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Credibility
"An internal committee at The New York Times has made specific recommendations to improve the paper's credibility with readers." (Subscription required.) Talk about transparency. Not many organizations are willing to publish or highlight their perceived weaknesses. What do you think of this list? Are they on target?
Comments
The NY Post and Washington Times and WSJournal are much more professional than the NYT.
Posted by Sean at May 10, 2005 1:49 PM
Credibility with readers, as defined by any internal NYTimes team? Ever think that the readers may have an opinion on that credibility?
BTW, subscription required to read a general notice to potential readers is a nice entry barrier. Only if you give us personal information will we inform you on how we will be credible?
Incredible!!
Posted by aen at May 10, 2005 2:51 PM
Clarification regarding the subscription requirement: articles from the NYTimes online are accessible to anyone for the first 7 days, after that a subscription is required, or you pay for archived articles. The reason I mentioned that a subscription is required is that these posts go into our archives, and I wanted to be sure that anyone reading this post after the 7th day would be alerted. Perhaps I should've used different wording. The NYTimes actually has a more generous subscription policy than say, the WSJ online.
Posted by Shelley at May 10, 2005 3:00 PM
What's sad is it took a committee to come up with these suggestions:
4. Consider creating a Times blog that promotes interaction with readers.
5. Further curtail the use of anonymous sources.
6. Encourage reporters to confirm the accuracy of articles with sources before publication and to solicit feedback from sources after publication.
9. Increase coverage of middle America, rural areas and religion.
10. Establish a system for evaluating public attacks on The Times's work and determining whether and how to respond.
Wow. Lovely use of words like "consider" and "encourage".
Suggestions by a committee are nothing. Actions speak louder. Much louder.
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Also, I think Sean is saying that something of this public interest should have no restrictions whatsoever. Subscriptions aside, you shouldn't even have to register to see it.
Posted by Dustin at May 10, 2005 4:06 PM
My recomendation would be they start with the truth and stick with it.
Maybe after they fire half the staff and hire new they will get it. Until then, who cares. A RSS feed of yahoo.com news gets you all the biased news stories you can use -- why pay for 'em.
The Internet age is two-way from here on.
Posted by bill at May 10, 2005 4:30 PM
If a full-of-itself newspaper falls in the forest and no one's around, does it make a sound?
Better yet, do we care?
An even deeper question: Why did it take all these centuries for the NYT to realize that 90% of Americans live across the Hudson? If they consider themselves a national newspaper, shouldn't they care?
Posted by Ron at May 10, 2005 4:51 PM
The NYT shouldn't care about me because I don't care about the NYT.
When I first had a home PC and got "wired" to the internet, I thought it was going to be so cool to be able to read all those magazines and newspapers and listen to radio from all over the world. I soon found that magazine and newspaper publishers wanted to protect their print versions (come one, we all know the only money made by them is from advertising, and their online versions are full of that, too) so I had to pay for online access. To hell with that. And, I discovered that I needed to pay for the software to allow me to listen to the radio, and then after about six months of that, my ISP informed me that every broadcaster was using so much bandwidth, that my little 56k dial-up couldn't handle it any more. My disillusionment became profound.
So, not only is the NYT full of it, so is just about every company that makes any money off the internet. I could pay my mortgage for what it would cost to have enough of the bells and whistles to allow me to get the full 'net experience. That's possibly why so many people abuse the internet at work--it's the only place they get a free T1 connection!
Fortunately, I've found many free papers and magazines on the internet, although many that I want to read still want to charge me. My disillusionment has become less. I still miss being able to listen to BBC World Service on my old free Real Player though.
Posted by Mike at May 10, 2005 5:41 PM
Having worked for over a decade in the Newspaper industry, I'd like to comment.
At the core of the NY Times and other newspapers' declining circulation issues is their inability to connect and communicate with the 'common' person. Newspapers used to be a community affair, with multiple newspapers per city, town, or even block. Their publishers were often celebrating their role in free speech and beating the heck out of corruption and exposing improprieties.
Newspapers are now revenue generators based primarily on advertising dollars, which a