12:27 pm Mar. 29, 2011
In his second column for The New York Times Magazine, appearing this week, Bill Keller, the top editor of the Times, ends with an analogy:
Some of our critics insist that objectivity is unattainable—or boring—so why try? To me that is like saying that because much of our children’s future is ordained by genetics, we should abandon the effort to be good parents. Impartial journalism, like child-rearing, is an aspiration, but it is a worthy one.
And unlike your children, a newspaper affords you the chance to start over, and this time get it right.
The column appeared the day before the Times' new metering system went into effect.
Much, probably too much, has been said about the paywall, which will or won't work out, but is almost certainly worth trying (though how much may be another matter). Some of the Times' own contributions to this conversation aren't helping, though.
Bill Keller's first two columns have irritated me, as a Times reader, by breaking two rules: They have sought to explain to me a paper I believed I knew pretty well already, and the explanations don't match my perception; and they sound discordant notes of apology and belligerence that make me feel embattled on behalf of this newly strange institution against a horde I never much cared to bother with before, and somewhat resent being bothered with now. I'd rather not be told what the Times is; I can read it for myself, and I plan to continue doing so every day, quite simply because I can't afford not to. For me that makes it the most important and best newspaper in the world.
But if we take Keller at his word, the metering system installed yesterday, along with various attacks on the paper, provides an opportunity to examine "first principles" about the Times' practice. Here's another first principle: The Times is a trusted brand because of the trust placed in the paper by readers, not, at least not as meaningfully, in the company's corporate leadership by its shareholders. With respect to Keller, who presently holds the position of executive editor, that trust will exist after we're both buried, so the negotiation he is attempting with me, as a reader, in this column, feels a little shallow.
Most of his column is about that trust: about whether the Times is a "liberal" newspaper, and what objectivity means. All this is old news to me.
I already have confidence that the paper will deliver as much of the important news as it can manage, and that it will face down opposition and obstruction, even danger, in pursuit of that news. Bill Keller, the Times shareholders and we, the readers, all agree that the Times needs to stick around, and even grow. And in the course of doing that, given the much-documented difficulty of the newspaper business these days, we all understand that that will necessitate them trying many things, and succeeding at some, but not all of them.
My own trust in the Times is intact and healthy. It's the Times, these days, that seems to have trust issues.
It was after all the Times, as Keller notes in this very column, that got the W.M.D. story wrong in the run-up to the war. There has no doubt been some soul-searching on this score; I think I've read some of it. But it is in the past, until it happens again. That is, there's no starting over; there's only moving on. I have, mostly, on that particular score; I share some people's questions about big media and its levels of exclusive access, and whether that compromises the ability to objectively evaluate inside information against on-the-ground reporting. This is really the problem critics have long had with the notion of objectivity: It often contains, but does not disclose, a subconscious agenda or methodology that is separate from "objectivity."
But I never believed for a moment that the Times pursued a political agenda in the reporting of the W.M.D. stories. New reporters, impressive ones, are with the paper in Washington and Baghdad and, today, throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The Times (and Reuters, to be fair) are running this show. My mind did not turn to the reporting of ex-Timesperson Judith Miller when, on Twitter, I saw the story of the woman who broke into the hotel-bunker where all the reporters are staying in Tripoli, accusing Khadafi security forces of kidnapping, raping and abusing her. I opened up my browser and typed "nytimes.com," and there it was, at the top of the page. I couldn't find a complete account anywhere else, yet. Nic Robertson's reporting on the event was impressive, but just then I chose to visit the Times site instead of subscribe to his tweet stream, as my Twitter contacts were instructing me to do.
A newspaper's daily editions are not properly viewed as and endless series of second chances with belligerent or impossible readers and critics, but as a renewed instant of the responsibility to serve readers better than anyone else.
A favorite theme of those nerds (I count myself among them) who can't stop talking about how the news will make its living in the future involves "putting the genie back in the bottle." With variations, what's usually meant is that when newspapers initially went online, they should have realized that the "content" that was there already—government and legal documents, chatboard discussions, the earliest forms of blogs (original guideposts in the freaky Internet that was full of strange stuff and in which a scarcity, rather than an abundance, of useful material is what made them necessary)—was so materially different from what they produced that they should have created methods to charge people to read their newspapers there. After all, they were charging on the newsstands.
This early accession to the notion of the "free web" has placed a price-point of zero on online news, the argument goes, so now, pushing even modest prices on readers to access your journalism online seems like an offense. What's worse, the early speculation about the value of advertising on the web forced newspapers into a model where what little monetization they could manage for online material is in some ways inimical to charging customers to read. Fewer customers, fewer page views; fewer page views, fewer paying ads.
Getting the balance right is something that had taken years at The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, and which they are still tweaking and talking about. From that point of view, the Times is simply late to the party and has a lot of catching up to do. The genie, some say, won't fit back in; others act as though stuffing it back in is some kind of human-rights abuse.
Things change on the web all the time, and we are constantly asked to modify our behavior. To those who heed the call, the web puts them in a constant conversation with everybody they know, all at once, all the time. Usually but not always these new behaviors are for our benefit; they're always free, at first. But then so is your first dimebag from the new dealer on the block. The addicts always end up paying somebody for something. And I'm a Times addict, and I'll pay, eventually, as long as the Times stays good.
The particular policy the Times is pursuing seems to recognize this. They've received a lot of criticism for all the "cut-outs," the pay exemptions that seem to give advantages to certain kinds of readers. Why is it cheaper to subscribe to the Sunday print edition, with which the full digital package comes free, than it is to the digital package on its own? Isn't that paying less for more? Doesn't charging for more than 20 articles read in a month penalize the Times' most loyal readers and reward the drive-by shooters following Drudge links and either "bouncing" back off the page in two seconds or adding to page time but scrawling a worthless, nasty comment at the bottom?
Why is it that I will never be stopped from reading a page on the Times website that I've reached through a link in my social networks, on Twitter or Facebook? Doesn't that mean I can just "follow" one of those pseudopirates who has written software that tweets out every single article link from a sitewide RSS feed and read the whole paper that way? (The answer to that is: If that's how you enjoy reading a newspaper you probably aren't the customer they're after in the first place.)
