11 ms·

The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

79 points by secondary 9y ago

_rpd 9y ago
For context, this is part of sweeping cuts to NYT editorial staff: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/05/31/new-york-times-ends-its-traditional-copy-desk/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/05/...
gnicholas 9y ago
Interesting choice — I love the NYT Public Editor's work and was actually just about to add her column to my media literacy / filter bubble project, Read Across the Aisle. Many people have never heard of a Public Editor and have no idea what the position entails. From a media literacy standpoint, this column offered a behind-the-scenes look at why certain decisions were made, how journalistic standards were applied, and the pros/cons of alternative options. In this time of political discord and journalistic polarization, I am surprised and disappointed that such an esteemed paper would decide this position is no longer necessary. I hope the NYT keeps the existing archive online, and frankly I may still add this archive to my media literacy app — even though the underlying stories would become increasingly stale over time. IMO, it is that good!
- jacobolus 9y ago
  You love Liz Spayd’s work, or the previous public editor, Margaret Sullivan? I’ve found Spayd’s column pretty anodyne.
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    I have mostly read Spayd's work, and I enjoy the analytical aspects of it. How would you say Sullivan's work differed? Worth combing through the archives?
    - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
      Yes absolutely. Margaret Sullivan is a national treasure. Here's her 'back catalog' of stories from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/by/margaret-sullivan https://www.nytimes.com/by/margaret-sullivan
jerkstate 9y ago
The NY Times created the Public Editor role in response to a fabrication scandal. Are they trying to tell us something?
- eli 9y ago
  That they never really wanted it?
shard972 9y ago
So they think that they can just replace that role with social media? Wasn't the whole issue with newspapers in the 2016 election was they relied far too much on social media and ended up in a bubble? I don't see anything in the article that makes me feel like they are interested in fixing that problem.
- PhantomGremlin 9y ago
  ended up in a bubble? Yes they did. They know it. And they don't really give a fuck. After the election they did some public navel gazing about what went wrong. To prove they were serious, there was even an editorial about The Future of the Times. So I wrote to Ms Spayd. I challenged her, at the next meeting of journalists and editors, to say something like: "show of hands, who voted for Donald Trump for president". My contention is that the result would be zero. Nada. Zilch. Even if they did vote for Trump, they wouldn't be dumb enough to admit it publicly to a room full of their colleagues. So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? They can't, and they don't want to. Or, maybe, Ms. Spayd actually did what I suggested. And the powers that be decided that she just wasn't a good fit for them anymore. And that's why she was shown the door. :)
  - wcummings 9y ago
    Employing Trump voters would create an unsafe work environment for women and minorities.
  - pg314 9y ago
    > So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.
    - panzer_wyrm 9y ago
      In the last election people reporting on the KKK outnumbered the clan 10 to 1.
cwyers 9y ago
On one hand, having an ombudsman (whatever you want to call it) is a good thing for an institution like the Times. On the other hand... having Liz Spayd in that role is pointless, so this isn't a loss. The past year has shown us how the New York Times has let false equivalence and the need to sell newspapers to both sides of the aisle has severely damaged the quality of the paper's coverage, and Spayd has continually carried water for this rather than hold the paper to account. I for one am tired of watching the Times sell itself with ads about how the truth is more important than ever and then follow it up with coverage like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/politics/health-care-fact-check-preexisting-conditions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/politics/health-care-f... Where Pelosi saying "Up to 17 million children" is supposed to be misleading because it chooses the high side estimate, when that is exactly what 'up to' means. Getting rid of the public editor won't make this better, but not having to read a public editor who won't confront this sort of coverage head-on will at least make me a bit less cranky about it.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  I'd feel more able to agree with you if the NYT didn't carry water for some whoppers ("you can keep you doctor", "insurers will compete for your business", etc.) back when the ACA was passed in the first place.
  - specialist 9y ago
    Insurer's response to ACA reminds me of a Frank & Ernest comic, which I can't find right now, sorry: Two USPS workers. Package label says "Do not bend, fold, mutilate." One says to the other "Doesn't say anything about crumple!" Har har har. --- I had high hopes for ACA. I believed the 15% medical loss ratio was the poison pill that would eventually drive insurers out of business, and therefore lead to Medicare for All. For comparison, Medicare's is under 5%, meaning 95 cents for every dollar spent goes to patient care, vs coke and prostitutes for the execs. Silly me. There's no set of rules that can't be broken, gamed. So now I'm for dozing it all down and rebuilding with universal coverage, single payer, using the capitation model (reward wellness vs fee for service). No more incrementalism. Just do it. --- Aside: Mid 2000s, my team created, implemented, supported 5 regional health information exchanges (eg BHIX). It was clear then, to everyone in healthcare IT, that we were pushing cooked noodles across hot pavement. Since then, it's only gotten worse. Overhead continues to grow geometrically, due to things like ICD-10 and meaningful care, without nudging the patient care (outcomes) needle one bit. I can't explain it. I just read about cost disease. It seems to explain rising costs, but I don't understand the mechanism, or what to do about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease And this book blew my mind: "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy" by David Graeber http://amzn.to/2mi169U http://amzn.to/2mi169U
makomk 9y ago
Unfortunately, the thing that will always stick in my memory about Liz Spayd is her criticism of the New York Times for refusing to give more credence to the claim that junk emails about Trump hotels were a secret communications channel with Russia: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/public-editor/trump-russia-fbi-liz-spayd-public-editor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/public-editor/trump-russi... (Seriously. Every single piece of evidence pointed to the communications being mass marketing emails, from the companies actually operating the server to The Intercept obtaining copies of some of the emails.)
- rdtsc 9y ago
  Wouldn't be surprised if in a few years there will be studies about the "Russia" propaganda campaign. How first it was very effective, everyone repeating the same things, the infamous "dossier" with sexual allegations, communication via mass marketing emails and so on. How it was beautiful and effective, and then everyone went too far and it ended up as a very expensive, counterproductive and embarrassing affair. Also I wonder to what degree the journalists and anchors involved actually believe those things, or they simply know what to sell and do it regardless of their personal convictions in the matter.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    Did you read what you're replying to? The New York Times didn't buy into some sort of "propaganda campaign", nor were they part of it. If anything it proves that journalism is doing quite well at the NYT, and the narrative of "bias" and "propaganda campaigns" is undermining civil society, and unfairly accusing people doing the best they can and mostly succeeding.
    - makomk 9y ago
      Supposedly a good five or so publications passed over the Trump hotel communications with Russia story for the same reason, but ultimately it didn't matter that much because the moment one publication (Slate) was willing to publish their article went massively viral on social media, the Clinton campaign helped spread it, and huge numbers of people saw and believed it. We've effectively reduced the accuracy of the media as a whole to whatever the sloppiest, most view-hungry outlet is willing to put out that fits everyone's preferred narrative.
matt4077 9y ago
Good take on this from Politico: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/31/good-riddance-to-the-nyts-public-editor-215213 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/31/good-ridda...
douche 9y ago
I wouldn't mind if the N.Y. Times crawled up itself and disappeared. The main loss would be the crossword puzzle.
had2makeanacct 9y ago
Saw an article about this on The Outline a month ago, it's a more informal and harsher take on this https://theoutline.com/post/1372/the-new-york-times-public-editor-is-bad-at-her-job https://theoutline.com/post/1372/the-new-york-times-public-e...
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Before I start, Disclosure: I'm neither a Trump or a Hillary supporter and I don't mean the following to be political. I'm just very dissatisfied with the sad reality of how I cannot trust anything online anymore. For me, the moment all my trust in NYT died was the election day. The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. People kept questioning "where the hell is this data coming from?". I believe Newspapers should try to play as much neutral role as possible, but throughout the entire election cycle the narrative was NYT vs. Trump. News organizations and journalists should report stories but should not become the story. As someone who just wanted to learn what REALLY is going on, I had (and still have) hard time believing anything they say anymore. Other conservative publications at least don't claim to be neutral. A publication shouldn't claim to "tell the truth" and do a whole TV ad about it if they are clearly biased and they're also aware of this. I know they're being provocative because this sells, and they need to make money, and it's getting harder to make money with newspaper. But they've crossed the line. People keep talking about "fake news", but what's really dangerous is not some viral website that write some funny photoshopped story. What's really dangerous is influential news organizations like NYT doing deceptively objective-sounding pieces with narratives that mislead the public. By now I think a lot of people know it's very possible to take a same piece of reality and write completely different versions of it, just by framing them differently. Because of that I have hard time believing anything online anymore, especially the influential ones. This is sad because it used to be the job of journalism to fight against injustice, but nowadays it's more about generating more page views and getting more subscribers, which led to people losing faith in journalism.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  It is my understanding of history that most newspapers used to have open political biases; they were even on the take from the party bosses, and it was written into their mission statements. You knew through what lens to filter the content, and they were happy with smaller, more limited readerships. This aim for objectivity in printed reporting was a recent 20th century development.
- dominotw 9y ago
wonderous 9y ago
"For the past three years, my assignment has been to try to help this newspaper live up to its own high journalistic standards as it covered a historic presidential election, two wars, the Great Recession, violence in the Middle East and more. I have deplored the overuse of anonymous sources, warned against the creep of opinion into news analysis and worried about the preservation of Times quality on the Internet. But, in truth, I have sometimes felt less like a keeper of the flame and more like an internal affairs cop." - Departing NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt SOURCE: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html?referer= https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html?r...
cylinder 9y ago
>“There is nothing more important to our mission, or our business, than strengthening our connection with our readers,” Sulzberger added. “A relationship that fundamental cannot be outsourced to a single intermediary.” This is a disturbing statement. Shouldn't a serious newspaper's mission be to investigate and report facts without regard to the "connection" it creates or dissolves with the reader? I'm sure Infowars has a deep connection with its readers. This is a profoundly ridiculous statement but I think it represents what the NYT has always been quite accurately.

79 points by secondary 9y ago

_rpd 9y ago

For context, this is part of sweeping cuts to NYT editorial staff: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/05/31/new-york-times-ends-its-traditional-copy-desk/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/05/...

gnicholas 9y ago

Interesting choice — I love the NYT Public Editor's work and was actually just about to add her column to my media literacy / filter bubble project, Read Across the Aisle. Many people have never heard of a Public Editor and have no idea what the position entails. From a media literacy standpoint, this column offered a behind-the-scenes look at why certain decisions were made, how journalistic standards were applied, and the pros/cons of alternative options. In this time of political discord and journalistic polarization, I am surprised and disappointed that such an esteemed paper would decide this position is no longer necessary. I hope the NYT keeps the existing archive online, and frankly I may still add this archive to my media literacy app — even though the underlying stories would become increasingly stale over time. IMO, it is that good!

jacobolus 9y ago
You love Liz Spayd’s work, or the previous public editor, Margaret Sullivan? I’ve found Spayd’s column pretty anodyne.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  I have mostly read Spayd's work, and I enjoy the analytical aspects of it. How would you say Sullivan's work differed? Worth combing through the archives?
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    Yes absolutely. Margaret Sullivan is a national treasure. Here's her 'back catalog' of stories from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/by/margaret-sullivan https://www.nytimes.com/by/margaret-sullivan

jerkstate 9y ago

The NY Times created the Public Editor role in response to a fabrication scandal. Are they trying to tell us something?

eli 9y ago
That they never really wanted it?

shard972 9y ago

So they think that they can just replace that role with social media? Wasn't the whole issue with newspapers in the 2016 election was they relied far too much on social media and ended up in a bubble? I don't see anything in the article that makes me feel like they are interested in fixing that problem.

PhantomGremlin 9y ago
ended up in a bubble? Yes they did. They know it. And they don't really give a fuck. After the election they did some public navel gazing about what went wrong. To prove they were serious, there was even an editorial about The Future of the Times. So I wrote to Ms Spayd. I challenged her, at the next meeting of journalists and editors, to say something like: "show of hands, who voted for Donald Trump for president". My contention is that the result would be zero. Nada. Zilch. Even if they did vote for Trump, they wouldn't be dumb enough to admit it publicly to a room full of their colleagues. So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? They can't, and they don't want to. Or, maybe, Ms. Spayd actually did what I suggested. And the powers that be decided that she just wasn't a good fit for them anymore. And that's why she was shown the door. :)
- wcummings 9y ago
  Employing Trump voters would create an unsafe work environment for women and minorities.
- pg314 9y ago
  > So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.
  - panzer_wyrm 9y ago
    In the last election people reporting on the KKK outnumbered the clan 10 to 1.

cwyers 9y ago

On one hand, having an ombudsman (whatever you want to call it) is a good thing for an institution like the Times. On the other hand... having Liz Spayd in that role is pointless, so this isn't a loss. The past year has shown us how the New York Times has let false equivalence and the need to sell newspapers to both sides of the aisle has severely damaged the quality of the paper's coverage, and Spayd has continually carried water for this rather than hold the paper to account. I for one am tired of watching the Times sell itself with ads about how the truth is more important than ever and then follow it up with coverage like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/politics/health-care-fact-check-preexisting-conditions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/us/politics/health-care-f... Where Pelosi saying "Up to 17 million children" is supposed to be misleading because it chooses the high side estimate, when that is exactly what 'up to' means. Getting rid of the public editor won't make this better, but not having to read a public editor who won't confront this sort of coverage head-on will at least make me a bit less cranky about it.

humanrebar 9y ago
I'd feel more able to agree with you if the NYT didn't carry water for some whoppers ("you can keep you doctor", "insurers will compete for your business", etc.) back when the ACA was passed in the first place.
- specialist 9y ago
  Insurer's response to ACA reminds me of a Frank & Ernest comic, which I can't find right now, sorry: Two USPS workers. Package label says "Do not bend, fold, mutilate." One says to the other "Doesn't say anything about crumple!" Har har har. --- I had high hopes for ACA. I believed the 15% medical loss ratio was the poison pill that would eventually drive insurers out of business, and therefore lead to Medicare for All. For comparison, Medicare's is under 5%, meaning 95 cents for every dollar spent goes to patient care, vs coke and prostitutes for the execs. Silly me. There's no set of rules that can't be broken, gamed. So now I'm for dozing it all down and rebuilding with universal coverage, single payer, using the capitation model (reward wellness vs fee for service). No more incrementalism. Just do it. --- Aside: Mid 2000s, my team created, implemented, supported 5 regional health information exchanges (eg BHIX). It was clear then, to everyone in healthcare IT, that we were pushing cooked noodles across hot pavement. Since then, it's only gotten worse. Overhead continues to grow geometrically, due to things like ICD-10 and meaningful care, without nudging the patient care (outcomes) needle one bit. I can't explain it. I just read about cost disease. It seems to explain rising costs, but I don't understand the mechanism, or what to do about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease And this book blew my mind: "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy" by David Graeber http://amzn.to/2mi169U http://amzn.to/2mi169U

makomk 9y ago

Unfortunately, the thing that will always stick in my memory about Liz Spayd is her criticism of the New York Times for refusing to give more credence to the claim that junk emails about Trump hotels were a secret communications channel with Russia: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/public-editor/trump-russia-fbi-liz-spayd-public-editor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/public-editor/trump-russi... (Seriously. Every single piece of evidence pointed to the communications being mass marketing emails, from the companies actually operating the server to The Intercept obtaining copies of some of the emails.)

rdtsc 9y ago
Wouldn't be surprised if in a few years there will be studies about the "Russia" propaganda campaign. How first it was very effective, everyone repeating the same things, the infamous "dossier" with sexual allegations, communication via mass marketing emails and so on. How it was beautiful and effective, and then everyone went too far and it ended up as a very expensive, counterproductive and embarrassing affair. Also I wonder to what degree the journalists and anchors involved actually believe those things, or they simply know what to sell and do it regardless of their personal convictions in the matter.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Did you read what you're replying to? The New York Times didn't buy into some sort of "propaganda campaign", nor were they part of it. If anything it proves that journalism is doing quite well at the NYT, and the narrative of "bias" and "propaganda campaigns" is undermining civil society, and unfairly accusing people doing the best they can and mostly succeeding.
  - makomk 9y ago
    Supposedly a good five or so publications passed over the Trump hotel communications with Russia story for the same reason, but ultimately it didn't matter that much because the moment one publication (Slate) was willing to publish their article went massively viral on social media, the Clinton campaign helped spread it, and huge numbers of people saw and believed it. We've effectively reduced the accuracy of the media as a whole to whatever the sloppiest, most view-hungry outlet is willing to put out that fits everyone's preferred narrative.

matt4077 9y ago

Good take on this from Politico: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/31/good-riddance-to-the-nyts-public-editor-215213 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/31/good-ridda...

douche 9y ago

I wouldn't mind if the N.Y. Times crawled up itself and disappeared. The main loss would be the crossword puzzle.

had2makeanacct 9y ago

Saw an article about this on The Outline a month ago, it's a more informal and harsher take on this https://theoutline.com/post/1372/the-new-york-times-public-editor-is-bad-at-her-job https://theoutline.com/post/1372/the-new-york-times-public-e...

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

Before I start, Disclosure: I'm neither a Trump or a Hillary supporter and I don't mean the following to be political. I'm just very dissatisfied with the sad reality of how I cannot trust anything online anymore. For me, the moment all my trust in NYT died was the election day. The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. People kept questioning "where the hell is this data coming from?". I believe Newspapers should try to play as much neutral role as possible, but throughout the entire election cycle the narrative was NYT vs. Trump. News organizations and journalists should report stories but should not become the story. As someone who just wanted to learn what REALLY is going on, I had (and still have) hard time believing anything they say anymore. Other conservative publications at least don't claim to be neutral. A publication shouldn't claim to "tell the truth" and do a whole TV ad about it if they are clearly biased and they're also aware of this. I know they're being provocative because this sells, and they need to make money, and it's getting harder to make money with newspaper. But they've crossed the line. People keep talking about "fake news", but what's really dangerous is not some viral website that write some funny photoshopped story. What's really dangerous is influential news organizations like NYT doing deceptively objective-sounding pieces with narratives that mislead the public. By now I think a lot of people know it's very possible to take a same piece of reality and write completely different versions of it, just by framing them differently. Because of that I have hard time believing anything online anymore, especially the influential ones. This is sad because it used to be the job of journalism to fight against injustice, but nowadays it's more about generating more page views and getting more subscribers, which led to people losing faith in journalism.

lr4444lr 9y ago
It is my understanding of history that most newspapers used to have open political biases; they were even on the take from the party bosses, and it was written into their mission statements. You knew through what lens to filter the content, and they were happy with smaller, more limited readerships. This aim for objectivity in printed reporting was a recent 20th century development.
dominotw 9y ago

wonderous 9y ago

"For the past three years, my assignment has been to try to help this newspaper live up to its own high journalistic standards as it covered a historic presidential election, two wars, the Great Recession, violence in the Middle East and more. I have deplored the overuse of anonymous sources, warned against the creep of opinion into news analysis and worried about the preservation of Times quality on the Internet. But, in truth, I have sometimes felt less like a keeper of the flame and more like an internal affairs cop." - Departing NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt SOURCE: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html?referer= https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html?r...

cylinder 9y ago

>“There is nothing more important to our mission, or our business, than strengthening our connection with our readers,” Sulzberger added. “A relationship that fundamental cannot be outsourced to a single intermediary.” This is a disturbing statement. Shouldn't a serious newspaper's mission be to investigate and report facts without regard to the "connection" it creates or dissolves with the reader? I'm sure Infowars has a deep connection with its readers. This is a profoundly ridiculous statement but I think it represents what the NYT has always been quite accurately.