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Shooting Weddings, for Better or for Worse

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Bill McCullough played pedal steel guitar for Knife in the Water, an Austin, Tex., band whose sound was “the perfect soundtrack for downing a fifth of bourbon alone in your car, parked outside your ex's house in the dead of winter.” Unfortunately, he wasn't much of a drinker. So, while his bandmates hit the bar after the sound check, he would wander, taking pictures with a camera he brought with him on the road. Working nooks and crannies and finding odd angles, he rediscovered his love of photography.

Good thing, too, since he lost some of his hearing in the ensuing years. Out of necessity, he started photographing weddings, where his penchant for finding giddy moments of humor and rendering them in lavish color and from unlikely vantage points proved popular. And in some ways, he found that his approaches to music and to photography were almost identical.

“For me, all the elements in a frame are important, and they have a voice, and to me that's a very musical thing,” said Mr. McCullough, who is 50 and self-taught. “There's a layering that happens with chords and harmony. Things harmonize.”

His series “Technicolor Life” is a vibrant collection of mini-dramas, stories, scenes and characters, all taken for actual wedding clients. His distinctive style came about with practice - honing the technical aspects and developing a sense of how a moment unfolds and where to be to seize that moment; rehearsing at home and on his street until it became second nature.

“When I photograph, it's very much - things are going around me, and there's sort of a performance in front of the lens, because I'm not staging or posing anything,” he said. “Some of the photos might look that way, but they're not.”

DESCRIPTIONBill McCullough “Lion,” 2010.

Far from being a mere observer, Mr. McCullough is part of the proceedings, being pulled constantly in all directions. “You've got a wedding coordinator going, ‘Get ready, they're going to cut the cake!' And you've got a mom over here saying, ‘Can I have a picture of my mother?' ” he said.

He likens the rush of events to musical improvisation. But when it comes to weddings, where small fortunes collide with big dreams, an unexpected moment where something goes wrong can spell doom. A wedding is, in almost every way, an effort to forestall improvisation. When Mr. McCullough was starting out, however, he was drawn to the idea of having just one chance to get things right.

He relishes both the pageantry and the people. And while he always finds his way into those nooks and crannies, the thick of the frenzy exhilarates him, too.

Lately, he has been fixing his eye on other subjects. In a union of two passions, he photographed the South by Southwest festival last month. He has been shooting a project that he describes as capturing the social aspects of dance - of learning and observing. He is also at work on a project in his neighborhood, in which he hangs out in the homes of neighbors until they forget about him or lose their self-consciousness in front of the camera.

Until he's almost invisible.

“It's like playing hide-and-seek,” Mr. McCullough said. “You're negotiating constantly, how you stand and what is your chemistry with the subject matter. For me, that's such a hard-to-describe thing that maybe even almost can't really be taught.”

DESCRIPTIONBill McCullough “Baby, Doll,” 2004.

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The Gang Legacy of Central America\'s Wars

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Donna De Cesare had just walked into the AIDS ward at a public hospital in El Salvador one day in 1989 when a young voice greeted her.

“What's up?” she recalled hearing. “Finally, someone from my country!”

She was taken aback. The voice was in English, with the rhythmic cadence of Chicano Los Angeles, where the young man had once lived. His name was Franklin Torres. Though he was born in El Salvador, he had fled during its violent civil war to what his mother thought was the safety of Los Angeles. Instead, he found refuge in gangs and drugs. Gangs led to his deportation, and back in El Salvador, drugs would claim his life.

The unexpected encounter stayed with Ms. De Cesare, who had traveled to Central America to photograph the civil wars wracking the region. She would, in time, document the overlooked legacies of those bloody proxy wars, zeroing in on how witnessing unspeakable violence scarred young minds both in Central America and in the barrios of Los Angeles.

This month, Ms. De Cesare released “Unsettled/Desasosiego” (University of Texas Press), an urgent and moving work that chronicles those who grew up amid political wars, gang wars or both. It is a look back on lives that were lost, and some who triumphed, during her many years in the region. It is also, for her, a motivation to continue to examine these issues and to push for action through her bilingual Web site, Destiny's Children.

“We need to consider what we are doing as a society when we abandon so many children,” said Ms. De Cesare, who is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “We need to see these young people as they truly are - children who have been burdened with so much that is painful from an early age and whose fragile hopes and dreams are being thwarted.”

In a picture from that first meeting, Franklin is thin, with just a few tattoos visible - a far cry from the current images of fierce, tattoo-covered members of La Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang. He told Ms. De Cesare that he had grown up in Usulután province, in a coffee-growing region that was the site of clashes between leftist guerrillas and the Salvadoran military.

A death squad had been active in that area, Ms. De Cesare said, and it was not uncommon for children like Franklin to see roadsides littered with the corpses of union activists, teachers or anyone thought to sympathize with the rebels. Some young people were forcibly conscripted.

Franklin's mother sought to protect him by moving to Los Angeles, where she dressed him in a starched white shirt and pressed pants. Other kids made fun of him.

“I heard that a lot from kids when I started doing this work in the 1990s,” Ms. De Cesare said. “They were treated as outcasts. When gangs dominated in the neighborhoods where they lived, there was some pressure to find some way of not being picked on.”

That was Franklin's introduction to the 18th Street Gang. After being arrested on drug and theft charges, he did time and was deported back to El Salvador - a harbinger of a flood of reverse exiles.

DESCRIPTIONDonna De Cesare A man held a friend's daughter. He wanted a family of his own but said, “First I need a job and a house. I need a future.” San Salvador, 1997.

Franklin gave Ms. De Cesare contact information for his mother and some fellow gang members in Los Angeles. When Ms. De Cesare returned to the United States, she began to pay attention to how neighborhoods in cities like New York and Washington had attracted large communities of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Life amid this diaspora intrigued her, even if New York-based editors did not share her enthusiasm.

“It was a story that was not being covered back then,” she said. “I tried to pitch stories, but there was resistance to the idea that anybody would really care. People instead were saying to me, because I had photographed the war in El Salvador, ‘Why don't you go to Bosnia?' Yes, I had photographed conflicts. But I don't see myself as a war photographer who was going to go around the globe from one war to the next. In the years I lived in El Salvador, I fell in love with the culture, and my abilities put me in a good position to be a good storyteller on the other issues.”

While other photographers chased conflicts across the globe, Ms. De Cesare was preoccupied with a different question: what happens when the war ends.

She looked at various aspects of the diaspora: the street peddlers; the soccer teams; the people who flew back and forth between the United States and El Salvador, selling items from home and bringing back packages and letters.

In 1993, she went to Los Angeles hoping to find Franklin's mother and his gang friends, but they had long since moved away. Instead, she teamed up with Luis J. Rodriguez, a poet and activist who knew about gangs, and they were awarded financing to begin a project.

Among the young people they encountered was Carlos Ingles, a former child soldier who had run away to Los Angeles with his brother. Ms. De Cesare followed him over the years as he tried to stay away from gang life and raise a family. Eventually, he was stopped while driving a cab, asked for papers and deported. That began a cycle in which he returned to the United States and was sent back to El Salvador several times. Then Ms. De Cesare stopped hearing from him.

A few years later, she got a call from Carlos's brother, Rogelio. Carlos had been killed in El Salvador. Though he had told his brother he was out of gangs, the truth may never be known. Gang violence had continued to take a wicked toll in El Salvador, even years after peace accords ended the civil war in 1992.

“It could have been anything,” Ms. De Cesare said. “He could have still been involved. He could have crossed somebody. It could have been a long-standing beef.”

Carlos's story was one of the reasons she decided to publish a book. People growing up in such violent conditions carry with them an emotional trauma that is seldom addressed, and it is difficult for them to escape gang life.

“We kind of write off these kids when they do come back,” she said. “And when they do, we make it so hard for them.”

While the best outcome might be for these young people to remake themselves and vanish into a new life in the United States, Central America is too small and too dangerous for that to happen in most cases. They end up in prisons, which can be like finishing schools for criminals, or they are killed by vigilante groups bent on “social cleansing.”

This is not to say that none escape the world of gangs. Ms. De Cesare has been following Carlos Perez, a young Guatemalan man who was a gang member growing up. A talented artist, he was able to leave Guatemala to study in Vienna, where he now lives.

Mr. Perez would like to return to Guatemala, Ms. De Cesare said, and work with other young people. But he does not feel comfortable working with former gang members. He might be a target.

That is why Ms. De Cesare plans to build on her book by developing a school curriculum and updating her Web site to provide resources for children looking for help and historical context to show how gangs emerged during civil wars.

“When people have other options, they expand their identity beyond the gang,” she said. “Their own homeboys respect that. That happens here. But down there, there are so few options that space is cut off.”

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Pictures of the Day: Washington and Elsewhere

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Photos from Washington, D.C., Sri Lanka, Russia and Syria.

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Teaching for Life

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Any thought of law school vanished the moment Ferrin Bujan stepped into a classroom as a student teacher. It was her last year at Queens College, where she was majoring in math and education, and she had been a little uncertain about her future.

“The world turned,” she said. “This is where I wanted to be. I enjoyed helping students who were struggling and knowing I could make a difference for them.”

Ms. Bujan, 24, is now in her third year teaching ninth-grade math at Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School in Fort Greene. It is not an easy job: she gets up before dawn so she can be at school early, spends the day teaching, then goes home to grade papers and do her own homework for the master's degree she is pursuing in special education. She teaches on Saturdays and during the summer. Even her social life revolves around other teachers.

Now, she is the subject of a continuing project by Alexis Lambrou, a 22-year-old photographer who was curious about how new teachers fared in the public school system. Some of her friends had gone from college to the Teach for America program, which sends recent graduates into public schools after a five-week training institute.

DESCRIPTIONAlexis Lambrou/Magnum Foundation Ms. Bujan by the piano at her parents' house in Queens. Her parents are West Indian, from Trinidad. She recently moved out of their house into her own apartment in Brooklyn.

“What's it like for a 22-year-old to be teaching an 18-year-old?” Ms. Lambrou asked. “How can you learn to be a teacher in five weeks? I was skeptical about that.”

Supported by a Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Fellowship, she set out to find the right teacher. Most schools did not return her calls. But a meeting with the principal of Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School went well, since the school was interested in using the arts for community engagement. Administrators paired Ms. Lambrou with Ms. Bujan, the school's youngest teacher.

Ms. Bujan was neither in Teach for America nor in her first year in the classroom. But she proved to be a fascinating subject. The school itself was small, and a sense of community prevailed. Though Ms. Lambrou thought a young teacher would have a hard time handling rambunctious teenagers, she found Ms. Bujan to be stoic and in control.

“A lot of kids, when they speak to her, it's like they're talking to a friend,” Ms. Lambrou said. “Some of them will sit during their lunch hour and talk with her in the classroom. They like her and look up to her.”

Even so, Ms. Bujan is clear about her role.

DESCRIPTIONAlexis Lambrou/Magnum Foundation Ms. Bujan checks the sign-in list for parent-teacher conferences. Fewer than half of her students'€™ parents or guardians showed up.

“I have to step it up a bit more than other teachers,” she said. “I don't want them to get the impression I am their friend. I am here to be their teacher. I don't want that line to be crossed.”

While she handles that task well, Ms. Bujan acknowledges that the job has challenges that often go unnoticed by education critics. While teachers are blamed if their students do not score well on standardized tests, she said, schools in needy areas often lack basic resources like computers and textbooks.

“It's hard to take the criticism and hear people say the things they say about the profession,” she said. “Someone who has those feelings should try walking into a school one day and try to step into a teacher's shoes. They would find it extremely hard and would probably reconsider their opinions about what a teacher should be doing and how the system is working.”

The time Ms. Lambrou has spent with Ms. Bujan has made her even more curious about her original project idea, the Teach for America model.

“I feel she is way more qualified,” she said of Ms. Bujan. “Sure, a lot of it is learning on the job, but Ferrin has the foundation and background to walk into a classroom more confidently, and it shows.”

Ms. Lambrou will have a chance to do that herself next week, when she begins teaching a photography class at the school.

“I started this story on young teachers and became one myself,” she said. “I'm not sure what to make of that. But I'm excited, and I'll be spending more time with Ferrin. There's always more to shoot.”

DESCRIPTIONAlexis Lambrou/Magnum Foundation A view of the school track from Ms. Bujan's classroom window at 6:30 a.m.

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More From The Times, and Elsewhere, on the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War

I wrote Monday about The Times's relatively low-key approach to covering the Iraq war's 10th anniversary, contrasting it to more robust efforts in The Guardian and to its own efforts on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Here are some further pieces that have appeared in The Times and elsewhere about the war.

* Room for Debate in the Opinion section is raising the question of whether the United States is better off after toppling Saddam Hussein.

* An article in the International section of Tuesday's Times notes the “anniversary many Iraqis would prefer to ignore.”

* Erik Wemple's blog in The Washington Post previews a CNN piece that will discuss the skeptical reporting offered by two Knight-Ridder Washington bureau reporters, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, in the run-up to the war.

* George Packer, in The New Yorker's Daily Comment Blog, writes about a photojournalism exhibition chronicling the war in Iraq.

* Michael Calderone in the Huffington Post says the news media failure leading up to the Iraq war could happen again.

*Chief Washington correspondent David Sanger offers news analysis on the lessons of the Iraq war for today's decision-makers.

*An editorial in Wednesday's Times assesses the war, calling it “unnecessary, costly and damaging on every level.”

*Shreeya Sinha produced this multimedia timeline of how The Times covered the early days of the war.

*An article on Wednesday's front page by Tim Arango and Michael R. Gordon described sectarian tensions that threaten stability in Iraq today.

*Several letters to the editor in Thursday's paper reflect on Iraq, a decade later.



Thanks for Not Calling: A Digital Etiquette Column Is a Disconnect for Readers

2:41 p.m. | Updated
When I called Nick Bilton â€" after an initial e-mail exchange - I didn't reach him right away.

One thing was certain: I was not about to leave a voice mail message. After all, that was the topic of my call â€" the huge reader response to his Disruptions column in which he wrote about the etiquette of communicating in the totally wired era. Voice mail is something to be avoided at all costs.

Mr. Bilton started his column with this:

Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says “Thank you”? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don't answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?

Don't these people realize that they're wasting your time?

Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life's little courtesies. But many social norms just don't make sense to people drowning in digital communication.

Mr. Bilton's column generated more than 500 comments, many of them disgusted with what they saw as his dismissiveness and bad manners. The column has also generated stories and commentary from many media outlets including The Atlantic Wire and The Globe and Mail. He followed up in the Bits blog on Tuesday, addressing specific reader complaints.

It includes an explanation of why he talks to his mother mostly on Twitter â€" and not even in direct messages. I doubt that the explanation will satisfy many of the parents among Times readers who hope for a more personal connection with their offspring.

One reader who wrote to me directly, Ellen D. Murphy of Portland, Me., expressed her displeasure memorably:

While I applaud The Times's apparent effort to reach out to children, you go too far when you give them a platform on your pages to express their opinions, which have all the hallmarks of immaturity and gracelessness of their age group. I refer to yesterday's column by Nick Bilton, entitled “Disruptions: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette,” which I first thought was a clever satire and then came to realize was an expression of Mr. (should I call him that?) Bilton's actual way of conducting himself. I feel sorry for his parents - his father, whose dozen voice mails he ignores, and his mother, who he insists communicate with him only by Twitter. This is a sociopath - and you employ him?

I was left with a sincere feeling of gratitude that, at age 62, I will be dead by the time Mr. Bilton and his age cohort will be running things - and the realization that they will probably smother me with a pillow should I have the bad manners (ahem) to survive and, inefficiently, take up space in their sleek, cold, 140-character world.

I asked Mr. Bilton and his editor, Glenn Kramon, about the strong reaction.

“Readers were able to say to me what they'd like to say to their children or grandchildren â€" that we're rude and insolent,” Mr. Bilton said.

He added, “Fine, I'll be the punching bag for a generation.”

Mr. Bilton, 36, is no kid, and he notes that he “can sit on either side of the fence,” digitally speaking. And if he had the column to do over again, he told me that he would have made the point that he does express gratitude, but not with a perfunctory e-mail.

“I still write handwritten thank-you cards,” he said, “and I think that is very special.”

He said he “learned a lesson” from the experience â€" that “our readers tend to go to extremes” when they react to a subject, and he might have tried harder to explain what he did and didn't really mean.

Mr. Kramon told me that he knew from the start that reaction would be negative but he believed â€" and still does believe â€" that the topic was worth exploring.

“Nick is raising issues that all of us are dealing with and doing it in a provocative way,” Mr. Kramon said.

As for the furor, there's no question, Mr. Kramon said, that “our audience was appalled.”

That reflects what he sees as a societal disconnect â€" and “Nick is voicing the other side of the disconnect in rather harsh terms. But maybe it helps people understand” how some members of the digital generation think and act.

And in other Times and tech-related commentary, the author Jeff Jarvis offered this tough criticism of a front-page article on Wednesday about Google and privacy violations, calling it “techno-panicky” and overplayed.  Mr. Jarvis wrote a book entitled “What Would Google Do?”  He is an unabashed admirer of the company and owns Google stock.



Is There Really Room to Debate Whether Women Can Lead?

4 p.m. | Updated The headline was powerful â€" or at least it had the power to startle.

Within the setting of the often excellent Opinion section blog, Room for Debate, and in the context of Sheryl Sandberg's book “Lean In,” it read: “Do Women Have What It Takes to Lead?”

On Twitter, Sarah Green, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, deemed it “not fit to print.” Those responding to her were quick to note that The Times's own newsroom is led by Jill Abramson, the executive editor.

In a blog called Policymic, Elizabeth Plank took up the topic with a certain amount of impatience.

“Can you hear that? Ah yes. That's the distinct sound of thousands of face palms echoing all over the nation.” And she noted that the subject “was last formally addressed in 1954 in the October issue of The Homemaker.”

By phone, Ms. Green later called the question “undermining.”

“If you substituted any other demographic group, I think there would have been an a-ha moment by an editor that this wasn't such a good idea,” she told me.

She added: “Why, with women, are we still asking questions like that?” Is it, she wondered, “because sexism is harder to see?” And, she said, “Because we don't see women in leadership positions as much, people think there's something wrong with the women.”

Harvard Business Review has published a number of studies that suggest that women actually outpace men in leadership abilities, according to both genders.

“So why don't we have more female leaders? I think that's a much more interesting (and debatable) question than ‘Do women have what it takes?'” Ms. Green said.

Rachel Sklar, co-founder of Change The Ratio â€" a nonprofit organization which sets out to increase visibility, access and opportunity for women in tech and media â€" and who was behind much of the Twitter traffic on this subject, also joined the fray in her blog.

The editor of Room for Debate, Susan Ellingwood, responded to my question about the headline.

Raising a provocative question is our way of starting an interesting discussion. That title starts a productive conversation about gender stereotypes and leadership â€" even if, in the end, the consensus among the debaters is “yes, women do have what it takes.” Each post explored the question from a different angle. And as readers' reactions show, the pieces sparked a conversation about an important topic. That's our goal.

What struck all of us here at Room for Debate is that the publicity around Sheryl Sandberg's book promotes an aggressive self-centered “male” approach to leadership, and yet there are many studies that show that team-building and consensus, seen as a “female,” approach to leadership can be more effective.

Gender equity, equal pay, the differences in leadership styles, the relatively small number of women in top corporate jobs or top elected positions, how women can succeed at both career and home life â€" all of these topics are worth discussing. (And now that we all live in what sometimes feels like Ms. Sandberg's “Lean In” nation, we're certainly getting plenty of opportunities to do just that.) No complaints there.

But prompting the discussion with a question whose answer is self-evident may not be the best approach.

As Ms. Plank responded to the question: “Uh, yes.”



Sunday Column: A Work in Progress for The Times

The Times's Work in Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Updated March 29, 2013, 5:42 PM ET: My last print column suggested that the American public's first knowledge of the abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison came from a press leak. As an astute reader pointed out, the United States military, responding to an internal complaint, had announced an investigation before news organizations obtained leaked information, particularly photographs.  The Associated Press makes the point that its early stories on Abu Ghraib predated the military's internal investigation. It was, however, the graphic images, leaked to news organizations, that were the first contact most Americans had with the outrageous prison abuses.

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

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

An Officer\'s Secretly Recorded Words About ‘Stop and Frisk\' Cause a Firestorm

Who, exactly, are “the right people” for the New York Police Department to stop, question and frisk?

Is that frequently used expression actually a racist code for young black and Hispanic men? Or is it simply police shorthand for people whose suspicious activities make them a legitimate target of police attention as they try to reduce the city's crime rate?

That's one of the questions at the heart of a federal trial that began last week in New York. In recent months, The Times has covered the stop-and-frisk program aggressively, questioning in many articles whether it is enmeshed with the reprehensible practice of racial profiling. And now it is covering the trial.

But one article â€" a Page 1 story last Friday by Joseph Goldstein â€" has caused a firestorm of criticism. It has drawn sharp and sustained protests from the Police Department and its legal department, and tough words from sources as diverse as the frequent police critic Leonard Levitt, a former Newsday columnist who writes the NYPD Confidential blog, and Heather Mac Donald, who frequently takes the Police Department's point of view, writing in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute.

Her assessment: The Times's article “has twisted the taped conversation into a poisonous indictment of the police.”

Essentially, Mr. Goldstein's article reported that, in at least one police precinct, race is a factor in the directions that street cops get from their supervisors on whom to stop, question and frisk.

Over the past week, I've considered the complaints of the Police Department's chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, and from the N.Y.P.D.'s legal department. I've read various articles criticizing the article, heard from readers commenting on it, and talked with the reporter, Mr. Goldstein, and the Metropolitan editor, Carolyn Ryan. I've also heard the audio of the secretly recorded conversation between Officer Pedro Serrano and his commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, and I've read the transcript.

The essence of the complaint against The Times's story is that, according to Mr. Browne, “The article provided a distorted picture of what the interchange between the inspector and a disgruntled, race-baiting cop was all about.” Officer Serrano had been criticized for making only two stops in a year, while working in the high-crime 40th Precinct in the South Bronx.

Ms. Ryan provided this response to the criticism in an e-mail (I later talked in person with her and Mr. Goldstein):

To us the story captures the essence of the argument between civil libertarians and the N.Y.P.D.: Are the police using the stop-question-frisk tactic as a blunt instrument to target certain groups of people, or are they acting, as the Supreme Court requires, on reasonable and individualized suspicion? The N.Y.P.D. has repeatedly said publicly that it uses the tactic only when an officer reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime.

But the reality of how that policy is communicated to officers in the station house appears quite different, as the story demonstrates. And in this case, it seems, the commanding officer of a precinct is suggesting an entire demographic be placed under suspicion.

The full transcript of the roughly 20-minute conversation shows Officer Serrano, who has been faulted for making too few stops, demanding guidance about whom to stop. He is told by his commanding officer, Inspector McCormack, to stop “the right people at the right time, the right location.” This is an oft-used N.Y.P.D. description of how the strategy is employed: they frequently talk about “the right people” or “the right stops.” It is obviously very vague.

At the end of the conversation, Inspector McCormack suggested that, in Mott Haven, given crime patterns there, the officer should stop “male blacks 14 to 20, 21.” This is not a specific description of suspects, such as “black male, 14 to 20, wearing red hoodie and blue sneakers,” or “black male, known to hang out in xyz location or associate with xyz people.” It is an entire demographic.

And Inspector McCormack does not appear, on the tape, to be talking about one specific crime for which particular young black males are wanted. He is describing the precinct's two biggest categories of felony crime, grand larcenies and robberies, of which there are close to 1,000 a year. And, most significantly, in his course of this lengthy conversation with Officer Serrano, he defines “the right people” in terms of the broad demographic, rather than by their suspicious conduct â€" like peering into apartment windows or evading police - which is the only lawful basis for a stop, according to the Supreme Court. To critics of the N.Y.P.D., this is akin to racial profiling. And to us it suggests that the way the department's strategy is communicated to officers is quite different from what N.Y.P.D. brass have described publicly.

She's right on many counts and says it well. I disagree, however, that the inspector said the officer “should stop” male blacks, but rather that male blacks were given as an example of those associated with past crimes.

What's more, the article is not presented as one about “how strategy is communicated.” It's presented as something close to proof of racial profiling..

Mr. Levitt, for one, does not think it comes close. He wrote on his blog: “If federal judge Shira Scheindlin concludes that the NYPD's Stop and Frisk is a racist policy she'll need more proof than last week's testimony of the 40th precinct's commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Levitt â€" who rarely pulls his punches against the Police Department - noted that a front-page article in The Times carries enormous weight, and, he said, “to me, there is a much more nuanced picture” than the one portrayed there.

“The way The Times handled it just seemed unfair to McCormack,” he said, given that “so much of the violent crime in the city is committed by young, black males. You can yell and scream about the impropriety of what he said, but it's true. And the victims are very often black, too.”

Mr. Levitt also noted that Inspector McCormack emphasizes â€" on the recording - that “99 percent of the people in this community are great, hardworking people, who deserve to walk to the train, walk to their car, walk to the store,” without becoming crime victims.” But that context is dismissed, far down in the article, as something that the inspector is “lecturing” his subordinate about.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, is correct when he says that the description of “young black males” was tied to specific crimes that had already occurred â€" the robberies and larcenies in the Mott Haven neighborhood. Note the use of the past tense in Inspector McCormack's exact words: “The problem was what, male blacks … And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks 14 to 20, 21.”

On the other side, Ms. Ryan is totally correct when she says that “what's left unsaid” is crucially important; the inspector never speaks about reasonable suspicion as a basis for possible stops.

I'll offer some final thoughts, but first want to state the obvious:

Racial profiling is not only reprehensible and illegal; it's also immoral. No individual should be prejudged as suspicious based on his or her age or the color of his skin. I can't be the judge of whether that's occurring in the context of “stop and frisk” - a federal trial will try to come to terms with that overarching question over the next month or more.

The Times's article strikes me as essentially accurate. But with its emphasis on one sentence â€" without enough context â€" and its presentation on the front page, it comes off as clear proof of racial profiling in the New York Police Department. (And there's no doubt that it was interpreted just that way by a wide variety of readers. The Rev. Al Sharpton quickly demanded Inspector McCormack's suspension, and a Times editorial the next day was headlined “Walking While Black in New York.”)

The facts, though certainly newsworthy, don't rise to that “smoking gun” level.



Thoughts Before Briefly Leaving the Grid

I'll be out of the office and off the grid for a few days, but before I go, a couple of thoughts:

1. The debate over the term “illegal immigrant” was reignited this week with the decision by The Associated Press to ban the term from its influential stylebook. The New York Times is also considering revisions to its use of this term.  Unlike The A.P., The Times will probably continue using the term, but may allow alternatives, giving writers and editors more options.

Meanwhile, Damien Cave, The Times's Mexico City bureau chief, wrote a front-page article this week that handled the matter deftly. In his story on Wednesday about immigration to the United States from Mexico's central plains, Mr. Cave used the terms “illegal immigration” and “illegal crossings,” but never referred to the immigrants with any adjective at all â€" not illegal, not undocumented, not unauthorized. He merely described their actions.

It is an emotionally charged and divisive subject. Most of my correspondence from readers is strongly in favor of The Times's retaining the phrase “illegal immigrant.”

2. In my Sunday column in the print edition, I'll answer, or try to answer, three questions from readers:

*How do you read the digital edition of The Times to get the complete experience of reading the paper in print?

*Whose opinion, exactly, is represented in Times editorials, and why are they now carrying a digital byline?

*Under what circumstances will The Times remove an online comment or article from its Web site?



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