Art Brisbane: New New York Times Public Editor in a "Fateful Time"
Art Brisbane begins his task at the New York Times as public editor. He’s the fourth person to assume the tough and often thankless job, and he well explains his answer to the question: “Why would you take this job?” in a column Sunday.
Brisbane’s description of the transparency required of the public editor — a non-staff job of calling ’em as you see ’em — is good reading by the news-reading public, and must-reading in all the journalism schools now getting back into session. It’s an old-fashioned reminder that a news organization’s job, as impossible as it is, is trying to get it right, and fair. And it’s a nicely updated description of how that role morphs in the always-on, always-publishing digital age.
“News delivered digitally in rapid cycles — with much less time for editing and oversight — will create more lapses. It is simply physics.
The cure, or at least a salve, for this condition is transparency, accountability, humility. If The Times is going to publish more and faster, it will have to react faster to rectify more mistakes. The speed and volume of correction or response has to try to equal the speed and volume of error.”
What I found especially sobering, and honest, is Brisbane’s noting of how fragile the Times very future is:
“Second, the next few years will be an inflection point for The Times. Newspaper-based organizations — ones like The Times that have created Web operations and other news products — will either weather the storm of transformation or tip into the deep. It will be a fateful time.”
That’s the kind of honesty that should him push him in right directions, as he takes on unforeseeable and sometimes unimaginable Solomonesque questions over the next couple of years. It’s also an honesty honed by experience. Brisbane is a Knight-Ridder alumnus, like his immediate predecessor Clark Hoyt and like Deborah Howell, the former Washington Post ombudsman who passed away in January (“A Journalistic Whirlwind Passes into the Night.”) Both have learned from personal experience that prior standing is no promise of survival. Knight Ridder (for whom I worked for 21 years) reigned as the #2 journalism company in revenue size in the U.S. for years, and distinguished itself journalistically. Yet, in 2006, it hit a wall, as investors forced auction and sale, and now its name is fast fading into history.
