An internal committee study, reports Tuesday’s The Guardian, has concluded that the New York Times must respond to “growing pressure by pledging to increase its coverage of religion and the rural areas in the US, while also recruiting journalists who have military experience.”


If you have a problem with the NY Times, is it because it’s too liberal or “monolithic“? Or is it because of the reporting of Judith Miller, the WMD stories, and more?
The Guardian continues:

“In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic,” says the report. “We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.


I won’t argue with this next part:

The report recommended steps to make both the NYT’s reporting and its workings more transparent to readers, including having senior editors write more regularly about how the paper works, limiting the number of quotes that are unsourced, and making its staff more accessible to readers. “The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a reasonable human being,” it says.


Ever try to contact a reporter at the NYT? Send the paper a fax? That’s why I fell in love with the list from FAIR.org — Newspapers || ALL MEDIA — because it lists the NYT’s (and other papers’) fax numbers.

“It’s about accommodation”:

Media commentators, however, criticised the NYT for being too concerned with its image, rather than the substance of what it publishes. “It will make the paper less interesting, less bold and more careful,” said Michael Wolff, media commentator and columnist for Vanity Fair. “In its DNA the Times is accustomed to being loved and admired in every respect. This shows they are more worried about what people are thinking of us rather than what we think ourselves. It’s about accommodation.”

[…………………]

At the report’s core, argues Mr Wolff, is the bid to become a truly national newspaper in a country where most papers are local, and where political divisions are partly informed by geography – Republicans in the middle, and Democrats on the coasts and in the north.


“At its heart this is part of a new business model,” says Mr Wolff. “Just because they are a national paper doesn’t mean they have to accommodate everyone. But they do have to accommodate more people than they have until now.”


Full article at The Guardian