Working with The New York Times

By: Jonathan Weber

The New York Times has a "public editor" who "works outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper and receives and answers questions or comments from readers and the public, principally about articles published in the paper." This week the new public editor, Arthur Brisbane, takes on the issue of straight news articles versus columns and other types of "point of view" pieces, and among his examples of what he feels are the blurred lines between news and opinion is a recent column by yours truly. Since he also takes the opportunity to question the idea of an "outside entity" such as The Bay Citizen providing coverage for The Times, I thought it would be a good moment to shed some further light on the dynamics of our Times relationship.

As most of you know, The Bay Citizen is an independent, nonprofit news organization, and our primary product is the website at BayCitizen.org. We also have an important partnership with The New York Times, in which we provide two pages of Bay Area coverage twice a week for Bay Area editions of the paper. On one level we think of this as a print distribution deal for our journalism, though it's not just any deal; our association with The Times provides a huge amount of credibility and exposure for a fledgling operation like ours.

The Times relationship was developed with great care on both sides, with the discussions starting more than a year ago. From the beginning, The Times was very focused on assuring that The Bay Citizen would be a truly independent organization that could deliver journalism that met Times standards. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, interviewed me before I was hired as editor in chief, and we have consulted closely with Times editors at every stage of our development.

We produce all of the editorial content for the Friday and Sunday Bay Area pages that appear in the "A" section of The Times. We provide story budgets in advance so that Times editors know what's coming, and they can reject stories that they don't think will work for them for one reason or another (though this has hardly ever happened in practice). Our stories are edited and fact-checked by our own editors, and then sent to Times national desk editors in New York. The stories are then read and edited again by both an assistant national editor and a copy editor. They write the headlines, lay out the pages, and select from the art that we provide. We work closely with them on the many final details of making the pages as good as they can be. All the stories are also published simultaneously at BayCitizen.org and NYTimes.com.

We have an experienced senior editing staff and a talented group of reporters, and we're confident that we've already demonstrated our ability to provide Times-quality journalism week in and week out. The bigger issue for us, quite honestly, is that the formal style of The Times is somewhat different from what would be most appropriate for BayCitizen.org. As we continue to build The Bay Citizen we expect to see more divergence in the style of the website versus the style of the Times pages (though there will be no divergence in journalistic quality and standards.)

That brings me back to Arthur Brisbane's comments. He says my column "stood at the very precipice of political opinion writing," which may be true, but the whole idea of a reported column is that it marries facts and point of view. Journalism today embodies a whole range of styles, some with more point of view and some with less, and while clear labeling of what's what is a good goal, it's not realistic to think that there can be some kind of calorie counter measuring the amount of opinion in a given piece. It's also worth noting, as Brisbane does, that Times editors edited my column and came to a different conclusion about it.

One of the things that has been fascinating, and inspiring, about working with The Times is experiencing their maniacal commitment to journalistic quality and credibility. They take very seriously their role as the preeminent global source of news reporting and analysis, and there is no gap between what they expect of their own staff and what they expect of us. I'd like to think the learning goes both ways too, as we bring our own approaches to the mix and, together with all of our partners, push the frontiers of next-generation news.