When the New York Times lost its way ( www.economist.com )
One of the longer pieces I’ve encountered in The Economist, but true to form, there’s no filler here. My experiences with internal-politics ousters is more of the quaint fiefdom variety than this Schweinerei, but much of what Bennet has to say about newsroom workings in the age of the internet sheds needed light on how many bosses a national outlet really has.
My rounds as opinion editor in both college and at a small daily in an Oregon college town predate the meat of the piece, but I encountered the beginnings of what have since become a rather large problem for newsrooms in general: the blurring of small-e editorial content (pushing from voice to opinion on news pages) with large-E Editorial content (where one finds the masthead).
Ultimately, I share his opinion that you have to be open to running content from all perspectives, so long as the thesis is backed up by the evidence presented. This is the reason I told the university president to buy an ad when he wanted free column inches … his timing could not have been more tone deaf after taking out a full page on an unrelated subject that he was now insisting was less important than what he wanted me to run.
In the end, I wrote a column about his attempt to hijack several structural and editorial bulwarks designed to prevent exactly what he was trying to do. I had the full support of the publisher, thankfully, even running under a hed of “Reaffirm this, Dick.”
