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The Public Editor

Why I Would Do This

“I feel like I’ve been sent to the principal’s office.”

The Times reporter sitting across from me smiled nervously. I hadn’t even spoken yet.

Scold, scourge, wreaker of cold justice: apparently, that’s what’s expected of the public editor.

In my introductions around the office, the first question — almost universally — was, “Why on earth would you want this job?”

All of this came after I had accepted the position, of course, and before I had considered that this is how the public editor’s post is viewed in some corners of The Times.

Maybe it’s a good question. Why on earth?

I wanted the job for several reasons. First is that The Times matters. No other American news organization has the resources and the ambition to reach as deeply and as broadly on as many subjects as The Times does. The public editor deals with problems in the aftermath. It’s forensic, a kind of journalistic “CSI.”

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.

Finally, any journalist would find it hard to say no to the chance to practice the trade here.

Admittedly, serving as the paper’s fourth public editor is a really strange way to do it. The job bears little resemblance to the roles I have played previously: newspaper reporter, columnist, editor, publisher, corporate manager.

The public editor is a radical concept. I am not an employee, but an independent contractor. I do not report to anyone at The Times, and my writings are not edited by Times senior editors. For that matter, The Times does not answer to me either. Staff members are not obligated to take any of my suggestions.

According to my agreement with The Times, the public editor is the “designated representative of the readers of The New York Times.” Other than that, the contract simply says I will prepare commentary reflecting readers’ and my own concerns about The Times’s “news and opinion content/coverage.” And that’s pretty much it.

The way I read it, this arrangement reflects a no-strings-attached commitment by The Times to empower an independent party to hold it accountable.

Thankfully, accountability at The Times is not a one-person job. There is no way one person, even with an able assistant like mine, can absorb the volume of discontent that is heaved at The Times every week. There is an internal system of accountability here, separate from the public editor. Here is how Bill Keller, executive editor, described it for me:

“We have a substantial infrastructure for responding to public complaints. Greg Brock [senior editor/standards], Phil Corbett [associate managing editor for standards] and Bill Schmidt [deputy managing editor] all spend at least a portion of their time dealing with issues of balance, fairness, accuracy and taste raised by the public. Some cases get passed up to me or Jill [Abramson, managing editor], or to our legal counsel. We publish corrections and editor’s notes, and try hard not to be overly defensive when our work is challenged.

“We make editors and reporters available for online questioning by readers, a feature called ‘Talk to the Newsroom.’ We publish reader letters in several places, and post comments on many of our online stories. We also try to be reasonably accessible to reporters who cover the media for various outlets. I can’t think of many other businesses that are as transparent and forthcoming about owning up to mistakes.”

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Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Keller also said reporters are encouraged to respond to readers, except in cases of vitriolic attacks and organized campaigns.

But is this enough in the age of Maximum Personal Expression, when readers and other critics chisel away daily at The Times’s credibility with such a potent arsenal of communication tools?

Bloggers, tweeters, aggregators and competing Web sites pore over Times content every day, hunting for food, hunting for fodder. In military terms, you could call it asymmetric warfare — a lightly armed foe waging war against a much larger and less agile one.

The metaphor of war, though, is incomplete because this is not just about the committed antagonists of The Times. It’s also about the loyalists. When they find errors or other shortcomings, they expect their beloved to own up.

Theirs is not to wage war but to salvage affection. That said, when they do get angry, they too resort to the blogosphere, the Twitterdome and the like.

Wounded lovers, armed antagonists — alike they hold The Times to the high standards that have been in place since long before the digital age. “The acceleration of the news pace,” Mr. Keller said, “increases the risk that we will fall short of our standards. That calls for greater vigilance, not lower standards.”

This sets a huge challenge for the organization. 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 have to try to equal the speed and volume of error.

Is that where things stand now? I will have to see for myself. To fulfill the public editor’s charge, I plan to write columns and blog posts, publish readers’ letters, reply to readers privately, and otherwise mediate an exchange between The Times and its audience.

Like The Times itself, I expect to be held accountable for my own work.

And, so you know, I do bring certain articles of belief to this.

I believe a news organization needs to be aggressive. When caution trumps ambition, something dies.

I believe there is no conspiracy. Neither Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. nor Bill Keller is the Wizard of Oz, dictating an agenda from behind a screen. Rather, The Times comes together like parallel computing: many lines simultaneously flowing through a filter, hitting the driveway and flashing on a screen. It is very messy.

I believe that journalists should leave their political views at the door when they report and edit the news. I’m a registered Democrat who voted for Barack Obama and then Scott Brown, so, as you can see, I have already left my views at the door!

A final note: I will be dividing my time between an office here at The Times and my home office in Massachusetts — where, when necessary, I will go to lick the wounds of a hired scourge.

Arthur S. Brisbane, the public editor of The Times, can be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com. Telephone messages: 212-556-7652. A biography can be found at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section WK, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Why I Would Do This. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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