In his first column

Saying people use the “blogosphere, the Twitterdome and the like” to criticize the work of grey lady, Brisbane said the paper understands that it needs to be transparent in responding to concerns of “[w]ounded lovers” and “armed antagonists” and that it still has to strive to respond quicker given the efforts people go to when poring over the paper and website for mistakes or problems.  Oh, and he voted for Barack Obama and Scott Brown.

Bloggers, tweeters, aggregators and competing Web sites pore over Times content every day, hunting for food, hunting for fodder. In military terms, you could call it asymmetric warfare — a lightly armed foe waging war against a much larger and less agile one.

The metaphor of war, though, is incomplete because this is not just about the committed antagonists of The Times. It’s also about the loyalists. When they find errors or other shortcomings, they expect their beloved to own up.

Brisbane was named in June to be the new public editor, replacing Clark Hoyt. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, the editor and publisher of The Kansas City Star and a senior executive at Knight Ridder. In his first column, he says he took the job because “the next few years will be an inflection point for The Times. Newspaper-based organizations — ones like The Times that have created Web operations and other news products — will either weather the storm of transformation or tip into the deep. It will be a fateful time.”

In stating his values, he said that “news organization needs to be aggressive” and that caution can be a dangerous when it overshadows ambition. He said that he “believe[s] there is no conspiracy. Neither Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. nor Bill Keller is the Wizard of Oz, dictating an agenda from behind a screen. Rather, The Times comes together like parallel computing: many lines simultaneously flowing through a filter, hitting the driveway and flashing on a screen. It is very messy.”

Brisbane is right that everyone is a critic of the the paper and is looking for things to question . . . and sometimes praise.  The paper is trying to figure out how to embrace the future–whether it is its iPad application or its new paywall–and the paper is still considered to have a liberal bias, except from liberals who believe it cowtows to big business and neoconservatives.

He’s going to have a very busy tenure.

Times Ombudsman Clark Hoyt took the paper to task on both accounts this weekend. And voila! Today there appears this correction:

Several articles since September about the troubles of the community organizing group Acorn referred incorrectly or imprecisely to one aspect of videotaped encounters between Acorn workers and two conservative activists that contributed to the group’s problems.

In the encounters, the activists posed as a prostitute and a pimp and discussed prostitution with the workers. But while footage shot away from the offices shows one activist, James O’Keefe, in a flamboyant pimp costume, there is no indication that he was wearing the costume while talking to the Acorn workers.

The errors occurred in articles on Sept. 16 and Sept. 19, 2009, and on Jan. 31 of this year. Because of an editing error, the mistake was repeated in an article in some copies on Saturday.

The correction may be a case of too little, too late considering ACORN was officially shuttered yesterday. That said, I suspect, whether they admit it or not, the Times will be taking Breitbart a tad more seriously from here on out.

Related: Big Win For ‘Big Government’: ACORN Officially Calls It Quits

Get this from Hoyt:

In January, Dealbreaker, a competing Web site, scored a scoop by posting an internal Citigroup memo about a rumored joint venture. The same memo soon went up on DealBook, complete with two minor alterations that Dealbreaker had inserted as a trap to catch competitors ripping off material without credit. Dealbreaker’s editor, Bess Levin, posted a gotcha. I called and asked her what happened next. She said got a call from Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of DealBook, who explained that Kouwe had verified the memo with Citigroup and was going to get his own copy. Rather than wait, Kouwe grabbed it from her site, she said Sorkin told her. Sorkin immediately ordered an editors’ note inserted in the DealBook item that gave credit and explained what happened.

Sorkin said Kouwe had told him “it was an honest mistake. I told him that it was unacceptable, but I had no reason to believe it represented a larger problem.”

You know what would have solved that problem? A link to begin with. (Also, spell check…Levin is not the first to come up with that plan.) The New York Times is no longer operating in an ivory tower free from all obligation to acknowledge the workings of the blogosphere, something they might do well to remember especially in cases like this one gets the sense there may be as much ego involved as sloppy reporting. Linking should not be considered a sign of laziness, but smart blogging. And to be fair, many of the blogs on the NYT.com are much freer about attributing…something that clearly works to the benefit of both parties. Especially when reporters are required to work at the frantic pace of the blogosphere, as is the case at DealBook where Kouwe was stationed.

Meanwhile, Felix Salmon thinks the problem is the NYT putting people with no blog experience in the blogosphere.

Big mainstream-media publications, when they hire people to write their blogs, generally hire people with no blogging experience at all — something which is both ill-conceived and dangerous. Some journalists make good bloggers; most don’t. So rather than gamble that you’ve found one of the rare exceptions, why not make prior blogging experience a prerequisite for such positions?

The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course.

Fair enough. Though I suspect it’s probably a combination of the two. As I said, linking is not brain surgery.

Related: NYT Business Reporter Resigns Over Charges Of Plagiarism [Mediaite]

Regardless the fact of the matter is that if the existence of the stories hadn’t been scooped by all forms of new media a few weeks ago, they certainly would have been considered bombshell-esque by many. Just the mere fact the Times has run two huge, not flattering, A-1 stories on Paterson in and of itself is newsworthy and probably does not bode well for Paterson’s political future.

So what does this one say. Well it’s not scandalous, but it’s not great. Paterson is remote, unreliable, and is “increasingly reliant on people whom he feels comfortable with but who lack deep experience in government” also he may not actually work that hard.

A review of several months of Mr. Paterson’s private schedules shows that his days were not long; he often arrived at his office in Manhattan or Albany after 10 a.m. and departed by 4:30 or 5 p.m. Sometimes, he has failed to show up at long-scheduled events.

Last May, Mr. Paterson was lined up to speak in Manhattan at the evening graduation ceremony for Teachers College, Columbia University. It was kind of a makeup: he had agreed in 2008 to be the speaker at the same ceremony but canceled at the last minute because he needed emergency eye surgery.

University officials were surprised last year when Mr. Paterson canceled again, with just two hours’ notice.

“The second time, it was going to be kind of like closure,” said Joe Levine, a spokesman for the college. “I don’t really know why he didn’t come.”

He had to cancel, the governor said, because of an emergency terrorism briefing. The Times requested the names of others who attended the briefing, or other evidence that the briefing had occurred, but Mr. Paterson’s office declined to provide any.

Also, apparently not even Paterson’s friends want to go on the record supporting him.

As The Times prepared this article, Mr. Paterson and his staff encouraged reporters to interview a number of the governor’s supporters to speak about his record. One declined to comment. Two others did not return phone calls requesting an interview. One supporter who did agree to speak for the record was Robert G. Wilmers, a Buffalo banking executive and former appointee of Mr. Paterson as chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation.

It’s not a flattering piece. It may not be a bombshell as we have come to understand it in relation to Albany but between this and Wednesday’s piece there is there is a sort of relentless wearing down effect that may in the end do more damage. Read the full article here.

In today’s Times public editor Clark Hoyt confirms that the upcoming profile (no date given) “would not contain anything like the salacious rumors being circulated but demurred on the issue of doing anything to stop them.” Great for Paterson. Sort of. But what about those pesky rumors? How did a perfectly reasonable “in-depth examination of his nearly two-year tenure” turn into this? The short answer appears to be: welcome to the Internet long-form journalism! From Hoyt:

The rumors about Paterson, who acknowledged past affairs shortly after taking office, were fanned by technology that allows everyone to be a publisher, spawning news and commentary sites with widely varying standards and such a hunger for material that just the fact that The Times is interviewing sources can become “news.” [John] Koblin, the apparent catalyst, wrote like an astonished bystander last week about what he called the “fake-news cycle.”

I asked [Bill] Keller why he did not [publicly address the rumors]. He said that addressing rumors just “spreads them and gives them an aura of credibility, even if the intent is the opposite. For The Times to issue a statement saying, ‘We are not investigating rumors about the sex life or drug use or financial shenanigans of Public Figure X’ doesn’t clear the good name of Public Figure X. It simply announces that we’ve heard the rumors and for some reason chose not to look into them.” It would be even worse, he said, if the paper said it was looking into rumors about Public Figure X. Keller added that the paper generally does not talk about what it is working on because news is a competitive business.

He said Paterson’s adversaries “are doing their best to flush out any negative material we might be looking into, and, in the absence of that, they are letting innuendo do their dirty work for them. The governor and his supporters are trying to neutralize any negative material that may come out by portraying it in advance as an unsavory muckraking exercise. Gawker and the Drudge Report and The New York Post are wallowing in all of this because that’s what they do.”

“Wallowing” is a strange word to use to describe Gawker, who, it seems to me advanced a MSM story with sharp 2.0 means — it makes me wonder if Keller reads Gawker, actually. The New York Post, meanwhile, just did what the Post always does. Regardless, there is something rather comforting about the fact that the Times didn’t succumb to the 2.0 newscycle in this instance — they are not a PR company. That said, anyone still skeptical about the power of Twitter to circulate information, news, and/or rumors (ahem, BriWi) need look no further for an example of where the new new journalism is heading.

Hoyt seems to sway back and forth in his column, citing respected experts on each side, all who note that Bronner is indeed a great reporter and could likely continue to do his job fairly. “But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality,” Hoyt writes. “I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.”

Times editors have a different take: “He’s a 20-year-old who makes his own decisions,” they said of Bronner’s son, while “Bronner said he had alerted his editors, as the paper’s ethics guidelines require.” As noted by NYT Picker, the guidelines are vague, leaving much room for interpretation about the allegiances of family members and the objectivity of reporters.

“Bronner occupies one of journalism’s hottest seats, covering the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians,” Hoyt explains. “As the top correspondent for America’s most influential newspaper, everything he writes is examined microscopically for signs of bias.” But Keller insists: “We have the utmost confidence that his work will continue to meet the highest standards.” Even if Bronner’s son were a foot soldier, Keller would remain in support of Bronner, stating, “I don’t think I’d have any problem with Ethan covering the conflict.”

In response to Hoyt’s ultimate prescription, Keller writes to Hoyt, “You seem to think that you (and Alex Jones) can tell the difference between reality and appearances, but our readers can’t. I disagree.” He provides a spirited defense of Bronner keeping his job.

In all, the situation is one of the most difficult ethical quandaries a newspaper can imagine, especially considering the brightness of the spotlight on this particular stage. Both Hoyt and Keller provide carefully reasoned positions and both of their columns are worth reading as a transparent window into the Times, where editors both discuss and disagree.

Too Close to Home [New York Times]
Bill Keller Takes Exception to “Too Close to Home” [New York Times]

Hoyt acknowledges the book’s newsworthiness, first by referencing Senator Harry Reid‘s apology for his racial remarks, but wonders how to represent these anecdotes from a book “written in an omniscient, novelistic voice, purporting at times to be inside the heads of players and recreating scenes and dialogue that the authors could not have witnessed.”

If you repeat some of the more salacious parts, like the supposed details of a fight between John and Elizabeth Edwards in an airport parking lot, are you just letting through the backdoor what you would never allow through the front? If you don’t, are you just burying your head in the sand while readers get the juicy stuff elsewhere?

After detailing John Heilemann and Mark Halperin‘s sourcing issues, Hoyt admits that the Times has “treated Game Change as news, but carefully,” pointing to the paper’s two reviews, multiple essays and reports. “None of the articles repeated the most titillating material,” he writes. In this instance, the Times seems adamant about maintaining its buttoned-up integrity, even though it may be sacrificing readers and page views, as well as appearing ethically conservative in an increasingly loose era of reporting on gossip.

Hoyt’s column also addresses Game Change‘s shots at the Times itself, refuting the book’s claim that op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd gave veto power on an explosive column to record mogul and big-time political donor David Geffen during the 2008 campaign.

It’s just Washington culture, everyone says of the book, and the Times is not immune to the dangers of anonymous sources. But interestingly, it’s not until his second-to-last sentence that Hoyt alludes to the paper’s own struggles with sourcing, writing that the paper “sometimes [gives] in to it more than I think they should.” That is, after all, part of the reason Hoyt has a job at all.

Secondhand Sources [New York Times]

The column’s title says it all really: “Times Standards, Staffers or Not.” In short, the paper will enforce the same rules on freelancers as it does on better paid staff members, despite the fact that the ethical guidelines are often antithetical to the unstable life of a freelance writer and may complicate one’s ability to do work elsewhere.

Whether it’s free travel or all-expense-paid press junkets, writers just scraping by are prone to accept any favors that will make their job or financial life easier, but that just will not work according to Hoyt:

These cases illustrate how hard it is for The Times to ensure that freelancers, who contribute a substantial portion of the paper’s content, abide by ethics guidelines that editors believe are self-evident and essential to the paper’s credibility but that writers sometimes don’t think about, or don’t think apply to their circumstances, or believe are unfair or unrealistic. Some writers do not read the guidelines carefully, and although they are encouraged to raise possible conflicts of interest with an editor, some don’t tell and are not asked.

The story of recently fired Times freelancer Joshua Robinson, just two years out of college, illustrates the conundrum perfectly. Robinson was fired for using his affiliation at the paper to score free airline tickets that he needed for an independent project. According to Hoyt, “He said he called himself ‘a reporter for The New York Times’ — which he is not — only to establish his ‘street cred’ with those he was soliciting, and not to imply he was on the newspaper staff.”

In other words: because the struggling paper relies so heavily on freelancers (meaning no salary or benefits for many Times contributors), they are required to do additional work elsewhere, even though it may affect their employment with the Times. But if you count the number of contributors who have run into similar ethical issues lately (Mike Albo comes to mind), then maybe the writers have weighed their options and trying to get away with something is worth it in an “every man for himself” world. Maybe it’s the paper being unrealistic and unfair.

“The paper wants to treat freelancers like staffers without the same pay or benefits, and without paying for their research,” one former columnist said. Times editors contend that “the most important consideration is that everything in the newspaper, no matter who produces it, must be free of even the smallest hint of undue influence,” while Hoyt suggests that writers keep slipping up because of the complicated guidelines.

But it seems pretty simple: pay them or let them fly.

Times Standards, Staffers or Not [New York Times]

But this weekend, Times watchdog blog NYTPicker caught another writer in an ethical pickle, as Harvard Business School professor and freelancer Prof. Mary Tripsas wrote a Sunday column about business management in which she praised the company 3M. Only 3M had recently arranged for researchers to come to headquarters “for a day-long briefing on the center, their travel and accommodations provided by the company.”

Via NYTPicker:

Most of her column focuses on 3M, which she describes as at the “forefront of a movement” that involves customers in the innovation process. After several paragraphs of worshipful description of the place and interviews with the executive in charge, Prof. Tripsas concludes: “[The center] has helped 3M to establish productive, long-term customer relationships.”

The blog has more on the specifics of Trispsas’ situation (Mediaite has contacted her for comment, as well), but this new instance of ethics violations calls into question a few larger issues:

By now, the Times must realize they have a real thorn in their sides due to NYTPicker’s existence. Even though it’s a small-time, insidery blog, they have proven that they will notice when the paper slips up, and at least a few people who care are paying attention. And yet direct violation of the rules is still occurring, which brings us to the writers and editors.

Are they being made aware of these rules? Are they choosing to ignore them? Do they know that NYTPicker has an eye on them? Whatever the case, they’re probably going to be “caught,” and likely fired (unless you’re David Pogue), so they need to adjust accordingly.

But more generally, maybe it’s time for the Times to rethink their stringent, intensely black-and-white policies. Freelancers are struggling and need to take their breaks where they can. Plus, the paper has cut many jobs, including many editors, making these things hard to catch. That’s not to say there should be a free-for-all of favors and freebies, but maybe these things can be judged on a case by case basis. Throw in a little bit of disclosure and you’ve got far less of a headache.

“These two items on successive Sundays late last month showed what can go wrong when journalists get too personal,” Hoyt wrote.

DeLaFuente used the Complain Box column — a space to write about “broader irritations of life, like loud music on the subway” — to kvetch specifically about a customer service incident, abusing his power along the way. One editor said the column “was like writing on New York Times stationery and then sending it out to a million and a quarter people.” Hoyt said, “The Times does not need the appearance that its journalists are using Complaint Box to air self-serving gripes.”

Buckley’s case, meanwhile, was a bit more controversial, and her ethical blunder a bit more egregious:

A Miami reader called attention to Buckley’s relationship with Joshua Woodward, the co-owner of the 8 oz. Burger Bar. It had been publicized earlier after Woodward was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of causing the miscarriage of a child believed to be his by another woman.

Mediaite first noticed the Buckley fiasco via NYTPicker, though Hoyt notes that Buckley was ineligable to write for the Times at all, because she has gone on free press junkets as a travel reporter.

Plus, the Times ethics manual is pretty clear on the matter of shilling for loved ones:

No journalist may report for us about any travel service or product offered by a family member or close friend.

No gray area there, Gray Lady. Hoyt closed his column thusly:

In the end, there is a bright line here. Journalists cannot use the power of The Times, or any newspaper, for what can be construed as personal purposes. It is simply wrong to look as if you are getting even with a company, or writing a plug for family or friends.

Public editor, out.

Earlier last month managing editor Bill Keller in one of his “chats” revealed that the Times may be considering cutting some of its web content as a cost-cutting measure. Before panic ensures, however, what I noted at the time still holds: the NYT.com has surplus of blogs — whereas many papers avoided dipping too far into the deep scary ocean of the Internet, the Times jumped in the deep end.

According to the Observer, those cuts are likely to come before the end of the year (though really, how frequently have we heard that). So what will be cut? Probably a bunch of stuff you have never heard of (I’m not even sure the NYT could name half the blogs it’s launched). What won’t be cut are the blogs people have come to depend on — if you can name it, it’s probably sticking around: The Caucus, Media Decoder, Deal Book, The Lede etc. Fear not, this is going to be a (very necessary) pruning, not some kind of massacre.

The case is point is this month’s re-election of Michael Bloomberg, who skated through to victory with a surprisingly narrow margin over an opponent most people knew very little about. The results were so close (and surprising) that both the NYT and MSNBC called the results early and then had to recall them. Now readers are beating down Times‘ public editor Clark Hoyt’s door wanting to know how come the results were such a surprise, where was the reporting!? One of the answers appears to be the sort of amazing disclosure that Times couldn’t afford to do their own polling. From the article:

The paper did not do its own polling in the fall. Janet Elder, the editor in charge of polling, said it was a budget-driven decision that still upsets her. In The Times’s only poll, in June, a majority of those responding said they wanted someone else as mayor, even though Bloomberg faced no formal challenger at that point and there was broad approval of his performance in office.

In the absence of its own later poll, The Times was left with those of others, which it treated quite differently on its Web site and in the printed newspaper. On the City Room blog, the paper reported extensively on surveys by two respected organizations, the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, whose director, Maurice Carroll, a former Times reporter, said in late October, “It looks like a Bloomberg blowout.”

In their press releases, Marist and Quinnipiac emphasized the gap between the candidates, which was as high as 18 points in Quinnipiac’s polls. That gap got headlines on the Times Web site. The printed paper did not carry full articles on the polls and did not name them, referring only to Bloomberg’s lead or Thompson’s poor showing in “polls.” Had The Times put less emphasis on the spread and more on the fact that Bloomberg was stuck at roughly 50 percent, readers would have been better served.

Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute, said he tried to warn reporters at a news conference — which The Times didn’t attend — that the race would be closer. Carroll pointed to a caution in his “blowout” press release that said such races tend to tighten.

So a couple of conclusions here: One, the NYT is far more willing to give important print space to their own internal polls, which in this case they couldn’t afford, meaning details of the polling were perhaps less than ideally covered in print. Two, based on the results, readers apparently still place more trust in the printed version of the news than they do in the online version, even if the online version is the better reported of the two. Also, the NYT is apparently as susceptible to eye-catching headlines as the rest of us.

Would Bloomberg have lost had the NYT done more rigorous vetting of the results? Perhaps. Of course, perhaps the city would have instead paid slightly more attention to his opponent Bill Thompson and concluded better the (experienced) devil you know. Either way, the results of diminished newsrooms are good for no one except those benefit from a softer spotlight.

The Times has already made the easier decisions — reducing the support staff, cutting freelance budgets, capping expense-account meals, seeking bargain airfares and hotels, rotating foreign correspondents every five years instead of four, and housing some bureaus in correspondents’ homes rather than downtown offices. The nice car and driver for the London bureau chief? History.

Wow. Even though many of these reduced accouterments would be considered a luxury by most bloggers, there’s still something a little sad about the fact the Internet has drained any last shred of glamor out of the reporters life. Perhaps the Times should consider draining some of its online excess in order to prop up the more important part of its print. Executive editor Bill Keller says “they will look at the 70 blogs on the paper’s Web site to see if any are not justifying themselves.”

I can tell you without even going through the whole list that some of those 70 blogs are definitely not justifying themselves. The best example of a NYT.com blog are the Caucus, or the Lede, or Media Decoder, which allow the paper’s reporters to post shorter items and keep up with the online news pace. The rest could arguably be folded into the paper itself. The NYT is to be commended for both jumping into the Internet world with such fearlessness, but now that push is really coming to shove, it is perhaps time for the Times to cease launching a blog for every subject that grabs its attention. The distance between the online world and the print world is narrowing at a terrific pace, something the Times has played a large role in. The next logical step is to streamline to two entities, folding in best bits of both, and leaving the excess behind.

(h/t Peter Feld)

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Apparently part of the problem is that Times editors do not watch enough Fox. Or any Fox as the case may be. Says Jill Abramson there was an “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.”

Some editors told me [Hoyt] they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com. When the Senate voted to cut off all federal funds to Acorn, there was not a word in the newspaper or on its Web site. When the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still nothing.

Which is a major problem. You may not like Glenn Beck, you may think he is a nut job. You may think what he does is not journalism, you may think that in a perfect world of objective, reasoned, researched news reporting he should not have a place. But you ignore him at your own peril. Actually, there is the argument to be made that the Times ignores him at everyone’s peril — it is their job, after all, to watch and report on things the rest of us may not have the stomach for or any interest in. They are supposed to be watching Fox News so that other people don’t have to, not the other way around.

According to Hoyt the Times has recognized this and assigned an editor to watch Fox(!) along with a bunch of other sites they don’t normally like to sully themselves with “to brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.” Ha! They should just read Mediaite more. Alas, managing editor Bill Keller “declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.” Good luck with that.

Granted, Dowd puts her name on everything she writes. But the whole ‘cowardly not constructive thing’ — not so much.

• Just last weekend MauDo went after Anna Wintour. Alright, maybe she was more interested in celebrating the “sacred monster,” but some of her jabs cut pretty deep: “Behind those bangs and dark glasses, is Anna human? Or did she tie Hermès scarves together and make a daring escape from District 9 in a getaway car driven by Oscar de la Renta?” Ouch.

• Dowd is a big fan of pet names (usually objectionable ones). Hence headlines like “Will Hillzilla Crush Obambi?”

• John Edwards got his share of smack from Dowd after his $400 haircut in a column called “Running with Scissors.” We haven’t reached the point,” she writes, “where we can handle a green-tea-soy-latte-drinking, self-tanning-sea-salt-mango-body-wrapping, Norah-Jones-listening, yoga-toning chief executive.”

• NYT public editor Clark Hoyt included Dowd’s attacks on politicians in a column called “Pantsuits and the Presidency,” responding to readers’ complaints about the Times‘ slanted political coverage. A thick slice of those comments revolved around mean Maureen Dowd was:

But Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband … She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

Photo: Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press via Salon.

Lizzi Miller

Trebay is not alone, however. Glamour‘s September issue won the applause and acclaim of its readers (and even the women’s blog Jezebel) for a stunningly unabashed but not self-congratulatory photograph of model Lizzi Miller, who flaunts a supple roll of fat and a positively beaming smile. “It’s a sign of the time that women are looking for more authenticity, a little bit less artifice in every part of their lives,” said Glamour EIC Cindi Leive to Matt Lauer on Today this week. “Will it change our approach? I think it will.” There you have it: Look for more ‘plus-sized’ models in your copy of Glamour soon.

And then there’s Cintra Wilson, one of Trebay’s colleagues in the NYT Style section. Wilson penned a “Critical Shopper” column earlier this summer that offended readers across the country — overweight readers in particular (if you missed that bit of above-the-fold news, catch up here). That was nearly two weeks ago, but the Times, among others, is still chattering about it (read: getting traffic from it).

Clark Hoyt, the Times‘ public editor, said in his column this weekend that Wilson wrote her mockingly disdainful piece about the arrival of a J.C. Penney’s in downtown Manhattan with “virtual sneer seeming to drip from her keyboard.” Hoyt also relayed the thoughts from his colleagues: Fashion editor Anita Leclerc classified Wilson’s writing style as “stream of consciousness … full of barbs.” Executive editor Bill Keller said the column “would make a fine exhibit for someone making the case that The Times has an arrogant streak.” In his mind it should have never been published. Hoyt even reported that Wilson said her work was “provincial” and that it was “dumb on [her] part not to see this coming.”

Ralph Kramden.

If Glamour learned the lesson that readers will respond positively in spades when they see realistically shaped people validated in print, then the Times has learned quite the same lesson but in the opposite way: Average readers will loudly disapprove when they find the stores that average income, average-sized people shop at lambasted in their newspaper. Along with toned bellies, pretension is very out (Anna Wintour went on David Letterman, for God’s sake).

But what has happened to the fantasy of print? The glamour of Glamour? The elitism and perfection of Vogue? The brave provocation of the Times?

Lewis Grossberger chimed in yesterday on his True/Slant blog to put a an end to the Gray Lady’s pity party, calling Keller a “Louis XVI wannabe” and Clark’s column a “hit job on the witty and readable Wilson.” Why such harsh words? Because, he says, Wilson’s only sin is writing well and being funny — and “Damn few people can do funny!” Instead Wilson has been made to apologize for her craft and a column that Wilson’s fans probably enjoyed.

But Grossberger is excessively harsh on the Times. His writing feels vindictive — when has the Times ever been about flash and pop?

Let me now make this diatribe even more apocalyptic: You, Clark Hoyt and the cluck-clucking, brain-dead editors (starting with the Times’ Louis XVI wannabe, Bill Keller) who agreed with your Babbitt-like op-ed-page hit job on the witty and readable Wilson, are one of the reasons why the Times is having that little problem we all keep hearing about…you know, the sliding-into-oblivion thing?

Because it’s boring. Always has been but now, because there’s actual competition, people notice. And here you are, Clark, proclaiming, “Let’s make it still more boring!”

This might just be the absolute worst time in the history of newspapers to come out for boring.

That’s a stretch, and the nuance of Grossberger’s point is lost in his anger. The Times is not becoming more boring, it’s just going about the business of trying to save face and keep readers happy (ever-important in this climate, right?). Hoyt’s column, after all, was more symbolic than anything else. I don’t see Wilson losing her job or trying to flatten her ‘barbs’ any time soon, otherwise she wouldn’t be the writer she was hired to be. Grossberger hits that nail on the head.

This summer’s newfound media sensitivity to overweight readers probably, like everything else these days, has something to do with the economy. Simple-minded though it may be, attitudes about weight have to shift in lean times. I’m reminded of an article from 2001 about beauty queens in Niger who eat animal feed to plump up for their pageants. But that’s a bit much — America’s fantasy body image isn’t going away any time soon, though we certainly eat less healthy food when money is tight.

The economy — insofar as it has forced magazines and other mainstream print outlets to march down a rocky road, splattered with the red ink of hemorrhaging ad pages — has definitely played a role in pushing the fat question. Rather: the question of how we should talk about and handle fatness in the media. Magazines somehow have to remain a luxury good that fewer people will pay more for (or something like that), while not seeming so detached and frivolous that nobody can stand to pick one up.

Meanwhile, the Internet is constantly reminding everybody in the media business that being opinionated and even offensive is a great way to make cash, get buzz and attract eyeballs online; even if a select slice of readers walk away with a bad taste in their mouths, click numbers are still up and ads are still more valuable. This commerce is trickier for established newspapers like the Times, hence the apology. Even so, think about how many clicks Wilson’s column generated (including the traffic generated by Hoyt’s column) and then consider how many readers the Times lost because of the incident. How many people really canceled their subscription or are boycotting NYTimes.com because of a trivial Style column?

For now everyone has had their cake. Overweight readers have made their voices heard (or at least acknowledged) by editors at a popular and widely read Condé Nast title and the New York Times. But will this just be a recession-era summer love affair with the fat? Will more plus-sized women really make it into the pages of Glamour? Will the Times really be more mindful of offensive ‘barbs’ that might catch the sides of fat readers? And will all the Ralph Kramdens of the world wilt once stock indexes boom again?

Frankly, we have hope the answer to all of those questions is no. Otherwise the things we read will only become more vanilla. And as any fat kid could tell you, vanilla tastes best with the toppings piled on high. Nuts are our favorite.

The exchange reads thusly:

Q. Specifically, some people inside the paper believe that Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic, without sufficient punishment, because she is close with Jill Abramson. Your response?

A: We love a conspiracy theory, but the truth is simple: Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic because she is — in my opinion, among others — a brilliant critic.

As for the perception that some New York Times stars (ahem, Maureen Dowd) get special treatment, Keller had this to say (hint: he blames it on the editors!):

If any editor finds a factual error in any piece by any writer at this paper and fails to point it out because the writer might yell or because the writer is thought to be a favorite, then that editor is failing to do his or her job. Stars or purported stars are obliged to get their facts right. Editors are obliged to edit everyone without fear or favor. Period.

The Times published an especially embarrassing correction on July 22, fixing seven errors in a single article — an appraisal of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman famed for his meticulous reporting. The newspaper had wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite.

How did this happen? Hoyt responds, and his “short answer” implicates just about everyone.

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Ouch. Interestingly, Hoyts seems to suggest that Stanley’s “hastily” written piece may have suffered from having too long a deadline, as opposed to too short a one. The article, it turns out, was penned on June 19, almost a full month ahead of Cronkite’s death on July 17.

On June 19, Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to be published after his death.

Stanley said she was writing another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking it later. She never did.

And neither did any of the numerous editors who looked at it it would seem! Also interesting to note is that Hoyt refers to Stanley as a “much-admired” writer. Of course one assumes she must be admired if the Times insists on keeping her on despite her record of errors — errors, which Hoyt says “undermine the authority of a newspaper.” It’s a record that the Times appears to have chosen to ignore in the past: in March of 2008 in a ‘Talk to the Newsroom’ feature, TV editor Stephen Reddicliffe did not address one question regarding Stanley’s history of errors. That said, not only are they keeping her on, they are (arguably) rewarding her by reinstating her personal copy editor whose sole responsibility will be to fact and copy check all of her articles (a reader points out the copy editor will likely have other responsibilities in addition to editing Stanley). Embarrassing yes, but also wow, what a luxury!

Worth a read, too, is Hoyt’s play-by-play of how the article made it to publication: he notes that it passed through the hands of five editors and demonstrates how each one dropped the ball in some way. This process could not be more at odds with the blogosphere where there is often little or no editorial filter; instead items are quickly corrected as their errors are (often quickly and ruthlessly!) brought to light by the reader. In this particular case the Times looks to have suffered from too many cooks in the kitchen. Something they are apparently aiming to address by adding another editor to the obituary department. Perhaps they should just wikipedia out their entire obituary department and be done with it.

You may recall how in May, MoDo made headlines when she “accidentally” included a paragraph by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall into her column. MoDo later clarified that a friend had suggested “I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way.” This is how the column was appended:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Cut to this morning when the ever-vigilant folks at NYTPicker caught a lengthy editor’s note regarding a Times Magazine piece, which puts “freelance writer Charles Siebert out to dry for appropriating a handful of descriptive words from a source’s email in his 7,498-word account of the way whales may be communicating with humans. Sunday Magazine cover story on whales.”

The cover article of The Times Magazine on Sunday reported on whales and the possibility of interspecies communication between them and humans. The final two paragraphs of the article described an occasion in 2005 when a humpback whale became entangled in crab-trap ropes and was freed by a rescue team. Some of the language in the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam “in joyous circles” after it was freed and “nudged” the divers gently, “as if in thanks”; that the divers thought it was “the most beautiful experience they ever had”; and that one diver said he would “never be the same” appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to The Times’s writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting. In seeking to confirm the accuracy of the article, Mr. Siebert read several accounts of the episode, including one published by The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2005 on which he based his retelling.

Mr. Siebert said that he unwittingly incorporated some of the phrasing from the e-mail message that he had been sent earlier. The Times does not allow writers to replicate language without attribution, and had the editors known of these repetitions, they would not have published the passage in that form.

Sensing a difference in the tone and amount of attention paid to these “unwitting incorporations” and failures to attribute? The more important question, of course, and the one the Times really needs to address is where the difference in these offenses lies. Calling Clark Hoyt! Gawker says they have contacted the Times regarding just this disparity, but has yet to hear back. Interestingly Gawker also seems to be taking the side of Siebert in this instance. This from John Cook:

We can understand how Siebert could either cut and paste something into his story with the intention of chopping it up into quotes and later forgetting to attribute it, or write something that he thought was his own synthesis of various sources but actually included phraseology bouncing around in his head that he didn’t know at the time was a direct quote from one of those sources.

It’s less understandable, perhaps, in a bi-weekly 750 word column.