a big industrial farm.
Towns are half-empty. Churches that were crowded now had six people in them. There's a picture of a minister that had six, seven people in his church service on a Sunday morning.
What was the sharecropper culture in the Arkansas delta like then?
The real source of the blues comes from loneliness. The sharecroppers would have a couple houses in a row, but it wasn't a community. These people lived in isolation. They went to the towns and they weren't welcome, they brought their food. Everything was a distancing; they were held at arm's length.
And that's where the loneliness of the music really comes from. It doesn't come from the juke joints or the collective getting together. The person, by themself, playing a little harp or something, is the delta. And I think unless you got a chance to go down there and meet people in that kind of lonely setting, you can romanticize it too much. In the movies or the books - with the exception of Faulkner, who is so phenomenal, because he understands all the depth, the layers of life.
But most people tend to romanticize it. And it was pretty chilly, a pretty chilly way of life. But the people, conversely, were unbelievably warm once you got to know them.
Eugene Richards Billy D. Harris, Aubrey, Ark. 2010One of the ways the delta has changed is that places are more integrated. Are race issues not talked about in the same way - or at least, not as much in public?
When I was down there originally, there were young people who really wanted to make race an issue. They would be the reporters for the newspaper. Race was a big thing for them; it was a cause, it was a seeking out of equality. That was the biggest difference - the sharecroppers all wanted their kids to do much better.
Now one of the big changes down there is the people that are there are static. It's not that they don't want their kids to do any better. They know they're just not going to. It's a hanging-on society, and the outmigration's continuing.
It's empty. When I went down there for Geographic, you could drive hours and not see anybody.
So you're crowdfunding your new book. Why?
I gave up. That sounds a little beaten.
We did the “War Is Personal†book ourselves, and I got a National Geographic grant and a Getty grant and it gave us the money to do that book.
And we did it ourselves and it sold out, and we actually got some money to give away. An unfortunate thing happened. One of the families - Carlos - his second son committed suicide. His first son was killed in the war, and they didn't have the money at the time to bury him so the money from the book went to that. So when this happened, we helped out.
I know there's a book here. It's not an earthshaking book - it's a quiet book and it's about race, and it's not going to be able to sell to a traditional publisher.
We did go to a European publisher who loved the book, but said we had to raise 80 percent of the money and then of course you don't have the decision on how it's going to look.
My son, Sam, put me on Facebook without my permission and got a blog going, forcing me into a different space. So, we decided to do the Kickstarter.
Eugene Richards A girl played with a doll's head in Hughes, Ark., in 1970. This alternate version of Slide 3 was first published in 1973.Follow @RichardsEugene, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Stephanie Sinclair has mostly happy memories of her childhood in Miami, where she grew up encouraged by her parents to be carefree, confident and defiant. It was there, in an elementary school broadcast arts program, that she requested to be a camera operator, offering the first inkling of what she would do with her life.
Today, she is one of National Geographic's conflict photojournalists, one of about a dozen women among the magazine's 60 freelance photographers.
For the past decade, Ms. Sinclair, 40, has traveled throughout Yemen, India, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ethiopia, documenting the lives of child brides, where girls as young as 6 are offered to older men as wives, often serving as a way to pay off a family's debt. She often wonders what her childhood would have been like had she been born under those circumstances.
“I don't see myself any different from those girls,†she said.
“Most of the girls I have photographed got married between the age of 8 and 13; that's such a pure age,†added Ms. Sinclair, who also does freelance work for The New York Times Magazine, Time and Newsweek. “I really identified with the innocence of that age, and I felt angry that no one was protecting them.â€
Several images from her series “Too Young to Wed†are part of “Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment,†an exhibition opening Thursday and on view through March 9, 2014. It features 10 other photographers - Lynsey Addario, Kitra Cahana, Jodi Cobb, Diane Cook, Carolyn Drake, Lynn Johnson, Beverly Joubert, Erika Larsen, Maggie Steber and Amy Toensing - who have been published by the magazine in the past decade.
The exhibition, opening at the National Geographic Museum in Washington with an accompanying book, includes more than 100 images done by the photographers while on assignment for the magazine, covering a range of topics: wildlife, war, landscapes and social justice.
Elizabeth Krist, the exhibit's curator, said that while you can't necessarily identify if an image was captured by a woman or a man, she thinks that gender plays a significant role in how a story is documented, especially with some issues like child brides or sexual assault.
“I wish this book wasn't necessary,†said Ms. Krist, a senior photo editor at National Geographic. “I also think that women are still underrepresented, and I think it is especially true if you look at developing countries. Women are more likely to cover issues that are important to women and to have access to these issues.â€
Many aspects of the industry have changed for Ms. Cobb, one of only four women to become a National Geographic staff photographer. She has worked for the magazine for the past two decades, but she still does not believe there are enough female photographers featured in major news publications.
When Ms. Cobb began her photojournalism career in the mid-1970s, she was the only woman on the photo staff at The Wilmington News Journal and remembers constantly feeling she had to prove herself to be part of many of the male-dominated photo pits. It wasn't until 10 years later when she went on assignment in Saudi Arabia for National Geographic that she realized the advantages of being a woman.
“My work in Saudi Arabia could not have been done by a man; it had to be done by a woman,†said Ms. Cobb, who documented the role of women in Saudi society. “That experience was a real turning point for me and how I approached my work. I began feeling more confident that there was a receptive audience for topics that focus on issues that affect women.â€
Erika Larsen Tepee-style structures are common in Sami villages, where they are often used to smoke reindeer meat. From “Women of Vision.â€Along with Ms. Cobb, several other women in the exhibit have experienced peril in the line of duty. Ms. Addario, a seasoned conflict photojournalist with more than a decade of experience in the Middle East, has been kidnapped twice, first in 2004 and again in 2011, when she was one of four journalists from The New York Times held hostage in Libya by pro-Qaddafi forces. Ms. Addario was repeatedly threatened and sexually assaulted during their six-day detainment. While reporting in Afghanistan, Ms. Sinclair had to fire her driver after he repeatedly mocked her for wearing a burqa and drove her to several of his personal locations against her will.
“You try not to dwell on these stories too much, but they are all real,†Ms. Cobb said. “They happen to men, too.â€
While organizing the exhibit and book, it was important to Ms. Krist that she convey a broad selection of images and photographers, varying in subject matter, location and style. After working at the magazine for more than two decades, she identified one overarching theme among the photographers: the “fundamental humanity in which they approach their subjects.â€
“They are the kind of people that you want to be around, the kind of people that you want to build relationships with,†she said.
As a photography intern at National Geographic in 2009, Ms. Cahana pitched more than 50 story ideas to her editors. None were approved, she says in the book. Two years later, the science section of the magazine was preparing an article about the science of the teenage brain. It called on Ms. Cahana, then 22, to document the images.
Ms. Cahana said she thought her age and gender allowed her to seamlessly blend with her high school-age subjects to produce the series, “Teenage Brains.†She worked on the article for almost four months, immersing herself in the high school environment only six years after she had graduated from an Orthodox school in Montréal. She attended classes, went to lunches and participated in after-school activities to meet her subjects. Eventually she realized that she no longer needed to go to school to meet her subjects - they began calling her to invite her out to events, just to have her there.
Ms. Cahana acknowledges that entering into the lives of young girls might not necessarily have been appropriate for an older man. “I was just having an easier time as a younger girl,†she said. Her images, several of which are in the exhibition, include a teenager getting her tongue pierced after peer pressure from a friend and a boxing match between two teenage boys, being recorded by friends on their cellphones to post on Facebook.
“When you really have the time to develop deep relationships with your subjects, it shows,†said Ms. Cahana, who had her first published photograph at The New York Times at the age of 17 and was awarded the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Young Photographer earlier this year.
Working as a young female photographer was not always easy for Ms. Cahana, and she has distinct memories of initially wanting to play down her femininity to be more accepted by the mostly male staff during her first internship. Several months on the job at Flash 90, an Israeli photo agency, she met Benedicte Kurzen, another young freelancer. Ms. Cahana remembers Ms. Kurzen confidently walking into the newsroom, talking about all of the places she had traveled as a photographer.
She also happened to be wearing a skirt.
That brief interaction with Ms. Kurzen changed Ms. Cahana's perception of what was possible. “There was this young woman who was able to carve out this whole identity and still do the work she was doing,†she said. “It made me look at myself and my work completely different.â€
Kitra Cahana After working himself into a trance, a man leapt through a flaming pyre in Venezuela. From “Women of Vision.â€â€œWomen of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment†is on view at the National Geographic Museum, on 1145 17th Street, NW in Washington, D.C., through March 9, 2014.
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CRUISES. Conferences. New forms of advertising. Fancy multimedia storytelling.
The Gray Lady, as The New York Times has long been known, isn't as sedate as she used to be. The company is innovating like a house afire. Or let's turn the metaphor around: With the house of print burning down, The Times is quickly building something new, hoping to have a permanent place to live in the digital age.
The innovation is necessary. After all, print advertising - the lifeblood of The Times - has long been in decline. Last year, in a major milestone, consumer revenue (mostly from print and digital subscriptions) surpassed advertising revenue, both digital and print. In the old days, print advertising alone brought in about 80 percent of all Times revenue.
The old business model is fading, and the new one hasn't quite arrived. The Times is journalistically strong and is profitable, but its future is far from certain. As necessary as innovation is, it comes with risks - ethical risks, journalistic risks and, if those should be compromised, business risks.
Here is a look at what is happening, and some of the implications.
CONFERENCES AND CRUISES In 2014, should you have the resources, you can go on a cruise to Patagonia and rub elbows with a top Times editor and a Times columnist who are among the speakers. Earlier this year, if you had $995 to spare, you could have attended “Thomas L. Friedman's The Next New World,†a conference in San Francisco featuring the Times columnist. Last year's DealBook conference, where businesspeople paid $1,500 to listen to the likes of the Goldman Sachs chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, interviewed on a stage at The Times, was another example. These ventures are lucrative, can be informative and help to “build the brands†of The Times and its journalists.
But, some readers have asked me, what makes them all that different from The Washington Post's ill-fated salons, attacked as being ethically unacceptable because they would have given a few people some rare up-close-and-personal access to Post journalists? There are some crucial differences: The Times conferences are on the record, while The Post's salons were not intended to be; and the cruises, unlike the salons, are not pitched to lobbyists and political animals as a way to schmooze Washington journalists. Still, this growing category of event deserves scrutiny and monitoring.
EXPERIMENTS IN ADVERTISING Take traditional advertising and put it in the digital space, and what you often get is either annoying (people can't wait to close the ad) or invisible (people look right past it). What's the answer? “Native advertising†- in which advertising is presented to mimic the appeal of editorial content - is all the rage elsewhere. The Times, so far, has only dipped its toe in that water but continues to explore new advertising ideas, including “micro sites†devoted to specific advertisers.
One small example from The Times, as David Carr noted recently in a column on native advertising, is in the guide to New York City activities, The Scoop. There, Citi Bike (itself sponsored by Citibank) sponsors a way to show readers where the bikes are. Harmless, right? Citi Bike gets its message out; The Times gets some revenue; and the consumer gets good information. It's a far cry from what got The Atlantic magazine into trouble when readers were confused by a Scientology ad that looked like editorial content (and which the magazine quickly said was a mistake that wouldn't be repeated), but the blurring of lines bears watching. Gerard Baker, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, warned last week that native advertising amounts to a “Faustian pact.â€
As with so many knotty issues in the new media world, transparency with the reader is the key. Tell the readers clearly what they're looking at.
Philip B. Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, put it this way: “If the point of native advertising is to fool the reader, that's no good. The reader should never be deceived.â€
VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION Last year, The Times learned to “snow fall,†a noun that became a verb when its elaborate multimedia story about an avalanche in Washington where three people died set a new standard for digital storytelling. “Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek†won a Pulitzer Prize, and since then, several other similar productions have been unveiled - among them “The Jockey,†about the “winningest†rider of thoroughbred racehorses.
Meanwhile, because The Times has more potential advertising for videos than it has videos to put it on, production has ramped up. Staff has doubled since last year, new video series have been added and video has been placed outside The Times's pay wall, so that it's free to all viewers. Even the popular Modern Love feature now has a video offering, done with animated illustrations. Rebecca Howard, general manager of video production, reports both to the executive editor, Jill Abramson, and to the executive vice president for digital products, Denise Warren. That dual reporting straddles the traditional wall between business and editorial concerns, meant to provide independence.
Ms. Howard thinks it's necessary, saying, “There's so much that's woven together about what we're doing.†As The Times decides where to put its finite resources, that blending of business and journalistic priorities is something to keep an eye on. Will the most newsworthy projects be the ones to get the green light, or will it be those that will generate the most traffic and thus appeal most to advertisers?
These issues are not easy ones. I've heard many people at The Times, including its publisher and its chief executive, emphasize that no new venture will tamper with the bedrock values of The Times or harm its journalistic integrity. Because the reader's trust in that integrity is the real currency at The Times, it's imperative that that promise is fulfilled.
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(For more from my interview with Rebecca Howard on the expansion of video at The Times, please see the Public Editor's Journal at nytimes.com/publiceditor.)
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 appears in print on September 29, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Perilous Task of Innovation in a Digital Age.
With the government shutting down and Marine generals being forced out for negligence, the subject of a weddings-oriented column in The Times is, no doubt, relatively unimportant. But because it has been the subject of plenty of angry reader e-mail, I am taking it up here.
The back story is a tragic one â€" a 5-year-old girl was killed in 2008 when her toy wagon rolled down a steep driveway onto a busy highway and into the path of a car. The driver of that car, Erika Halweil, was the subject, with her new husband (both are yoga teachers in the Hamptons), of a Vows column in the Sunday Styles section on Sept. 22. Vows is a popular weekly feature, begun in 1992, telling stories of how couples met and how they decided to marry.
Readers found this one, however, tone-deaf as well as offensive.
Alia Hannah Habib was one of many who wrote, upset about the article:
A few years back, the bride accidentally killed a small child with her car. (Don't worry too much about that, though, reassures Vows: “the bride was not charged.â€) This bump in the road is presented as part of the bride's journey toward spiritual happiness and a deeper understanding of her destiny.
The Vows column reads: “Today, she says the accident taught her about fate, her own and the girl's, but at the time she was devastated. She started taking daily classes at Tapovana and finding comfort in Ashtanga's rigorous, some say purifying, series of poses that are practiced in silence.â€
Another reader, Maria Ricapito, put it this way: “It was the way it was used â€" as a landmark in the bride's life path â€" that was just so stomach-turning. To describe the girl's death in that way (her spirit had left her body or whatever claptrap) … think of her poor parents.â€
The column was also the subject of news media criticism, including a piece in The Daily Caller, which called it the worst Vows column “in the history of history.†Gawker called it “staggeringly bizarre.â€
I spoke to Bob Woletz, the editor of society news, who told me that he edited the article carefully because of the mention of the child's death, asking the writer to expand on that aspect and to explain it further.
“To gloss over it seemed even worse,†he said. “It was a terrible accident but it was a part of their story.†He referred me to a Newsday report on the accident in which the little girl's father expressed sympathy for Ms. Halweil.
The Vows column, he said, “is not a reward for a life well lived,†as some readers seem to think, but represents “real stories about real people.†Vows subjects are chosen because their stories are interesting, not because they are role models, he said.
The column depicts Ms. Halweil as someone who seldom has a bad hair day and who shares “perfect sexual chemistry†with her husband.
The dreamy New Age language of this couple is missing the kind of down-to-earth expression of sadness or remorse about the accident that might have made this article less objectionable.
Lacking that element, despite repeated attempts to elicit it â€" “we had to put it in her words,†as Mr. Woletz said â€" this column might have found a better place on the digital spike than in the Styles section of The Times.
As Ms. Habib put it: “I can't imagine what Ms. Halweil had to go through to get over killing a small child through a senseless accident. Surely, there is no easy way to discuss such a tragedy. I'm certain, however, that a breezy profile about the bride's wedding is not the place to do so.â€
It's hard to know where to start with the lead article in Monday's Times. In it, anonymous government sources â€" described in the vaguest possible way (for example, “one United States officialâ€) â€" are unquestioningly allowed to play their favorite press-bashing hand, featuring the national security card. In so doing, they seem to take a swipe at a news organization that competes with The Times.
But since The Huffington Post's energetic media reporter Michael Calderone has already written two well-reported posts on the “odd†article itself, and Greg Mitchell wrote about it Tuesday in The Nation, let's limit ourselves here to its jarring set of headlines.
After all, I'm on the record, repeatedly and perhaps tiresomely, about: 1) the overuse of anonymous sources; 2) setting the bar too low for agreeing to government requests to withhold information (despite some recent encouraging signs to the contrary); 3) the tendency to treat non-Times journalistic efforts with a lack of respect.
So, starting at the top, here is the main headline, in the upper-right corner of The Times, which is probably the most prominent position in world media: “Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence.â€
One might ask: Says who? Well, failing the presence of any attribution, one can only conclude that it's The Times itself making this interesting statement.
Surely the subheadlines (in the print edition) will address that problem? Well, no. “Militants Alter Tactic,†says the first. And the best of all: “Disclosure Caused More Damage Than Vast Snowden Trove.†Not a shred of attribution among the three â€" just straight from the mouths of anonymous government sources into the automatic credibility conferred by the paper of record's front page. The headline on the inside page echoes those on the front.
Patrick LaForge, who oversees the copy desk operations at The Times, where headlines are written, agreed that the headline was unacceptable when I asked him about it on Tuesday. (I had heard from a number of readers who were critical of both the article and the headline.)
He wrote in an e-mail:
The headline was not up to our standards. It should have better reflected the attribution or qualifications in the story. We've discussed this with the copy desk supervisors and other editors who were involved.
Sometimes our editing safeguards fail us under the press of deadline, as they did here. It is good to be reminded that our readers expect better. I am sorry we disappointed them.
I appreciate the tone of Mr. LaForge's response, which is oriented toward improvement rather than defensiveness.
That's a good start in addressing the problems of this article, its sourcing and its placement.
Updated, 3:58 p.m. | William B. Hamilton, the Washington bureau's editor for national security stories, told me Thursday afternoon that The Times did not mean the Monday article to be a swipe at another news organization.
“We certainly didn't intend it to blame McClatchy in any way,†he said, noting that The Times also published the names of the two Al Qaeda leaders whose messages were intercepted. (It did so only after McClatchy's story made the names public.)
He also said that many of the critics of the story “are missing part of the news here â€" that Snowden has not given away the store†in terms of harming national security or counterterrorism efforts.
The article, Mr. Hamilton said, “told an important and surprising story given the focus on Edward Snowden and the N.S.A. leaks. It had the kind of detail about terrorist operations that only reporters with long experience in national security coverage â€" and sources they can trust â€" can uncover.â€
Mr. Hamilton made the point in an e-mail that anonymous sources are a necessary part of national security reporting. That's even more the case now that government investigations of leaks have chilled sources' willingness to talk to reporters, he said. The alternative, he said, was not to write some important national security stories at all.
“It is simply unrealistic in this age of leak investigations to expect us to gather news on sensitive subjects like intelligence and military operations without their use,†he said.
I also spoke with the Washington reporter Eric Schmitt, who echoed much of what Mr. Hamilton said, but added that The Times needs to “be vigilant in explaining to readers as clearly as we can who these sources are and what their motivations are.â€
“We owe it to our readers†to provide that kind of explanation and context, Mr. Schmitt said.
For those who follow journalism and press rights issues, here's a roundup of some interesting pieces on those topics from the past few days:
1. The journalistic lessons of the Richard A. Jewell case. Kevin Sack, who was The Times's lead reporter on the Olympics bombing in Atlanta in 1996, opens his piece accompanying the Retro Report with this compelling statement: “I can't remember ever being so furious with an editor.†The report's video features archival footage and recent interviews to show how much of the media coverage relied on unidentified law enforcement sources to cast enduring suspicion on Mr. Jewell. (The Retro Report is a weekly video series that revisits past news stories.)  In today's era of ever-more-competitive news - Twitter wasn't even a gleam in the Internet's eye in 1996 - these lessons are well worth reviewing.
2. The worsening atmosphere for journalists in the leak-crackdown era. Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post, describes how reporters are trying to fight back, but also about the difficult challenges. He quotes, for example, the veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit accountability news organization. “I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,†Mr. Smith said. “It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for government to monitor those contacts.†It's ugly out there for journalists (which means for citizens, too), and not getting any better.
3. False equivalency in government shutdown coverage. James Fallows in The Atlantic and Dan Froomkin on Aljazeera America's Web site wrote strong pieces recently, laying out how news coverage often fails to communicate the real dynamic of the situation. The Times's Nicholas D. Kristof picked up on the theme in his Sunday column. And a Times reader, David Cooper, expressed concern to me via e-mail on Saturday: “The so-called ‘deadlock, ‘impasse,' ‘dead end,' ‘shutdown,' etc., is clearly caused by the House speaker's refusal to hold a clean vote.†All these writers make good points. False equivalency makes it harder for readers to make it through the thicket of information; journalists need to work harder to root it out.
4. The executive editor on horse-race political coverage, sexist coverage of women, and more. Jill Abramson, The Times's executive editor, talked with Ken Auletta over the weekend during The New Yorker Festival. She covered a lot of ground, including her disagreement with the public editor on a post from last week. (Executive editors and public editors have been known to disagree. I predict this won't be the last time.)
A Times reader, Tom Bird, of East Lansing, Mich., raised a timely issue, given all that's happening in Washington. He wrote that other news organizations, including The Associated Press, are putting the expression “Obamacare†in quotation marks, “signifying that it is not a neutral expression, but instead is political rhetoric that is being used in a partisan way.†And he added, “When will The Times wake up?â€
A quick search of Times news stories turned up only one recent example of the phrase being used in the manner Mr. Bird mentioned. It came in a prototypically Times-like headline on the front of the Sunday business section: “On the Threshold of Obamacare, Warily.†(The word also appears regularly, without quotes, on the Economix blog where one recent headline read: “How to Gut Obamacare.â€)
But, for the most part, the news pages are using what I view as the equivalent of quotation marks â€" a description of the phrase, which provides the same kind of distance as quotation marks would. Here's an example:
… federal officials declined to discuss whether they had found design flaws in their system, but their comments appeared to place most of the blame on the sheer volume of traffic. They pronounced themselves pleased, saying that the intense interest showed a pent-up demand that demonstrated the need for the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law known as Obamacare, which created the exchanges.
I asked Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, about the guidelines for the expression in the news pages. “For the most part, we have not used ‘Obamacare' as our standard term in news stories outside of quotations,†he said. “Aside from the question of whether it's politically charged, the term strikes me as informal â€" essentially a nickname â€" which is not our normal style for straight news articles. Most often we simply use a straightforward description, like ‘the health care law' or ‘the health care overhaul,' or occasionally the formal name, the Affordable Care Act.â€
However, in the opinion pages of The Times, where different style guidelines often apply, many examples crop up of Obamacare without quotation marks or description. Columnists including Frank Bruni, Charles Blow and Paul Krugman have used the phrase â€" acceptably, I think â€" in the context of their overall viewpoints and individual voices.
A reader, Paul Teichert, in mentioning a Joe Nocera column in which the phrase was used, expressed his displeasure: “Why become part of the conservative media echo chamber?†he wrote. “I wish that in future The Times would adopt a policy of calling it solely the Affordable Care Act rather than sounding like those who have disdain for the act and our president.â€
As for just how politically charged the phrase is, that can be debated. A look back to last year found a Times article about leading Democrats' change of heart in embracing the term. Even the president seemed to be picking it up.
Of course, that was then. Just last week, the ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel sent a camera crew out to the streets to query citizens about whether they preferred Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. They may mean one and the same thing, but people reacted negatively to the first and more positively to the second.
That's far from a scientific poll, of course, but it makes the point that â€" as The Times's readers point out â€" language choice matters.