A committee investigated The New York Times’ policies and practices for months and revealed a simple truth:
The reader matters.
The highlighted recommendation of a 94-page report prepared by the Times committee is to create the position of public editor.
For Oregonian readers who are used to having a public editor to respond to reader complaints, hold the newspaper staff accountable to the high accuracy and ethics standards, oversee corrections and report to readers in a regular column, this may not seem a stunning development.
It is. It will open the Times to reader criticisms, make it more accountable to the public it serves and help editors and reporters be more fully informed. That’s what it has done here.
The Times only made a commitment to the public editor position for a year, so time will tell if it truly listens to readers and if the staff understands the paper’s credibility is tied to openness with readers.
For the Times, it took the embarrassing saga of a 27-year-old reporter, Jayson Blair, to add the first public editor in its 152-year history. The fallout from Blair earlier prompted the committee and led to the resignations of the newspaper’s top two editors.
The Times often sets the agenda for the country’s other newspapers, and its decision should lead to the creation of this position in other newsrooms. With fewer than 40 public editors in daily newsrooms, the growth in the number has been glacial at best.
In the aftermath of the Blair case, other newspapers already have reviewed guidelines and practices related to anonymous sources, datelines, attribution and corrections.
Editors at The Oregonian found many of its guidelines to be sound, but they were gathering dust in minds or desks and in need of freshening. So The Oregonian revisited and clarified several of them. Readers should see these principles in practice and expect that journalists should be willing and able to explain exceptions:
Anonymous sources: The newspaper strongly discourages the use of them. Those sources should be used only if the story is of serious public concern, if sources have legitimate reasons to fear public exposure, if the information can be obtained no other way and if the information is central to the story.
Supervising editors should know the identity of an unnamed source. Senior editors, who must provide permission, may ask the identity of unnamed sources. But more importantly, they need to understand the expertise, context or bias a source brings.
Attribution: The newspaper will not represent the work of others as its own. When in doubt, the newspaper will attribute. That means that a quotation gathered by somebody else will note it, as in “Jones told The Washington Post.”
Corrections: The newspaper is committed to correcting errors and tracking problems in accuracy to help staff members overcome them. But the newspaper, like the Times, still is pursuing better ways to improve accuracy across all reporting teams and departments.
Datelines: A dateline on a bylined story means that the reporter actually was at the place named in the dateline and reported a great majority of the story there. But in stories on suburban zoned pages and in the Thursday zoned weeklies, the newspaper permits datelines to indicate the community where the news took place.
Beyond those guidelines lies a larger challenge for The Oregonian, The New York Times and other newspapers. The guidelines are simply practices or signposts for a newsroom that is committed to fairness, accountability and transparency to readers.
And the management and culture of a newsroom will determine whether journalists embrace those principles.
Historically, journalists have been slow to realize what the Times report emphasizes: How the newspaper is managed and the culture that style creates are keys to the quality of the newspaper.
The exhaustive committee report revealed a deeply troubled if talented newsroom. The analysis of the Jayson Blair train wreck exposed a culture of isolation, poor or no communication and overworked professionals who feared their future was tied only to how many hours they worked and how they related to senior editors. That type of culture could bring any organization to its knees.
The Times report also is remarkable in how its recommendations state the obvious.
Leaders of successful organizations recognize these basic principles that have to be applied — and how difficult they are to follow: Be civil to co-workers. Communicate with one another. Be fair by offering equal opportunities for promotions. Give those who disagree with management decisions a safe climate to appeal. Ensure managers are accessible to those whom they supervise. Have a diverse work force that values people of different backgrounds and people who balance home and work.
Stephen Engelberg came from The New York Times to The Oregonian a year ago to become managing editor for enterprise. He says the cultures of the two newsrooms are vastly different. But it would be a mistake for journalists at The Oregonian or any newspaper to think it is not vulnerable to miscommunication and management errors that could damage the newspaper’s credibility.
Newspapers get lost, Engelberg says, when they stop being open to criticism and questioning, when they start editing for themselves and stop serving the reader. “We essentially do serve one set of masters, and that’s who reads the paper every day,” he says.
As at other newspapers, leaders at The Oregonian struggle regularly with how internal management and communications affect what is published and the newspaper’s credibility. How people here treat sources who are difficult, readers with complaints or colleagues in the most challenging circumstances speaks to what kind of newspaper The Oregonian is.
The Oregonian likes to think of itself as a newspaper that always is trying to get better, and it should.
At a meeting called to discuss the underlying issues of the Blair case, editors here struggled with the same issues that are now clearly in play at the Times: Editors might be good journalists, but are they necessarily well-trained managers? What happens when editors spend too much time in meetings rather than working with those they supervise? How can reporters and other nonmanagers be assured that higher-level editors are hearing their concerns? Does everyone have an equal chance for promotion or good assignment?
The Oregonian has a lower than usual editor-to-reporter ratio to encourage coaching and development, and supervising editors sit with reporters rather than among themselves. Yet managers know they need to be more consistent about feedback and setting goals.
The Oregonian strives to communicate among its different departments and teams, but daily communication can still be flawed, which can lead to two reporting teams covering a story or story ideas falling through the cracks.
The Oregonian devotes more effort to training journalists than almost any other newspaper. Still, editors know they need to do more to satisfy the long-term career aspirations of staff members, as recommended in the Times report.
The Oregonian is one of the few newspapers in the country whose percentage of journalists of color is at or near the similar community percentage at 19 percent, yet that’s not true among managers.
Diversity in staffing, promotion and coverage are essential for the Times and other newspapers, according to Roger Wilkins, an outside member of the Times committee and a professor of history and American culture at George Mason University. “The paper needs to be able to see a diverse world and an increasingly diverse nation with as many sets of eyes looking from as many differing perspectives as possible,” he writes in the report.
Journalists at The Oregonian would be arrogant — and wrong — to assume the newsroom today is open to as many different views and ideas as possible.
Arrogance in a newsroom leads to ignoring readers. And that is fatal for high-quality journalism.
In its report, the Times committee highlights the public editor position because it will bring the Times closer to readers with whom it has lost touch.
That was why Editor Sandy Rowe created the first public editor position at The Oregonian a decade ago. She initially encountered resistance and skepticism in the newsroom, but she knew readers would rise to the challenge and her newsroom would respond.
Publisher Fred A. Stickel told readers on the front page in 1994: “We want to provide more ways for you to tell us how we’re doing.”
They have. And it is readers like The Oregonian’s who should take pride that the public editor position will arrive at The New York Times.
