Public Editor Number One: The Collected Columns (with Reflections, Reconsiderations, and Even a Few Retractions) of the First Ombudsman of The New York Times - Hardcover

Okrent, Dan

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9781586484002: Public Editor Number One: The Collected Columns (with Reflections, Reconsiderations, and Even a Few Retractions) of the First Ombudsman of The New York Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586484001 ISBN 13: 9781586484002

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2006

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From December 2003 to May 2005, Daniel Okrent served as the New York Times' first "Public Editor," a position created following the newspaper's Jayson Blair scandal and the tumultuous reign and resignation of Howell Raines as Executive Editor. His mission: read the paper and provide his assessments, without guidance from the paper itself and without fear or favor, of how well it executed its responsibility to provide objective, accurate, and complete coverage of the world-at-large. Not an easy task, but the New York Times chose the right writer for the job. Experienced, wise and witty, opinionated but never shrill, he delivered. Okrent addressed subjects ranging from WMD coverage, reporter self-promotion, pulling for or piling on political candidates, and corrections policy, to the Tony Awards, to the great delight and consternation of the paper's readers, and those in its own newsroom. Now, collected, amended, and assessed by Okrent here are the complete columns of his rocky and illuminating eighteen months along with an evaluation of the entire experience; its ups and downs and what he thinks he got right and got wrong. This is a smart, serious, entertaining, and longlasting look at what today's finest journalism does well— and what it can do better.

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About the Author:

Before his appointment as the Times's first public editor, Daniel Okrent served in a number of prominent positions in magazine publishing, among them editor-at-large of Time Inc., managing editor of Life, and editor of New England Monthly. He is the author of four books, most recently Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, which was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in history. Okrent lives in New York and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

From Publishers Weekly:

If ever a job was to serve as a vortex of contempt-social, political, intellectual, professional, grammatical and sometimes just plain nonsensical-it's the ombudsman at The New York Times. Established in the wake of the Jayson Blair fiasco and the dramatic departure of then-executive editor Howell Raines, the Times' "public editor" was to serve as the readers' advocate, a wildcard columnist with the freedom and power to explore, analyze and, when necessary, rebuke the "paper of record" on its own pages. Into that spot stepped Okrent, a former magazine editor whose zeal for the task and willingness to irritate Times staffers and readers alike yielded twice-monthly essays that were everything column-writing should be: conversational, provocative, probing, revelatory, often combative, occasionally humorous, and a touch self-satisfied. During his 18-month tenure, Okrent addressed some of print journalism's hottest topics-anonymous sources, polls and statistics, the selection and placement of photographs, the persistent accusation of liberal bias-in an attempt to demystify the day-to-day sausage-making at the world's (arguably) most important newspaper. Though too concerned with his own critics, Okrent's short, insightful and sometimes apologetic epilogues that follow each column add valuable depth to an already strong collection.
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