Tweet, tweet.

Last week, newly appointed public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about what she now calls "the insulting and profane Twitter messages" that Times freelancer Andrew Goldman tweeted at author Jennifer Weiner. Ms. Sullivan ended the post by calling for a clear social media policy at the paper of record.

Looks like they are now clearing it up. It is actually fairly simple: don't be a jerk to readers.

"Be thoughtful. Take care that nothing you say online will undercut your credibility as a journalist. Newsroom staff members should avoid editorializing or promoting political views. And we should be civil – even to critics – and avoid personal attacks and offensive remarks," Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, said in a memo. The memo was included in Ms. Sullivan's post today.

"When in doubt, ask yourself if a given action might damage The Times’s reputation. If so, it’s probably a bad idea," Mr. Corbett continued.

And just how does this policy apply to freelancers?

“It would be crazy to try to control freelancers’ behavior night and day,” Mr. Corbett told Ms. Sullivan. But, as the Times standard bearers pointed out readers often don't know the difference between staff writers and freelancers. “So we want them to have the same standards,” Mr. Corebett said.

But the policy isn't new. We heard something similar last week when we reached out to find out if the newspaper was going to change their social media policy.

“We expect New York Times journalists to act like New York Times journalists,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said.

“It has been communicated to Andrew Goldman that his comments on Twitter were not appropriate and not in keeping with The Times’s long-standing principle that we expect our journalists to behave as thoughtfully on social media as they do in other aspects of their jobs,”added Ms. Murphy, in an email last week.

But ultimately, it is all up to the Times, Ms. Sullivan points out.

"And unstated is the simple truth that The Times has the upper hand here. It decides, often on a case-by-case basis, which freelancers to assign. Assessing their judgment on social media is very likely to be a part of that decision-making."

"Particularly in the wake of Mr. Goldman’s display of poor judgment, it’s good to see the guidelines reinforced," the public editor writes.

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.

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.

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.