The New York Times Looks at The Times' Business Coverage

New York Times' ombudsman Arthur Brisbane raises interesting questions about coverage in his columns. One I meant to look at was a recent column, "Financial News for the Rest of Us," in which Brisbane looks at the impact of the growth of resources and digital space allocated to the Times' DealBook section.  Edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin, 10-year-old DealBook, which started out as a newsletter that aggregated breaking mergers-and-aquisitions news, focuses on Wall Street issues, and in print covers part of a page in the daily business section. Online, Dealbook now has a staff of 15, and is able to dig deep in its coverage, so sometimes it's very much inside Wall St. baseball.

Brisbane makes the point that while DealBook serves an important constituent among Times' readers, other urgent business stories may go untold.  While lauding DealBook's coverage of the Google acquisition of Motorola "served a broad readership’s desire to understand what this might mean for Google and its quest to exploit mobile technology," Brisbane wonders, "A week before that, though, when the world economic system shuddered and stock markets dropped, I was left wondering whether The Times should have spent its money not on expanding DealBook but on enlarging its stable of journalists aimed at the wider subjects of international banks and sovereign debt."

Brisbane provides insights into the print business section and the needs of the online reader when he quotes  Larry Ingrassia, the Business Day editor, who said, "that while in print The Times can succeed by broadly addressing 'the five or 10 most important things you need to know,' the Web demands narrower and deeper offerings."

Interesting perspective, especially when combined with a recent David Carr column in the Times: "News Trends Tilt Toward Niche Sites," which makes the point that news giants being outmaneuvered by smaller sites with passionate audiences & sharply focused information.

The Problem with the Comments to New York Times Articles

In "Readers with plenty to say," the New York Times highlights readers' issues with the way the Times opens up (or not) articles for comments, including:

• Too few articles, editorials and Op-Ed articles are open to comments.
  
• Comments are shut off too quickly, especially for West Coast readers.
• Comments are often not published in the order they were submitted.
  

The Times uses staffers to moderate the online comments because unsupervised forums devolved into off-topic and abusive comments.

It's interesting to note that the way comments are handled depend on the section in which the article appears. Bloggers monitor their own comments, with some spending as much as 20 percent of their time monitoring comments.

If you ever considered posting a comment to the Times, check out the article, available here.

Should Publicists Be Reported On in News Stories

A recent exchange in the New York Times touched on the role of publicists in the journalism process, following a New York Times Magazine profile of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. that mentioned his publicist (though not by name) nearly a dozen times in the article.

I can't remember a publicist getting so much mention in any celebrity profile before. The unnamed publicist was part of a key and controlling theme in the profile.

And that sparked the issue: "A strong ethical argument can be made that the reader should be made aware of the circumstances under which an interview was conducted. Isn’t the reader entitled to be aware of these conditions?" asked Larry Bloomstein, a reader from Dix Hills, NY.

The response from the Times was also interesting. According to Philip B. Corbett, standards editor:

"There are no clear-cut rules for when such interactions (by a publicist) should be noted in a story. My rule of thumb would be simple: If the information would significantly inform the reader’s understanding of the story, we should probably include it. The same goes for other details of how an interview takes place.

The Times' Public Editor or ombudsman, Arthuer S. Brisbane went on to suggest that:

"Publicists and other handlers should be more visible to readers, and perhaps not only to enhance readers’ understanding of a story. Some readers want to know when a third party is actively working to obtain or shape coverage for a news subject. Unfortunately, this activity takes place largely out of the view of readers. I believe that news organizations, including The Times, need to be more transparent and let readers see behind the scenes. The penalty for failing to do so is to invite suspicion that coverage can be manipulated."

We live and do business in an age of transparency, but would reporting on how publicists arrange interviews be useful information for readers or would that information serve as a distraction to the larger story?

Check out the entire exchange here.