Photo credit: The New York Times

Now that Arthur Brisbane is no longer holding The New York Times accountable as the public editor, he is publicly looking back at his two year tenure at the paper of record. Mr. Brisbane served as the fourth ombudsman -- the readers' representative -- a position created in the wake of the 2003 Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal.

In an interview with Craig Silverman at Poynter two days after his time at the Times came to an end, Mr. Brisbane spoke about his experience.

“I’m trying to decompress,” Mr. Brisbane told  “Yesterday and today are the first two working days that I haven’t had to worry about the e-mail queue and what’s coming in and what’s in the paper, and you know what? I am enjoying it.”

Mr. Brisbane expects to be remembered for his "infamous" truth vigilante post, where Mr. Brisbane questioned whether it's a reporter's job to challenge statements presented as facts by sources rather than just reporting it - especially by politicians during an election season. The post got a lot of attention, which came as a bit of a surprise to Mr. Brisbane.

“For better or worse, it’s probably the goddamn fact checking thing,” he said. 

Mr. Brisbane will also be remembered for the stir he caused on his way out, where he essentially accused the Times of having a liberal bias in his final column. "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," he wrote in his good-bye post.

In his final post, Mr. Brisbane also noted the healthy egos at the paper and the similarities to Garrison Keillor's fictional town. "As for humility, well, The Times is Lake Wobegon on steroids (everybody’s way above average)."

Although Mr. Brisbane blogged and tweeted in his official capacity, he said he had a largely apprehensive relationship with social media.

“It’s an alien realm for me,” he said. “I didn’t dive into it whole hog, as pretty much everybody who is a media commentator has observed. I understand that my successor is going to do that more in-depth, and I wish her best.”

What's next?

“There are people who publish blogs that I think have every bit the same deliberative, thoughtful quality that the traditional print medium tend to establish. So it can be done very well, but it’s probably not something that I’m going to do. Whatever I do create, I am going to try to move beyond the frame of daily journalism,” said Mr. Brisbane.

NYU Young Media War Rages On: The young folk of NYU Local—the pirate NYU news publication/blog, as opposed to the officially-mandated NYU publication, Washington Square News—is going to wage further war on its rival by putting out its own print publication. It's going to be called NYU Local Magazine. The scrappy youths at NYU Local have sold us on it as follows:

It's going to be a mix of guides to life at NYU (A guide to smoking pot in your dorm room written by a former R.A.), some long profiles of NYU students and New Yorkers (Rapper Cakes Da Killa), and there's some servicey content of stuff that we think NYU students need to know (Where you can drink with and without a fake id). Essentially, now we're the most exciting print publication at NYU too.

 
Cakes Da Killa? I feel older than Fran Lebowitz in full-on nuclear NYU-hating mode. Advice to these young media entrepreneurs: Get a lawyer. Or rather, just: Don't write about Nikki Finke without a lawyer.

Jay Penske Has Falling Down Moment After Too Many Years of Employing Nikki Finke: Have you read this whole thing about Mail.com owner (and Nikki Finke's boss) Jay Penske? It is beyond. Penske and his brother were arrested in Nantucket for breaking into the Nantucket Yacht Club. And this is after two women claimed to have been assaulted by the Penske Bros. Apparently, Jay Penske pissed on some woman's boots after she confronted him for pissing in the parking lot. Obviously Penske has spent too much time around Nikki "Devil May Care" Finke. Anyway, the women declined to press assault charges but the Penskes were still locked up. Also, this:

Wow. Nothing more. [Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror]

Music Editor Real Talk: Your favorite new "Real Talk by an Editor In GIF Form" Tumblr (not an obscure form at all, by any measure) is Music Editor Real Talk. It is not Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston. Editor Real Talk "editor" and erstwhile GOOD Magazine editor Ann Friedman says it isn't her either. Do you know who it is? Tell me.

New York Times Trolls Lolo Jones, Pt. 9: Arthur Brisbane, who is still the Times' public editor, has finally had enough hate mail about Lolo Jones. "I think the writer was particularly harsh, even unnecessarily so." [NYT Public Editor]

The Audacity of Hope: Communications grads saw an uptick in job numbers. They should have majored in economics, regardless. [Journalism.org]

Robert Thomson Can't Lose: The Wall Street Journal is covering the Olympics with puppets. Couldn't make it up if I tried. [Beet.tv]

Tips? Scriptures? Adam Davidson fan mail? Cowboy Barn discount codes? Please, by all means, send them here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Photo by Derek Gee / Buffalo News, via twitter.com/Sulliview

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson announced Monday that Margaret M. Sullivan, editor and vice president of The Buffalo News, will replace Arthur Brisbane as the paper’s public editor.

Speaking on the phone from Buffalo Monday afternoon, Ms. Sullivan told Off The Record that she had lusted after the gig for years.

“Now that there’s going to be much more of a digital job,” she said, “it’s a very good fit for me.”

She described the Times search as broad and the vetting process as lengthy and thorough.

“It was not a slam dunk,” she admitted.

A post created in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003, The Times’s public editor serves as a liaison between readers and newsroom. He or, for the first time since the position's creation, she, answers reader questions and critiques newsroom decisions in a biweekly Sunday column.

In an internal memo announcing Ms. Sullivan’s appointment, Ms. Abramson said the position will expand “to keep pace with The Times’ multi-platform presence.” The public editor will now engage with readers “in a more timely way,” she wrote, by way of a social media presence, a blog and a web page, in addition to the print column.

After praising Ms. Sullivan’s reporting credentials (she created The Buffalo News’s first investigative team), Ms. Abramson lauded her digital bona fides.

“She’s a regular blogger and is comfortable with social media,” she wrote.

Ms. Sullivan told Off The Record that she began her Buffalo News blog, called SulliView, as an experiment late last year, when she was itching to do more writing and “immerse herself in the tools journalists had.”

“Whatever the digital platform may be, you can’t understand it until you do it,” she explained.

She has used SulliView as a platform to explain why a tough Romney article landed during his Buffalo fundraising weekend (total coincidence), engage in a live chat about an impending digital subscription plan and simply riff on the late Nora Ephron, Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi, and Pitchfork-beloved lo-fi group Youth Lagoon.

She sees the new public editor blog as “a digital village square where the conversation can be outside in real time.”

To outsiders, the rise of social media and reader feedback has only made the job of public editor more difficult. Her predecessor, Mr. Brisbane, received a social media lashing for one controversial article, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?”—including a parody Twitter.

In May, The Washington Post reported that he would step down after two years in the job and not pursue his third year contract option. (“I am grateful to him for his unwavering integrity and commitment to our readers,” Ms. Abramson wrote in her memo.)

But if the public editor has become something of a punching bag for media watchers, Ms. Sullivan isn’t concerned.

“I’ve learned in my job as top editor that you have to roll with the punches, have some equanimity and know that whatever the crisis du jour is, there will be another one soon,” she said.

In taking the job, Ms. Sullivan leaves her hometown paper, where she started as an intern 32 years ago and has served as top editor for twelve. The paper will conduct a national search for her replacement.

Prior to being named the first-ever Times ombudswoman, Ms. Sullivan was the first woman to hold the top job at The Buffalo News.

“It seems to be my fate,” Ms. Sullivan said of her repeat glass ceiling breakings. “I’ve read the analyses that there are relatively few women opinion columnists, maybe I’m making a step in the right direction on that one.”

Ms. Sullivan, who has a son in law school in Boston and a daughter at New York University, said she is looking forward to relocating to New York City for the position. She also offered a word of hope for the small newspapers currently being snapped up by mogul and philanthropist Warren Buffett, owner of the The Buffalo News, since 1977.

“There are very few better places to be in journalism than in a paper owned by Warren Buffett,” she said.

The paper of record being one of them, it seems.

Mr. Callan is the tweeter behind @TimesPublicEdit, a parody of Mr. Brisbane, whose handle is @thepubliceditor. Mr. Callan began the account in January, shortly after The Times published Mr. Brisbane now-infamous column, “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” asking if newspapers ought to fact-check all remarks made by newsmakers.

“I was aghast at the sort of sophistry that was on display for that,” Mr. Callan told Off The Record.

The feed began as a place to mock the concept of truth vigilantism (“Should The Times have asked some follow-up questions when Rick Santorum told us he was a vampire?”) but later became a sort of ombudsman-at-large, questioning the fixations of the reporters who hang around on Twitter.

Indeed, Mr. Callan’s parody became so refined that when he wrote “CNN is reporting that Anderson Cooper is straight” (a reference to CNN’s incorrect reporting on the Supreme Court’s health care decision), reporters from other outlets—unable to resist a catty and colorful quote from a Times editor—forgot to be their own Twitter truth vigilantes.

“Awful lot of snark coming from Art ‘Should we check facts?’ Brisbane,” wrote Atlantic associate editor David Graham, before quickly recanting. “Blast, that’s a fake Times Public Editor account. Apologies.”

Reporters for the New York Post’s Page Six and The Hollywood Reporter, were more easily fooled; both attributed to the joke to Mr. Brisbane.

Forty-eight hours, 719 retweets, and some 3,000 “favorites” later, Mr. Callan’s account was shut down by Twitter.

The situation would make a fine topic for a Public Editor column. (In fact, it’s one Craig Silverman, who was reportedly approached to replace Mr. Brisbane, has discussed on Poynter.) As journalists increasingly treat their subjects’ Twitters as a primary source, should the microblogging platform regulate parody Twitters? Or is it the job of a journalist to vet its social media sources?

When Mr. Callan appealed his suspension, Twitter told him it had received a “valid impersonation report regarding your account.”

“Twitter firmly believes in the freedom of expression,” the company wrote to Mr. Callan, “However, impersonation that misleads, confuses, or deceives is against Twitter Rules.”

But Mr. Callan, who writes for the sports blogs The Classical and Amazin’ Avenue, says his intention was parody, not deception.

“Occasionally I would get a retweet or a mention but up until this past week nobody to my knowledge thought that was really him,” he said.

Per the rules, Mr. Callan has added “fake” to his profile and been reinstated. Any confusion will soon be settled, however. Mr. Brisbane, who declined to comment on this story, will abdicate the public editor post in September. The Times has yet to name his replacement but is reportedly circling in on candidates.

Off The Record wondered whom the ombudsman’s ombudsman might like to see take over the position.

“A person of color, a woman, someone out of the mold,” he said. “The New York Times already skews toward the Arthur Brisbane demographic. It should bring something different to a paper that’s already fairly monochromatic.”

The Public Editor column in question sought to ask whether or not the Times should work to aggressively counter the press lines given to them, by writing those counters within the context of a story. This is a poor way to bring up the ongoing debate about where a journalist providing "news context" crosses over into a journalist providing "opinions." Especially when you title your column "Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?" Which sounds less like a public editor column, and more like a particularly unfunny Stephen Colbert segment.

The answer to whether or not the Times should be relentless in its pursuit of truth is "Yes," unless you are the target of that pursuit. Which is why a bunch of Times reporters publicly facepalmed when they read his column. Everyone on Twitter was like "YES!" Some people wrote some legitimately funny takes on it.

Finally, not too long ago, Times' executive editor Jill Abramson filed a response tonight. So eager was the Times to get this response into the open that even the company's head flack made a point of Tweeting it out.

It begins:

Art,

In your blog, you ask “whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” Of course we should and we do. The kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.

Which is basically what everyone else said. Why even dignify this? So outrageous isn't the question itself so much as (A) Mr. Brisbane's inability to ask what he ostensibly meant to say and (B) the awesome, pageview-bating headline he put on it to incite the rage of the masses.

Mr. Brisbane is asking whether or not it's a journalist's place to look at something that is clearly and patently untrue—and either question it or note it as untrue—without empirical evidence. The closest he came to clarifying this question wasn't in the first or even the second post on the matter he wrote, but in an interview with Jim Romenesko:

What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing.

This depends on whether or not you're the kind of person who sees something that is plainly full of lies and cannot control the urge to publicly identify it as "total bullshit," or if you're the kind of person who says "well, hold on a second, maybe this person in a position of great power with very powerful interests to protect is actually telling us the truth." Most journalists—especially at the New York Times—are the first kind.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of news sources like Fox News and people like James O'Keefe—who employ euphemisms for "objectivity" to a pornographic degree—have made these lines blur a little more over the last decade. Blogs and bloggers also make fundamentalists like Mr. Brisbane—who, as Jack Shafer pointed out, is no slouch as far as journalism goes—get very squirmy about what "objectivity" means. This is the stripe of mindset that thinks that a journalist shouldn't have an opinion about anything, and that this opinon-less zombified state of human living is what constitutes "objectivity." Hence, his question: Does relentless pursuit of the truth constitute something other than journalist's place, like an agenda (of calling 'bullshit' what it is)?

For the most part, however, most practitioners of journalism would agree that erring on the side of skepticism publicly is probably a good idea. The alternative is the kind of lifeless journalism and commitment to archaic and never-quite-ever-actually-realized ideals of objectivity that hasn't helped anyone, let alone the craft or business of journalism.

Some folks, however, continue to thrive on the journalism of a juicy headline—sometimes quite ginned up—intended to make people ragey. Ask Matt Drudge! He's done okay for himself. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear even that was Mr. Brisbane's intent. It may be worth paying less attention to next time.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Times

DealBook, the Andrew Ross Sorkin-founded Times blog which now claims a few pages in the print section, focuses on reporting deals hours before they would have been announced and chronicling the lives of Wall Street players like a gossip column. It serves the investors' appetites, not the public interest, according to Mr. Brisbane.

It struck the Times ombudsman as a foolishly pre-2008 editorial strategy, now that macroeconomic issues dominate business headlines, and now that Wall Street is a downgraded player in international economics.

"I was left wondering whether The Times should have spent its money not on expanding DealBook but on enlarging its stable of journalists aimed at the wider subjects of international banks and sovereign debt," he wrote.

In response, Mr. Ingrassia sent the following letter to Mr. Brisbane, and cc'd the business staff, according to Poynter:

Art,

Your column left me wondering how closely you read the Times – or at least our financial coverage. There is far more financial news, of all kinds, than ever before. Not less, as your column strangely asks.

On the coverage of the European debt crisis: We have written several hundred stories explaining its origins and implications over the past year and a half, and dozens of them ran on the front page. A number of these stories delved into the very questions you wondered about – including the dangerous ripple effects in the financial system if the problems aren’t solved. And other stories have explained how derivatives sold by banks both helped disguise the extent of the debt problems in some countries like Greece, but also pose concerns going forward. Maybe you missed these, but we reported them.

On DealBook: The addition of reporters has enabled The Times to expand its coverage of finance, not just the stories that you cited about what’s happening on Wall Street but public service journalism stories as well – like the banking industry’s aggressive lobbying against some of the stricter regulations approved by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown or the battle to limit the power of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to name just a couple of important running stories to which DealBook reporters have made major contributions.

Sorry, but when you start with a wrong premise and ignore the record, you end up with a wrong conclusion.

Larry Ingrassia
Business editor
The New York Times

Bummer about Romenesko quitting, huh?