The Shadow Editors: Clark Hoyt's Reign of Error Ends in June

Much went awry in the handling of these two articles: a new freelancer was not properly vetted; e-mail in which she disclosed her personal relationship was overlooked; an editor wanted to accommodate a respected staff member even though she knew his essay was flawed. — New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt.

Tom: Whahuh, Clark Hoyt?
Tom: I don't….
Tom: Ha, wow.
Choire: Shall we turn first to the sad, sad story of the Times copy editor who wrote a Complaint Box column about Jet Blue, an airline that he'd sued after missing a flight because he couldn't find the gate?
Tom: Thirty minutes?
Tom: Dude showed up 30 minutes before a flight?
Tom: It's not about fairness to JetBlue.
Tom: it's about not letting the writer embarrass himself.
Tom: But also it is INSANE to compare that story to Hoyt's other example: a woman pimping her boyfriend's restaurant.
Tom: And then he gets to the recurring Times junket problem.
Tom: He concludes: "The Times is right to stick by the rules."
Tom: Have you read the rules?
Choire: I have read the rules!
Tom: "137. Before being given an assignment, freelance contributors must sign a contract with the Times Company or one of its units. Such a contract obliges them to take care to avoid conflicts of interests or the appearance of conflict. Specifically, in connection with their work for us, freelancers will not accept free transportation, free lodging, gifts, junkets, commissions or assignments from current or potential news sources. Independent broadcast producers, similarly, must comply with our ethical standards during their preparation of any news production that will bear the name of the Times Company or one of its units."
Tom: Taking it from the top: "Before being given an assignment, freelance contributors must…."
Tom: How does that happen? The freelancers sign the Times contract before the Times gives them an assignment?
Tom: Should everybody just sign on in advance, before they pitch the Times?
Choire: Sure!
Choire: WE ALL MUST OBEY BEFORE WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING.
Tom: I believe what they mean to say is "Editors for the Times must obtain a signed story contract from a freelancer before any reporting or writing that may appear in the Times can be done."
Choire: Most likely.
Tom: "Well, the pitch idea sounds intriguing, but are you sure there's enough there for a piece?"
Tom: "Not yet."
Tom: "OK, let me send you a contract, then you fill it out and e-mail it back to us, and once that's all set, please do some more reporting and see if it's a story."
Choire: Heh.
Tom: As a freelancer, I sort of like it! Taken to its logical conclusion, the Times should be paying people to write pitches.
Choire: As if.
Choire: Yes.
Choire: Well.
Choire: Also?
Choire: Did you notice Hoyt mentioned that this particular freelancer sent FIVE PAGES of story ideas to this editor?
Tom: That's pretty great.
Tom: Then comes this: "in connection with their work for us, freelancers will not accept…"
Tom: So why does her previous junket automatically disqualify her in Hoyt's eyes?
Tom: "The paper has strict rules that freelance travel writers cannot have accepted free trips, rooms or meals."
Tom: That's how he puts it, but it's certainly not what that provision says. Now, the next provision says this:
Tom: "138. Assigning editors and producers who deal with nonstaff contributors should be aware that a freelancer's previous involvements and professional behavior can prove an embarrassment. They should make every effort to insure that a freelancer has no history or ties that would raise a real or apparent conflict of interest on a particular assignment."
Tom: But I don't see how that vague language comes out to a retroactive application of the no-junkets-on-Times-assignments rule to every assignment a freelancer took before taking a Times assignment.
Choire: The Travel section does have different rules: "No staff member of our company who prepares a travel article or broadcast – whether on assignment or freelance, and whether for us or for others – may accept free or discounted services or preferential treatment from any element of the travel industry."
Tom: But that doesn't apply to non-staff freelancers.
Choire: Right.
Tom: Just to moonlighters from the rest of the paper.
Choire: Correct.
Tom: I'm just reading the rules that Clark Hoyt linked to, within the sentence where he said that this writer was de facto ineligible to write for the Times.
Tom: And I see nothing in those rules that says freelancers "cannot have accepted" junkets, past tense, which is how Hoyt puts it.
Choire: Righty.
Tom: So let's recap.
Choire: Go for it.
Tom: First of all, Hoyt is equating a staffer who wrote a piece about a personal complaint, clearly identified as such, with a writer who recommended her boyfriend's restaurant in a piece with no disclosure in it.
Tom: Now, the complaint piece was dumb, but it was not the least bit unethical on the writer's side.
Tom: It was unconvincing and it should have been spiked by the editor once it emerged that the guy had inflicted the troubles on himself. And the Times' way of mixing staff contributions with public contributions in that space could be a problem for people who worry about the paper throwing its weight around—but those ethical judgments or misjudgments were made by editors.
Tom: From the writer's point of view, all his cards were on the table for the reader to see.
Choire: Yes.
Tom: In the end, I came away from the piece feeling sorry for JetBlue for having had to deal with such a mad-tempered pest of a passenger.
Tom: But again, that is an editor's failure.
Tom: But Hoyt is more or less calling the guy a crook.
Choire: Allow me to blather on for a bit!
Tom: Yes?
Choire: May we return to Clark Hoyt's November 1 column?
Choire: Then, he wrote: "Now, with an around-the-clock news cycle, reporters file throughout the day, and copy can be edited over a smoother cycle, she said. That is the goal, but the editing staff is dealing with much more copy than before, some online articles are now read by a single editor instead of four or five, and I hear regularly from readers complaining about errors in grammar, spelling and word usage."
Choire: That Hoyt reduces the serious changes in workload and workflow that have been going on at the paper over the last three years to complaints about grammar is absurd, if not wrong. What he addresses in this column today, though he doesn't mention it, are the real effects of what he wrote about on Nov 1.
Tom: Yes. This freelancer shouldn't have written about her boyfriend's restaurant, but she did tell them about it. She just mistook their inability to pay attention for permission to go ahead.
Choire: So, as you say, these instances of editors being too busy, or overworked, or ding-batty, or whatever they were, to pay attention to minor bad-goings-on, and therefore making some dumb mistakes are, at best, just a symptom of what's going on at the Times (which is what's going on everywhere else). This is a newspaper that, as we all know, is losing 100 staffers more right now. That means: more unread emails by editors in the case of the bad-choosing-girlfriend-freelancer, or more bad shoe-horned-in columns by a coworker who can't bother to get to the airport more than 30 minutes before his flight and then actually gets lawyery over it. That Hoyt is unable to make these connections, and that is his job, I think, is terrible.
Choire: And that it's THEN compounded with an untrue statement of the Times' own policies?
Choire: That's just derelict.
Choire: *Gets off soapbox*
Tom: Don't get off your soapbox yet!
Choire: I was just making room for you up here!
Tom: I'm trying to figure out how the Public Editor's weird and confusingly vague sideswipe into the forced-miscarriage story serves the readers of his column.
Tom: It was bound up in the initial discovery of the conflict of interest, sure.
Choire: Well, he has a strange obsession with how things are found out.
Choire: Here's how Clark Hoyt finds things out: he gets letters.
Choire: Meanwhile, NPR gave credit, without necessarily knowing from inside the Times that such credit was deserved, to NYTPicker for bringing up the issue of the Miami freelancer.
Tom: While Hoyt gives no credit to NYTPicker.
Choire: (Which, to NYTPicker's credit, they brought up on November 23.)
Choire: (And the Times editors note was published on Dec 6.)
Choire: Anyway!
Choire: But Hoyt got a letter from a reader in "Miami."
Tom: Hoyt's job here, this late in everything, is to be a quasi-judicial arbiter of the ethics questions.
Choire: Yes.
Tom: And the forcible-miscarriage thing reads as an attempt to disparage the character of the writer by association.
Tom: She didn't just write about her boyfriend, she wrote about her boyfriend the sensational criminal, because she clearly enjoys trafficking in wrong behavior.
Tom: When the sleazy behavior that matters here is the Times' ongoing notion that everyone who writes for it must abide by a monastic code of ethics, even as a greater and greater share of the paper is written by people who do not get to share in the institutional and financial strength on which that code of ethics is based.
Tom: You want ethically impeccable writers? Then don't expect them to have to hustle for a living.
Tom: Don't blame them for getting bought, let alone for the potential appearance of having previously been bought, when you're too cheap to buy them yourself.
Choire: Yes, this poor girl should know better than to date some terrible owner of a burger joint. Also she should know better than to write about him. Stuff happens. Her side of the story? "I told my boss up front!"
Choire: She may not be the sharpest whatever in the whatever? But these things happen, and her defense is reasonable.
Choire: As is her editor's! Whose defense is: I don't have time to read all these fucking emails.
Tom: There's more to it than that, even.
Tom: Here's a piece of reporting the Public Editor could maybe have tried to do: who on the ground in Miami could have done the job without ethical complications?
Tom: They won't pay to send a staff reporter to Miami.
Tom: They want somebody who already lives there and is intimately familiar with the dining scene.
Tom: And they end up with a person who is….intimately familiar.
Choire: Also, there is the issue of Miami.
Tom: Sure.
Choire: For instance, you can have Brett Sokol write about art collectors, as he recently did, from Miami, for the Travel section.
Choire: (DISCLOSURE: YEARS AGO I ONCE HIRED BRETT SOKOL AS A MIAMI-BASED FREELANCER AND I LIKE HIM THOUGH I DO NOT KNOW HIM.)
Choire: And that is well and fine. But you also have to know that he is the arts editor of Ocean Drive magazine.
Choire: Ocean Drive is owned by Niche Media, which owns Gotham, etc. And is what I consider one of the filthiest media outlets in terms of relationships between editorial, social status and the advertising department.
Choire: Does this mean Brett shouldn't write for the Times? No!
Choire: Does it mean it would take a team of editors about three weeks to thoroughly investigate, I guess, every party he's ever attended, every airplane he's been on, and every collector's house at which he's consumed a canape? Sure!
Choire: These towns, and these beats, are small.
Choire: You cannot go to a party in the art world in Miami without running into Rosa de la Cruz.
Choire: Of course, he hasn't slept with the de la Cruz's, THAT I KNOW OF, nor did he break up with them due to dubious tabloid incidents.
Tom: But if you won't send an outsider, you get an insider.

[This is a good place to note, since we dragged Brett in without his consent or knowledge, that he is a CLEAN TEEN, who does not go on junkets, and never accepts comped services of any kind. We used him rather cavalierly as an example of a Miami freelancer—which was not to besmirch him in any way!]

Choire: Also: how would you FIND an outsider to write for you?
Choire: On… TUMBLR?
Tom: Probably yes, actually. But that would be work.
Tom: And they don't have time to do work.
Tom: But it's the sanctimony that gets me.
Tom: Here is what the Times has been doing: it has been adding coverage of lifestyle and travel–the areas where conflicts of interest are easiest to come by–and it has been cutting staff.
Tom: Both in response to economic imperatives.
Tom: We are in tough Times.
Tom: But stop pretending.
Tom: The Times has lowered its standards.
Tom: Lower standards are cheaper than high standards.
Tom: The Times has sacrificed integrity to save money.
Tom: So have lots of publications.
Choire: And also, and not to sound so terribly reactionary, but this is just another instance in which, if I were an editor at the Times, I'd be screaming "DAMN YOU CLARK HOYT" at my walls for the next 24 hours.
Choire: It's not that the ombudsman should be on the "side" of employees of the Times.
Choire: But that he should understand what's happening inside the paper. And this shows, in at least two ways, that he does not.
Choire: AND ANYWAY, PS: WEN HO LEE, THE END.

Previously: Wordplay Most Fouled: How Not To Write A Headline