Remember that under our rules, at least one editor must know the identity of an anonymous source. (As standards editor, I do occasional spot checks to make sure this policy is being followed.)

But the best part of the memo came at the beginning when Mr. Corbett was explaining the impetus behind the memo: "At a farewell dinner for Clark Hoyt, a number of editors once again discussed our use of anonymous sources."

If you ever wondered what a goodbye dinner for Clark Hoyt would be like, there you have it.

Mr. Hoyt left The Times after his tenure elapsed to help Bloomberg grow its Washington Bureau.

(h/t Hamilton Nolan)

The bureau has been expanding rapidly in the last year and now has more than 140 staffers (three times as many as The Times has in D.C.), Michael Calderone wrote last year. Mr. Hoyt will help mold the expanded bureau and report directly to editor-in-chief Matthew A. Winkler. During his three years at The Times, Mr. Hoyt's relationship with executive editor Bill Keller was necessarily contentious but light-hearted. In his goodbye note, Mr. Hoyt recalled that Mr. Keller would compare their weekly meetings to a proctology exam.

Arthur Brisbane replaced Mr. Hoyt at The Times in June.

(h/t Joe Pompeo)

In his last column over the weekend, Mr. Hoyt also remembered one highlight from his interactions with Bill Keller.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, once joked as we walked down the passageway to his office for an interview that he was heading for his weekly proctological exam. But throughout my tenure, Keller was gracious and supportive.

Mr. Hoyt preferred to think of himself as a "shock absorber."

Mr. Hoyt's goodbye was an overwhelmingly friendly one, praising The Times courage for inviting "someone like me into its midst: an outsider with no investment in its mystique or the quirks of its newsroom culture." 

An outsider, yes, but also a fan. Mr. Hoyt closed the column saying that he looks forward to the end of his tenure because he can go back to "savoring" the paper as a reader.

It's been a wild ride for Mr. Hoyt!

"I don't have any regrets about it. It has been fascinating and endlessly interesting," Mr. Hoyt told Media Matters during a recent interview.

He was The Times' third public editor since the position was created after the paper's Jason Blair scandal.

Mr. Hoyt described himself as a "shock absorber." O.K., sure.

How will we remember him? Choire Sicha and Tom Scocca summed up his reign pretty well, we thought.

John Koblin reports that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.'s son, Arthur G. Sulzberger, will begin writing for the paper on the Metro desk starting February 23rd. One staffer calls the 28-year-old, "Quite nice, eager to please and humble." Plus: Times 'Updates' Make Clark Hoyt Want to URL; ProPublica's 60 Minutes of Infamy?

Leon Neyfakh writes, "Niko Pfund, the 43-year-old publisher of Oxford University Press’ academic and trade division, has had one occasion after another during the past few weeks to squeal with delight."

Plus: Oscar and Me... Fashion Week's Brave Face... Begley the Bookie

Mr. Hoyt’s central objection had to do with the headline that The Times placed on its Web site starting at 2:52 p.m. on Jan 22:  “Taxes and a Housekeeper Are Said to Derail Kennedy’s Bid.” Within the story, there were nearly no details about the housekeeper, and that headline stayed up all day long, changing only slightly. (“Snags for Kennedy Said to Be Taxes, Housekeeper” was the headline if you looked at the Web site that night.)

Finally, by day’s end, after the whole story about Caroline Kennedy’s nanny and housekeeper proved to be non-credible, the Jan. 23 print edition of The Times went to press with the headline “Paterson Is Set to Name Senate Pick.”

Though the content of the story changed markedly throughout the day, only one version stands on the site, because changes were made to the same article page without showing the revisions. If you were curious to watch how the story changed throughout the day—say, the way you would if you were to look on Nexis in the old days and see how one story changed from Sept. 6 to Sept. 7—you wouldn’t be able to. And The Times doesn’t feel it’s necessary to offer its readers that chance, either.

In his column, Mr. Hoyt wagged his finger and asked whether the nature of the Web was eroding the paper’s standards; the editors at the paper said no, and that was that.

“In general, our policy is live articles on the Web are a work in progress by definition,” said Craig Whitney, the paper’s standards editor. “We’re not archiving each successive iteration of it as a finished product as we do with the printed paper.”

And in fact, it’s only the side constraint of a printed edition of the paper that made readers come to expect a permanent archive of published errors followed by separate, published corrections. The Times can’t pull back all its newspapers from readers’ hands and replace them with corrected ones. If the Web allows The Times to remove an error, why not just remove it?

For some blogs, including even Gawker, a standard practice is to keep the original item as is, and either provide updates or put in the updated, correct information in a new post.

“The pages are enormously confusing as it is,” said Jon Landman, digital editor at the Times. “Clutter is a problem. Everything, as I’ve said to Clark, is a balance. You can have one imperative that conflicts with any number of others and you have to make some choices.”

“To ask people to negotiate successive editions is not helpful to readers,” he continued. “Helpful to researchers, yes, but not to readers.”

“Can we flagellate ourselves more effectively?” said Mr. Whitney. “We’re blessed with plenty of opportunities to do that already. I don’t think we need to do that anymore.”

jkoblin@observer.com

In his Public Editor column on August 16th, Clark Hoyt wrote that Mr. Kristof "plans to write a column looking back on the case and apologizing to Hatfill for any 'extra scrutiny and upheaval the columns brought to him, and wrestling with the journalistic issues involved.'"

Here's what Mr. Kristof wrote today:

Of course, Mr. Kristof could've ended there, but the columnist goes on to offer three "What if?" scenarios that challenge journalistic notions of privacy and the public's right to know. One involves "a group of young foreign men" with "barrels of chemicals"; the next a new suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey case; the third, a girls' basketball coach who's "been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct." Would you write about these things if you were asked not to?

Pop quiz, hotshot: Now what do you do?

After running through which publications used the dreaded word and which didn't, Mr. Hoyt wrote:

Hoyt says he would've used it (in fact he did since "The Times agreed to an exception to its decision for this column because what he said is central to this discussion"), but expressed sympathy for the editors. "As potty-mouth language spews from the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, from rappers, rock bands, Hollywood movies, the Broadway stage, modern literature, cable television, the Internet and people on the sidewalk talking into their cellphones, The Times and other news media face a tough choice—just where to draw the line on words once thought unfit for what used to be called polite company."

It seems in this case, the paper chose to cut the 'nuts' out.

So two days ago, current Op-Ed columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins wrote into Mr. Hoyt’s reader's response column to respond: "When the public editor laces into an opinion page columnist for making fun of a controversial political figure, it sounds like a suggestion that all of us tone things down. I hope I’m hearing wrong."

So was he telling them to tone it down?

"No," he said to Media Mob. "It was a comment on a single aspect of a columnist’s work from a columnist I greatly admire. It was not a message for other columnists to tone it down. If I had meant to say that I would have said it directly."

Then what was the point of Mr. Hoyt’s column in the first place: to express frustration over Ms. Dowd’s specific opinions about Mrs. Clinton? Or for the public editor to muse about the role of a columnist more generally?

"I was dealing with a set of columns and the language in them," he said. "I think it is the public editor’s role to comment on Op-Ed columns when there is either an issue of fact, which there wasn’t in this case, or an issue of tone, which I think there was in this case. It’s not about the opinions expressed. The language in this line of columns was over the top, it was repetitive and it was relentless."

According to Deborah Hofman, who edits the bestseller list, Night got the boot after 80 weeks on the list because editors decided it was an "evergreen," which means it is likely to keep selling forever because so many students are reading it for class (kind of like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye). Ms. Hofman told Mr. Hoyt that the "editorial spirit of the list is to track the sales of new books...We simply cannot track such books indefinitely."

Another interesting revelation: Ms. Hofman and Janet Elder, editor of the news surveys department (they're the ones who crunch the numbers every week), both told Mr. Hoyt that The Times is considering starting a classics list, "which would include the perennial best sellers."

One wonders whether such a list—declaring as it would in strict mathematical terms what does and doesn't count as "perennial"--could begin to help solve some of the problems the culture is having with respect to the modern canon!