New York Times Expands Standards Department, Which Will Now Oversee News and Opinion
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The New York Times is substantially expanding its standards department, according to a newsroom memo composed by executive editor Dean Baquet, managing editor Joe Kahn and editorial page editor James Bennet.
As part of the expansion, the department will absorb the paper’s “reader center,” its portal for addressing reader concerns established in 2017 when the Times made the somewhat controversial decision to eliminate its public editor position — a move that drew criticism from those who believed that the paper was shying away from a sense of accountability.
The standards operation will now be a little more outward-facing, including responding to reader comments and working with Times journalists to elucidate their reporting for readers, among other things. “This investment will take a standards operation that is already one of the largest in journalism and roughly triple its size,” the memo said.
Phil Corbett, the paper’s standards editor since 2009, will oversee the department, the purview of which historically has included ethical concerns, style questions and post-publication issues.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the expansion is that Corbett will now also oversee the opinion department as well as the newsroom. He will work to maintain standards around “accuracy, fairness and integrity” in both departments, per the memo. Traditionally, those departments have been strictly siloed off, as they are at most newspapers, though the memo said that this change would help the Times maintain a “strict separation between our news and opinion journalism.”
“As standards editor, I have always consulted informally and offered advice to my Opinion colleagues on issues of standards and ethics; Times opinion journalists follow our Ethical Journalism rules and adhere to the same fundamental standards of accuracy and fairness as the newsroom,” Corbett told Mediaite in an email.
“So this will mostly make official what has already been the practice informally,” he continued. “And hopefully with an expanded team we’ll be able to offer more support than I’ve been able to do in the past, both to the Opinion department and to other expanding operations around the newsroom.”
Because the Times no longer has a public editor, it is hard to know if these changes will result in the production of better, more transparent journalism — and how much it will benefit readers.
“The standards department has been around for a long time and this is a substantial expansion of it,” Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post and a former public editor at the Times, told Mediaite. “It will be interesting to see how much of what they do is public-facing as opposed to strictly internal.”
