Success and Risk as The Times Transforms

“WHY on earth would you want this job?”

Two years ago, I set out to answer this question in my inaugural public editor column — if only because so many people at The New York Times had asked it. Now, as I complete my term and hand the baton to the incoming public editor, Margaret Sullivan, I want to take a second look at it.

Back then, I viewed The Times as a deeply resourced news organization that was challenged to recreate itself in an environment that was smashing old media and vaulting new forms to prominence. I saw myself as something of a coroner, called in to autopsy flawed news articles that drew complaints.

What I’ve seen has surprised me. Not so much the occasional corpse in text but the deeper changes reshaping what I hesitate to call merely “the paper.”

In these two years, The New York Times Company has been transformed, shedding most of the assets that once made it a diversified corporation. When About.com is sold, the Times Company will be back to the basics: The Times itself, the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, and two New England papers, The Boston Globe and The Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Mass.

Through this, The Times has maintained an unmatched investment in journalism, even as the company’s profitability remains in doubt (the last quarter saw a loss of $88 million). I conclude that Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the company chairman and the publisher of The Times, is betting the farm that strong journalism is an essential asset that cannot be shed.

The company’s survival mantra calls for expansion in the international, video, social and mobile spheres. What is so exceptional and surprising to me, a career veteran of long wars between newspapers’ business and newsroom camps, is how thoroughly The Times’s newsroom appears to have bought in to this strategy.

No doubt, the mortal threat is clear enough now to be a motivator. But for journalists at The Times, the opportunity to flood the Web with content is a compelling one in its own right. Encouraged by the company to exploit social media, many Times journalists have become extraordinarily prodigious publishers on Twitter, some with thousands of posts to their credit.

Consider this sign of the froth that surrounds social media: A few weeks ago on NYTimes.com, a Times editor conducted a serious video interview with a BuzzFeed writer about the day Twitter was down for an hour or two — and the political, journalistic and (dare I extrapolate?) metaphysical implications thereof.

The emphasis on social and mobile media means that Times material appears far from the home base of NYTimes.com, not to mention the distant shores of the Old Country, print. For journalists, this presents tantalizing new opportunities to build a personal audience, while for the company it is a way to follow readers where they are going.

The result is an oddly disaggregated New York Times of hyper-engaged journalists building their own brands, and company content flung willy-nilly into the ether.

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Observing this dynamic, I responded with columns emphasizing that, as the digital transformation proceeds, The Times should more forcefully communicate its brand values — its high standards, commitment to accountability, etc. — by publishing those standards more prominently and communicating directly with readers on an NYTimes.com reader portal of some kind. Fortifying core beliefs and expressing them, I believe, secures the anchor in a time of change like this. It reinforces those standards to the staff and gives the reader reasons to trust The Times.

Two years ago, when I wrote my “why on earth” column, I suggested that the pace of change called for a re-emphasis on “transparency, accountability, humility.” Looking back now, I think The Times could do better with these.

The Times is hardly transparent. A reader still has to work very hard to find any Times policies online (though some are tucked away there), and there is still no place where Times editors speak on the issues. As for humility, well, The Times is Lake Wobegon on steroids (everybody’s way above average). I don’t remember many autopsies in which, as we assembled over the body, anyone conceded that maybe this could have been done differently.

The strong suit, though, is the corrections desk, led by Greg Brock, where thousands of errors are somehow adjudicated every year. This is a powerful engine of accountability, unmatched by any other corrections operation I have seen, and a potential foundation element for a portal where The Times could prominently display “transparency, accountability, humility.”

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

Stepping back, I can see that as the digital transformation proceeds, as The Times disaggregates and as an empowered staff finds new ways to express itself, a kind of Times Nation has formed around the paper’s political-cultural worldview, an audience unbound by geography (as distinct from the old days of print) and one that self-selects in digital space.

It’s a huge success story — it is hard to argue with the enormous size of Times Nation — but one that carries risk as well. A just-released Pew Research Center survey found that The Times’s “believability rating” had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating. Can that be good?

“Why on earth would you want this job?” The answer is: I thought two years ago it would be interesting, and two years later, I can say that it certainly was.

And one final note: many thanks to Joseph Burgess, my assistant, who ably helped me fulfill the duties of the public editor.