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Committee Recommends Changes at NY Times
Monday May 9, 4:39 pm ET
By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer
Internal Committee Recommends News Changes at New York Times to Build Readers' Confidence


NEW YORK (AP) -- An internal committee at The New York Times is recommending a series of measures to build readers' confidence in the newspaper, including cutting back on using anonymous sources, making the news staff more accessible to readers and drawing a clearer distinction between news and opinion columns.
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The report was compiled by 19 members of the Times' news staff under the direction of Allan Siegal, a longtime editor at the paper who was appointed the Times' first standards editor in 2003 after the scandal surrounding Jayson Blair, a young reporter who was found to have plagiarized or fabricated elements of dozens of stories.

Siegal also chaired an earlier committee that looked into the practices in the Times' newsroom in the months after the Blair fiasco, which led to the resignation of the paper's top two editors.

Bill Keller, who took over as executive editor following the upheaval, said in an interview that Siegal's first report was "in response to a specific wound to our reputation," while the second report, which Keller commissioned last fall, "grew out of a more general anxiety about the credibility of serious journalism."

Keller said that he expected to implement most of the findings in the report, but only after taking a week or two to get feedback from the Times' newsroom staff.

Siegal's committee made a number of specific recommendations, including a regular column to be shared by Keller and the paper's two managing editors to deal "broadly with matters about the newspaper."

Keller said this particular recommendation was not "universally loved" at the paper. But he added: "I accept the basic premise that we should do more talking to our readers and the general public."

Alex Jones, who co-authored a book about the Times and is also the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said he found that the committee's suggestions "make sense."

"The thing about it that I thought was most interesting and surprising is that the Times is acknowledging that they need to respond more to their critics than they have been," Jones said. "I salute them for that."

Among other findings, the committee also suggested that the paper become "yet stricter" about using anonymous sources. "Dan Okrent, the public editor, told the committee that when readers complain to him, anonymous sourcing is the No. 1 killer of our credibility," the committee wrote.

The committee also said the paper must reduce the "garden-variety factual errors that corrode our believability" and "strengthen and better define the boundary between news and opinion," such as establishing a standard look for columns that appear in news pages but that carry "voice and viewpoint."

The report also urged more coverage of religion, following up more often with news sources after a story has run for feedback, and making it easier for readers to send reporters e-mail, but in such a way that would shield them from "spam and harassment."

"The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being," the committee members wrote.

Michael Massing, who wrote a lengthy critique of the coverage by the Times and other papers of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the New York Review of Books last year, said he found the suggestions encouraging.

"If the Times follows through on its expressed intention in this report to become more responsive to the concerns and criticisms of readers, then it will certainly help the Times to become an even better newspaper," Massing said.

Seth Mnookin, who wrote a book about the Blair debacle, called the report "another step" toward making the paper more accountable to its readers, following the appointment of its first public editor and a "more transparent" corrections policy that drew a clearer distinction between major and minor errors.

Link to full text of the report:

http://www.nytco.com/pdf/siegal-report050205.pdf





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