New York Times
www.nytimes.com Accessed Oct 30 2008
The New York Times' Credibility Committee gave its heads of staff a report about the paper's credibility in 2005. While the original report is not available to the public, Bill Keller responded to that report with a number of proactive measures addressing the Times' credibility and its plans for improving.
The Times
has two assets that distinguish us and give us our
authority in the eyes of discerning readers: We have the best
newsgathering staff in the world, and we have a code of professional
standards — standards of accuracy, impartial judgment, fairness and
accountability — that we take seriously. What the committee has
proposed is a reaffirmation of those high standards, greater
discipline in upholding them, and a redoubled effort to make sure the
public understands how deeply to believe in them. (Keller)
http://nytco.com/pdf/assuring-our-credibility.pdf
With this report's standards in mind, I critique the New York Times' credibility for the reporting day of October 30, 2008.
Extent of Community Involvement:
The New York Times encourages commentary on its political election stories, prominent on the front page. However, on most other stories, user comments are not enabled, and the stories that do invite reader commentary have the option difficult to find, usually in a small box at the top of the story. The first and most prominent story on the front page on October 30, 2008, situated in the top left, “Increasingly, Poll Shows Palin Hurting McCain’s Chances,” has no comments on it, even three hours after its posting. I would expect at least a few comments, based on the proximity of the date to the 2008 presidential election, and the politically educated nature of the Times' reader base.
To the site's credit, however, all of the opinion pieces are able to be commented on, although comments are closed after a certain number of them are submitted. However, with such a huge reader base, it would be a moderating nightmare to keep the comments open for too long. On the Opinion page, it is hard to tell if there are any community bloggers at all, although there is a prominent Letters to the Editor section. The Times does encourage some community involvement by offering the My Times feature, which allows registered users to choose what they want to see on their own My Times page, but this is a computer-to-peer situation, not a way for users to connect and discuss.
Readers have the option of sending in corrections to facts, but the page with the corrections information is hard to find (at the very bottom of the page.) Therefore, I give the New York Times a C for this section. They lack any real effort to encourage reader input on their stories, and those stories that can be commented on are few and far between. To the paper's credit, their reader base is so huge that fielding comments on all stories would be a massive undertaking. Thus, they get an average grade. Grade: C
Format of Stories:
The New York Times appears to feature print journalism, but it does have a section for videos and photos. Many of the breaking news videos are pulled from Reuters, but many more are shot on location by Times reporters, including the NYRegion series. The video page is well designed but slow-loading, and I lost interest after waiting forty five seconds on a T1 connection. The videos covered a broad spectrum of story types, and the videos were interesting and kept me watching. They have a good video editing team, and the videos were put together well.
The Times has an image feature called the Pictures of the Day. It is a slideshow of photos of the biggest and most interesting stories. For example, the lead story will have a photo in the slideshow. If a reader clicks through the show, he/she will get a snapshot view of the largest stories, and this is good for user interactivity, because it allows the reader to get an overall view of what is going on. The Times has many linked photos within its stories, and many slideshows to choose from in different sections.
Because the Times is primarily a newspaper, the videos and photos were not given too much face time, but are available. A more credible image would be to use the photos and videos more often, and for them to have their own sections available at the top menu. The internet allows for more content, and the Times web site should reflect that. Grade: C
Updates:
The New York Times keeps a very full update schedule. Its stories are updated multiple times in a day, and new and breaking stories are posted promptly. Stories that have been updated have a tagline that states what date and time they were modified. The front page stories change a couple times a day, and breaking stories are reported soon after the reporters get information. For the 2008 election, the Times has an entire section devoted to the day, and November 4 has multiple stories and updates for viewing. Grade: A
Editorial System:
The Times has a large and comprehensive editorial system, but this is not immediately available for viewing on the web site. The Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, has a very prominent page, however. According to the Times' credibility plan by Bill Keller, there is an editor who deals with credibility issues alone, who reports to a higher level if he or she feels that a public attack on the Times' credibility should be dealt with by a higher editor.
The plan also outlines good ways to ensure story accuracy and source investigation that all editors and journalists should go through when verifying a story. This hierarchy is not immediately obvious to readers in the finished stories. Reporters cannot be reached directly, but this is more for the security of the reporters since the site is available to such a high number of viewers.
However, it is impossible to tell what level of the editorial system any given writer is on by just a web contact form alone, and a more credible approach would be to list the reporters and writers and editors, even if it is just a text-based list. The stories themselves are well-written and often have multiple authors, which gives evidence that there is a series of double checking going on within a story. Grade: B
Staff blogs are not prominent on the site, and there are only three blogs mentioned on the Opinion/Editorial page, and only two established blogs out of the three entries mentioned. The New York Times has a number of blogs, but the only way I could find to access them were one small link at the top of “The Opinionator” blog. The blogs I read were “A Merely Biracial Breakthrough” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/a-merely-biracial-breakthrough/) and “Political Prime-Time” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/political-prime-time/) by Tobin Harshaw of “The Opinionator”, and “Rotundas, Recruits, and Friday Night Football” (http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/rotundas-recruits-and-friday-night-football/) by Bill Barich. None of the other blogs were considered because I only found them by chance.
Harshaw is a concise writer who uses a lot of block quotes, but he brings up interesting points in his entries, such as his quotes from Harvard professor Charles Ogletree that Obama's biracial status still doesn't signal a recession of race problems. Barich's entry is part of a series done during the election season in the spirit of Steinbeck's “Travels with Charley.” It is a long entry, but it is well written, interesting, and I found myself going back to read his previous entries. These two featured bloggers are great, but I am not impressed by the sheer lack of blog focus. The New York Times has not done a good job of utilizing the value that blogs can lend to a site's credibility. Grade: D
Final Thoughts:
The New York Times has an advantage when it comes to credibility because it is already established as a newspaper, and has been for a very long time. Readers do not have much reason to not trust the paper as a credible news source. However, the organization has not done a good job of utilizing the internet's ability to improve news credibility. The lack of reader commentary, public input, and staff blogging does not speak well for the Times' image. While the stories are well-researched and there are many reporters and much evidence of fact-checking, online credibility is more than just what makes a print newspaper credible. Final Grade: C