Congratulations are in order for Art Brisbane, former Kansas City Star editor and publisher, who on Monday was named the fourth public editor — or ombudsman — at The New York Times.
This is one of the best and most powerful jobs in journalism. The Times has about 1,000 reporters, editors, copy editors, photographers, graphic artists and other news personnel, and Brisbane will have free rein to comment on whatever they do — or fail to do.
Here is how Brisbane’s predecessor, Clark Hoyt, described the job in his last column, published June 11:
“I was handed the equivalent of a loaded gun — space in the newspaper and on its web site to write whatever I chose about its journalistic performance. My contract stipulated that I reported to no one and could be fired for only two reasons: failing to do any work or violating the company’s written ethics guidelines. I tried hard to be responsible with the power. The contract, designed to guarantee independence, came with term limits.”
Like Hoyt’s, Brisbane’s term is for three years.
Brisbane, who is the grandson of legendary Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane, said in a Times article published today that one of the subjects he expected to address was the nettlesome issue of whether the same journalistic standards that The Times applies to its printed edition should be applied to its web content.
“I think that journalists and editors are struggling with establishing standards for digital news,” he said. “Are those standards different from content in print? And if they’re different, how do we justify that they’re different? I expect that is a problem that will be with us for a while.”
That is a problem many papers have struggled with. I don’t know how it has gone with The Times, but I know from my many years at The Kansas City Star that The Star did not handle the balancing act well. It was Star credo that we applied great care and caution to what we put in the printed edition, but when the digital era came along, we often slapped material together haphazardly for the web site.
It was a dichotomy that made many Star reporters and editors very uncomfortable, and it was a factor, I am sure, in why many papers were slow to embrace the web and, as a result, got left behind as the new journalistic model coalesced.
In his new job, Brisbane will be in a position to influence not only web standards, but also other key journalistic issues, including the use of anonymous sources and keeping news reports free of “opinion creep.”
Brisbane, a 59-year-old Harvard graduate, had two stints at The Star. A Long Island native, he started his newspaper career in 1976 at the Glen Cove (New York) Guardian. He began working for The Kansas City Times (the morning paper before The Star went to a single daily edition) in 1977.
He became a columnist and authored a book of columns, Arthur Brisbane’s Kansas City. In 1984, he became a reporter for the Washington Post and later assistant city editor.
Brisbane returned to The Star in 1990 and two years later was named editor. (Reporters and editors later speculated that when he returned to The Star, he could have had a tacit understanding that he would be named editor after Joe McGuff retired.) He became publisher in 1997 and served in that role until 2005, when Knight Ridder –which owned The Star and 31 other newspapers — named him senior vice president.
In 2006, Knight Ridder sold out to Sacramento-based McClatchy Co. Brisbane was one of several top executives to get lucrative severance packages as part of the sale. Brisbane’s share was $4.5 million.
The Times did not say how much Brisbane will be paid as public editor.
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