Perfectly Reasonable Question No. 1: On Direct Quotations in Articles

A reader, Edward Hershey of Portland, Ore., wrote to me some time ago about an article in Sports by the basketball writer Howard Beck. Mr. Hershey, who described himself as “a former sportswriter in the Red Smith-Jimmy Cannon era,” wondered about Mr. Beck’s use of a quotation from the Miami Heat forward LeBron James. It came deep within what he accurately called “a compelling deadline story following the first game of the N.B.A. championship series.”

It read:

“You don’t have no rhythm of what they’re going to do,” James said before tipoff. “They don’t have a rhythm of what we’re going to do. So it’s like the first test we’ve had with one another in a while.”

Mr. Hershey asks a good question about what he terms “careless grammar from a superstar who clearly knows better, based on his next two sentences.”

“Should Beck have cleaned it up, as we used to say after one of Mickey Mantle’s barely decipherable observations, turning ‘no’ into ‘a,’ or would that have violated Times policy?” Mr. Hershey wrote in an e-mail.

The answer, according to both Mr. Beck and the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, is pretty simple. (I asked them both about this several weeks ago.) The Times doesn’t change direct quotations and saw no objection to using the full quotation, as is. If that’s the way the basketball star said it, that’s how the quotation should read in The Times.

The Times’s stylebook, a guide used by editors and reporters throughout the newsroom, puts it this way in its “quotations” entry: “Readers have a right to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said. The Times does not ‘clean up’ quotations.”

The guide goes on to say that anything other than that - “approximate” quotations â€" can undermine readers’ trust in The Times. However, it adds, “The writer should, of course, omit extraneous syllables like ‘um’ and may judiciously delete false starts.”

One way around this particular example was to paraphrase. That might have worked in the first part of the quotation, though something would have been lost, too. As it was, I don’t think anyone would judge LeBron James harshly for his grammatical slip, as long as his midrange jump shot was working. (It clearly was in the N.B.A. finals.)

I appreciate Mr. Hershey’s question, as I do all of what I like to call the “perfectly reasonable questions” that come my way from careful Times readers. I wish I could answer them all, but the volume of e-mails to the public editor’s office makes that impossible. But, as I prepare to go off the grid on Friday - abandoning a laptop for a kayak - I hope to get to a number of them. Stay tuned for more in the course of the next couple of days.

Perfectly Reasonable Question No. 4: On Mentioning Brand Names

Dan Goldberg, who identifies himself as the user of an Android phone, thinks The Times is giving Apple some free publicity, and he doesn’t like it.

Mr. Goldberg, a reader from El Cerrito, Calif., quoted from a June Travel section article in The Times in which the author wrote, “Before a recent trip to Europe I downloaded 10 of the apps to my iPhone.”

Mr. Goldberg’s e-mail to me posed the following questions:

Has Apple paid for this gratuitous mention-endorsement? Have New York Times employees been given free iPhones by Apple. Could “smartphone” have been used instead? In movies the studios get paid for such endorsements; does The New York Times?

I understand the reader’s implicit point, but I have been assured that there is no financial relationship, like a “product placement” fee, at work here.

I asked Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, to respond. In an e-mail, he told me that The Times goes “to great lengths to avoid any link between editorial decisions and advertising.” The paper also tries “to guard against even the perception or suspicion of such a connection.”

He wrote:

In a story like this â€" basically an advice story about using apps to book last-minute hotel rooms â€" it made perfect sense for the writer to be specific about the device he happened to be using. He also pointed out that most of the apps are available in Android versions.

In other cases, even if the specific brand or product is not crucial information, such details might add color or texture â€" perhaps a profile subject favors Gucci bags and drives a Porsche, or wears Levi’s and drives a beat-up Dodge pickup. Substituting generic descriptions for the specifics is likely to water down the story rather than enliven it.

But whatever the writer or editor’s reason for mentioning a brand, advertising or “product placement” doesn’t figure into it.

I agree with Mr. Corbett’s evaluation. While it’s possible to overdo the use of brand names in articles, they often add personality and specificity to a piece of writing.

I am answering questions from Times readers. On Wednesday I wrote about the use of direct quotations and about identifying writers of letters to the editor. Thursday morning I took up Web links and vulgarity and will later get to a question about “NYT Picks.”

Perfectly Reasonable Question No. 3: On Web Links and Vulgarity

A reader, Susie Reiss, wonders about the practice of inserting links in the online version of articles, finding it inconsistent at times, and mentioned a case in which references to some schools in an article included links while others did not.

She wrote: “What is the policy on inserting Web links? Do you think it is reasonable to link to some groups and not others in the span of an article?”

Another reader objected to the link in an article on The Times’s Web site Wednesday. The story itself concerned the spokeswoman for the mayoral candidate Anthony D. Weiner and her vulgarity-laced rant against a former campaign intern. The article described “expletives,” but the link within it took readers to an interview that detailed the rant itself, with some strong language.

Times editors have been thinking about this recently, as they prepare to update the stylebook. The overall idea, according to Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, is this: “We encourage reporters and editors to include links when readers will find it useful and interesting. There’s no restriction on the number but too many can be distracting. It makes sense to be judicious.”

Here’s some of the language that will be included in The Times’s stylebook:

If an article refers to material of interest to readers, like a Web site, document, image or video, provide an embedded link as a convenience. Readers also value links to background information and other useful content. When crediting a competitor, providing a link is mandatory. Test that all links are operational. While readers understand that The Times does not edit or control material found through external links, be mindful of our taste standards and generally avoid linking to strongly offensive material. Consult the standards editor or the news desk if there are questions. Generally avoid linking directly to the site of a specific seller for products including books, unless the Web site itself is the topic.

It’s good to be consistent, of course, and the schools article might have done a better job with that, if all the schools did indeed have their own Web sites.

As for the article on Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman and other taste matters, Mr. Corbett responded, “We think readers recognize that when they follow a link, it’s not The New York Times.”

But, he said, good judgment should still prevail: “We would avoid things that are terribly offensive. We probably wouldn’t link to a porn site or a horrible racist screed.”

I’ve written before about The Times’s conservative policy on the use of vulgarity and the lengths to which it will go to avoid it. Readers seem almost evenly divided on whether they would like to see the rules loosened or kept strict. The Times isn’t looking for a vote, however; it is sticking by its strict standards.

A link can sometimes be a way to abide by those standards while still giving readers the details â€" if they want them.

I am answering questions from Times readers. On Wednesday I wrote about the use of direct quotations and about identifying writers of letters to the editor, and will later get to a question about the use of brands â€" iPhone, for example â€" in Times articles.

Perfectly Reasonable Question No. 2: On Identifying Writers of Letters to the Editor

As the famous line from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” goes: “Who are those guys?” A version of that alarmed question sometimes comes up regarding letters to the editor in The Times.

A reader, John Hamilton of Shelton, Wash., writes to ask:

“What criteria does the New York Times editorial page use in identifying (or not) by profession, education, current or former employment writers of letters to the editors?”

He adds:

I ask the question because there clearly are criteria being used. One can infer, from today’s, Sunday’s, paper, for example, that you identify people with legal backgrounds when the topic is legal. But doing so confers a degree of legitimacy on the views expressed (or seems so to me) that leaving the writer unidentified does not. It would be interesting to know, continuing with today’s paper as an example, what John Viteritti’s background is, or Dewey Klurfield’s. For what it’s worth, it seems to me that a better policy would be to identify each writer in some way that he or she had consented to.

I asked the letters editor, Thomas Feyer, to respond. He said that the policy doesn’t amount to an exact science; there are judgments, not all of which are clear-cut. He wrote in an e-mail:

The criterion for an ID is relevance to the topic of the letter, or to show that the writer has expertise in the subject. Most times it’s obvious: the writer is a doctor, lawyer, professor or somesuch. Sometimes the ID is included if we think it would be of interest: a high school student, for example. Sometimes it’s included in the interest of full disclosure, when the writer has a financial or other stake in the subject.

But the general criterion is: Is the ID interesting, relevant or important for the reader to know?

The policy, Mr. Feyer added, “is simple, though in practice it’s not always.”

As to Mr. Hamilton’s suggestion about identifying every letter writer according to his or her desire, the idea is interesting but probably impractical, since not only would it use precious space, but it also might be an administrative nightmare as editors tried to fact-check identifications and come to happy terms with letter writers about how to identify them.

I am answering questions from Times readers over the next two days. I wrote about the use of direct quotations earlier, and will soon get to a question about when links are included in articles, including the question of when the linked article or site includes offensive material that wouldn’t appear in The Times.

Pictures of the Day: Zimbabwe and Elsewhere

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Photos from Zimbabwe, Israel, Ohio and Canada.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Pictures of the Day: Zimbabwe and Elsewhere

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

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Photos from Zimbabwe, Israel, Ohio and Canada.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Bill Brandt’s Negative Beginnings

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Young people sometimes look at the world with brash certainty, seeing only absolutes â€" stark blacks and bright whites. But time and experience teach us that life exists mostly in nuanced gray, and that ambiguity often provides insight.

For the photographer Bill Brandt, the reverse was true. His early social documentary work was rendered almost entirely in subtle midtones. It was only in his later, and more famous, nudes and landscapes that he made strikingly high-contrast prints.

To really understand Mr. Brandt’s work, you have to turn to the original, vintage prints, and that’s exactly the goal of “Shadow and Light,” a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. His photos were exhibited at MoMA in 1948 and again in 1961, but it was the 1969 exhibition curated by John Szarkowski that cemented his reputation as one of the most important 20th-century photographers. Until recently, the museum’s Brandt collection was composed almost entirely of high-contrast prints made for the 1969 exhibition under the supervision of the photographer.

After he began making his dramatic prints in the early 1950s, Mr. Brandt would only reprint his photos from before and during World War II in much higher contrast, which radically changed their effects. But a recent acquisitions campaign by MoMA focused on prints Mr. Brandt himself had made at or around the time the negatives were exposed.

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Reg Butler.” Circa 1952.

Exhibiting these images allowed the curator, Sarah Hermanson Meister, to connect what had seemed like completely separate silos of Mr. Brandt’s work.

“If you’re forced to look at the different sections of his work in isolation, it’s difficult to understand the trajectory of a career,” she said.

The exhibition fleshes out Mr. Brandt’s work with many images that are rarely shown, including photos from World War II that go beyond the images of daily life in London bomb shelters that were always included in previous retrospectives. Without the added context, it is easy to dismiss his early social documentary and portrait work as a prelude to his more influential work from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. In reality, he would have been an important photographer even if he had stopped photographing before his nudes.

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Gull’s Nest, Late on Midsummer Night, Isle of Skye.” 1947.

The volume of images in the exhibition and the accompanying book provides an opportunity to understand the development of Mr. Brandt’s vision and his printing.

“Looking at the vintage prints, you begin to see a shift from the late ’40s into the mid-’50s from very silvery tones, which even persist after the war, into the higher contrast, higher pitch of the work in the portrait of Reg Butler (above) and the portrait of a young girl lying on the floor in that interior (below),” Ms. Meister said.

By examining the prints closely, viewers can also see that nothing was off-limits for Mr. Brandt when it came to darkroom work. He would print something one way and then print it in a totally different way, recrop it and often extensively retouch. He would use a straight razor to cut, scrape and press the emulsion, a fine brush to apply ink or watercolor washes, or a graphite pencil to add or strengthen detail.

“While he could be remarkably uninhibited in his image revisions, at times he demonstrated a restraint and a lightness of touch that is almost invisible on his finished prints,” Lee Ann Daffner, a MoMA conservator, wrote in the book.

Later in his life, Mr. Brandt might have taken an existing print and rephotographed, reprinted and retouched it to attain the desired effect.

He certainly wasn’t the only photographer to retouch images extensively or to mine different sections of the gray scale. But the wildly different printing approaches he took during his career made his work difficult to understand fully.

The MOMA exhibit, which runs through Aug. 12, is a tribute not only to the breadth of his work, but also to the primacy of the print â€" the physical object â€" in truly comprehending photographic artists.

“In the past, discussion of the dramatic evolution of Brandt’s printing style has been relegated to the sidelines, and while it is necessary to value the nearly impenetrable darkness and muted tones 
of his early prints from the 1930s, it is not so simple to dismiss the forcefulness of his later interpretations as an aging man’s bastard prints,” Ms. Meister wrote in the book’s introduction. “Indeed, a significant part of Brandt’s art is that the exposure of the negative was, for him, only the beginning. In many respects, each Brandt print is unique because the pervasiveness of his hand in retouching his work â€" to correct and to enhance, with a variety of tools â€" means that it is rare to find two prints presented in an identical manner.”

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton Place.” 1955.

“Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 12.

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

Bill Brandt’s Negative Beginnings

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Young people sometimes look at the world with brash certainty, seeing only absolutes â€" stark blacks and bright whites. But time and experience teach us that life exists mostly in nuanced gray, and that ambiguity often provides insight.

For the photographer Bill Brandt, the reverse was true. His early social documentary work was rendered almost entirely in subtle midtones. It was only in his later, and more famous, nudes and landscapes that he made strikingly high-contrast prints.

To really understand Mr. Brandt’s work, you have to turn to the original, vintage prints, and that’s exactly the goal of “Shadow and Light,” a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. His photos were exhibited at MoMA in 1948 and again in 1961, but it was the 1969 exhibition curated by John Szarkowski that cemented his reputation as one of the most important 20th-century photographers. Until recently, the museum’s Brandt collection was composed almost entirely of high-contrast prints made for the 1969 exhibition under the supervision of the photographer.

After he began making his dramatic prints in the early 1950s, Mr. Brandt would only reprint his photos from before and during World War II in much higher contrast, which radically changed their effects. But a recent acquisitions campaign by MoMA focused on prints Mr. Brandt himself had made at or around the time the negatives were exposed.

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Reg Butler.” Circa 1952.

Exhibiting these images allowed the curator, Sarah Hermanson Meister, to connect what had seemed like completely separate silos of Mr. Brandt’s work.

“If you’re forced to look at the different sections of his work in isolation, it’s difficult to understand the trajectory of a career,” she said.

The exhibition fleshes out Mr. Brandt’s work with many images that are rarely shown, including photos from World War II that go beyond the images of daily life in London bomb shelters that were always included in previous retrospectives. Without the added context, it is easy to dismiss his early social documentary and portrait work as a prelude to his more influential work from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. In reality, he would have been an important photographer even if he had stopped photographing before his nudes.

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Gull’s Nest, Late on Midsummer Night, Isle of Skye.” 1947.

The volume of images in the exhibition and the accompanying book provides an opportunity to understand the development of Mr. Brandt’s vision and his printing.

“Looking at the vintage prints, you begin to see a shift from the late ’40s into the mid-’50s from very silvery tones, which even persist after the war, into the higher contrast, higher pitch of the work in the portrait of Reg Butler (above) and the portrait of a young girl lying on the floor in that interior (below),” Ms. Meister said.

By examining the prints closely, viewers can also see that nothing was off-limits for Mr. Brandt when it came to darkroom work. He would print something one way and then print it in a totally different way, recrop it and often extensively retouch. He would use a straight razor to cut, scrape and press the emulsion, a fine brush to apply ink or watercolor washes, or a graphite pencil to add or strengthen detail.

“While he could be remarkably uninhibited in his image revisions, at times he demonstrated a restraint and a lightness of touch that is almost invisible on his finished prints,” Lee Ann Daffner, a MoMA conservator, wrote in the book.

Later in his life, Mr. Brandt might have taken an existing print and rephotographed, reprinted and retouched it to attain the desired effect.

He certainly wasn’t the only photographer to retouch images extensively or to mine different sections of the gray scale. But the wildly different printing approaches he took during his career made his work difficult to understand fully.

The MOMA exhibit, which runs through Aug. 12, is a tribute not only to the breadth of his work, but also to the primacy of the print â€" the physical object â€" in truly comprehending photographic artists.

“In the past, discussion of the dramatic evolution of Brandt’s printing style has been relegated to the sidelines, and while it is necessary to value the nearly impenetrable darkness and muted tones 
of his early prints from the 1930s, it is not so simple to dismiss the forcefulness of his later interpretations as an aging man’s bastard prints,” Ms. Meister wrote in the book’s introduction. “Indeed, a significant part of Brandt’s art is that the exposure of the negative was, for him, only the beginning. In many respects, each Brandt print is unique because the pervasiveness of his hand in retouching his work â€" to correct and to enhance, with a variety of tools â€" means that it is rare to find two prints presented in an identical manner.”

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton Place.” 1955.

“Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 12.

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