'Public Editor' Daniel Okrent, Recruited After Scandal, Draws Ire of Reporters

By James Bandler
2004 © The Wall Street Journal

When the New York Times decided to hire a "public editor," it wanted to heal a damaged institution. The Jayson Blair scandal -- which began with a reporter's fabrications and ended with the firing of two top editors -- had badly bruised the paper's credibility. The public editor would scrutinize the Times's future performance and act as an advocate for readers.

Daniel Okrent, a veteran magazine editor, has been the Times's public editor for seven months. But instead of bringing calm, the experiment has created fresh tensions within the Times about such subjects as the paper's coverage of weapons of mass destruction.

Some editors complain Mr. Okrent's questions are a nuisance, and also complain when he doesn't seek them out for comment. One reporter encouraged colleagues to ask confrontational questions in a meeting between Mr. Okrent and business-section reporters. "Sometimes you have to treat others like the Russians -- you have to demonstrate strength," says the reporter, David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winner. "I'm just waiting for him to screw up," Mr. Okrent retorts in an interview. He hastens to say the comment was a joke and that he will avoid tackling any issue concerning Mr. Johnston.

More recently, in an e-mail exchange, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller complained to Mr. Okrent about inquiries he was making for his column yesterday about a case of alleged child abuse. "i've got to say: man, you need a vacation," Mr. Keller wrote. "It's called reporting, right?" Mr. Okrent replied.

Businesses from Boeing Co. to Arthur Andersen LLP have turned to distinguished outsiders to fix problems wrought by scandals. None of these critics had a regular column with a large and influential readership. Moreover, unlike some newspaper ombudsmen who weigh in on routine questions of style, Mr. Okrent is using his post to question basic tenets of journalism and longstanding Times practices.

This tough stance comes at a time when the press is being regularly assailed by readers, especially online. Journalistic scandals at papers including Gannett Co.'s USA Today, the nation's largest, have damaged the industry's credibility among readers, and the media's reputation among the public is at a low ebb.

When asked to name the public editor's biggest accomplishment, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the chairman of New York Times Co., answers succinctly: "Surviving," he says. "I did try to warn him."

'Very, Very Difficult'
Mr. Okrent, 56 years old, says his first months at the Times were "very, very difficult." The paper, he says, "has a very strong immune system, and I was a different kind of antigen.... If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better."

In the spring of last year, the Times discovered that one of its reporters, Mr. Blair, had systematically plagiarized and fabricated portions of articles on topics including the Washington sniper killings. The revelation added to pre-existing discontent about the leadership of Executive Editor Howell Raines, who, along with his No. 2, was forced to step down.

As the scandal unfolded, the Times set up committees to recommend changes. The paper adopted most of them: It appointed editors to oversee standards and staffing; simplified its policy on which reporters received bylines; and made efforts to improve communications among departments.

There was little agreement initially about whether the paper needed an ombudsman after 152 years without one. Some committee members, including Assistant Managing Editor Allan Siegal, thought rigorous editing was a better solution than having an outsider look over reporters' shoulders. But Mr. Siegal eventually changed his mind and became a strong advocate of an ombudsman. He says he was persuaded, in part, by the comment of one of the three outside members of the committee that the paper needed to become "ostentatiously accountable."

Regular Forum
Eventually the whole committee agreed. In adopting the committee's recommendation, the paper gave the public editor a regular forum in its Sunday edition and later reserved a section of its Web site for readers' questions and additional commentary. The ombudsman was free to correspond with individual readers.

Dozens of newspapers across the U.S. have ombudsmen and some, such as the Washington Post's Michael Getler, are well-known for pointedly criticizing their employers. Other papers, including The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., prefer to keep quality control in the hands of editors.

When the Times announced its intention to hire an ombudsman, dozens of people applied, including journalism-school professors and a judge. Time Inc. Editor in Chief Norman Pearlstine nominated Mr. Okrent, a longtime colleague who had been managing editor of Life magazine, editor of new media for Time Inc. and an unsuccessful candidate for the top job at Sports Illustrated.

Mr. Keller, the Times's executive editor, says he was impressed by Mr. Okrent's independent-minded coverage of the AOL/Time Warner merger for Time magazine. There, Mr. Okrent called his employer a "dinosaur." Mr. Okrent also had a Renaissance man's array of interests from baseball to jazz to architecture.

The Times gave Mr. Okrent an 18-month contract in November, paying in the low six figures, Mr. Okrent says, declining to be more specific. Even if the experiment didn't work out, the paper was stuck with him. "We have to be careful," Mr. Keller told Mr. Okrent, both men confirm. "It would be really tough to fire you."

Mr. Okrent immediately marked himself as an outsider to the newsroom. He asked for, and received, permission to abandon Times style rules -- the paper automatically uses 'Mr.' and 'Ms.' on second references, for example -- in order to write in a more conversational manner. Other columnists have similar dispensation. Mr. Okrent told Mr. Sulzberger he wouldn't recommend the Times fire specific reporters. "That's not my job, it's your job," Mr. Okrent said, both men recall.

On Dec. 7, Mr. Okrent introduced himself to readers. He divulged in detail his sympathies on a range of political and social issues, despite advice to the contrary from Mr. Siegal. He acknowledged that his experience in daily journalism was limited; he was once a "not-very-good campus correspondent for The Times -- a little on the lazy side, rarely willing to make the third or fourth phone call to confirm the accuracy of what I'd been told on the first one."

Within a month, Mr. Okrent ran into resistance. In January, a reader complained about a business-section article about employment in the restaurant industry. Mr. Okrent wrote back, without consulting reporter Sherri Day or anyone else. Mr. Okrent told the reader that the editorial process behind the article, "did not represent the Times at its best," according to a person who has seen the letter.

At a get-to-know-you session between Mr. Okrent and the business staff on Jan. 7, reporter Mr. Johnston, who had learned about the letter, pounded his fist on the table and accused Mr. Okrent of unfairly damaging Ms. Day's reputation. Mr. Johnston also encouraged his colleagues to ask tough questions, he recalls. Staffers took their turns lambasting the public editor and Mr. Okrent says he apologized. He describes the meeting as a "lynch mob."

At about the same time, Mr. Okrent met the paper's department heads, representing sections such as sports and culture. Editors griped about the time they spent answering Mr. Okrent's inquiries, people at the meeting recall. At last count, the public editor and his assistant have sent more than 4,600 messages to the staff about various matters.

At the same meeting, Mr. Okrent recalls, some editors complained about the opposite problem. One said he was annoyed after not being consulted about a column that blasted the paper for hyping its opinion-poll data, Mr. Okrent recalls. Mr. Okrent's response spread around the office: Does a theater critic have to talk to actors when reviewing a play?

On Feb. 19, Tessco Technologies Inc., a wholesaler of telecommunications equipment, announced the name of a new director, Daniel Okrent. The press release mentioned that Mr. Okrent also served on the boards of Zinio Systems Inc., a company that digitized print magazines, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery.

Mr. Johnston, who says he supports the idea of an ombudsman, e-mailed Mr. Okrent: "I know from calls and e-mails I have gotten this morning that [the appointment] has aroused a lot of outrage in the newsroom," he wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail The Wall Street Journal obtained from a third party. "The last thing we need is another scandal, but now we have one." Mr. Johnston wanted Mr. Okrent barred from writing about any subject that touched on his board memberships, and took his complaint to Mr. Keller, the executive editor.

Mr. Keller disagreed with the concern raised by the reporter. Mr. Okrent had disclosed his board memberships and his talks with Tessco before accepting the job. But Mr. Okrent was furious. "I don't need this s-," he told Mr. Siegal, both men recall. He told Mr. Johnston he would "disclose loudly" should he ever have to write about issues related to those institutions.

Sweeping Statements
Even though Mr. Okrent has labored almost exclusively in the magazine and book worlds, that hasn't stopped him from making sweeping statements about newspaper practices. "I'm afraid we'll see reporters stop chasing quotes around the same time dogs stop chasing cars," Mr. Okrent wrote in one column, taking the paper to task for using quotations out of context.

Soon after, Education Editor Suzanne Daley took Mr. Okrent to task for doing exactly that. In a column, Mr. Okrent quoted Ms. Daley saying she didn't give a reporter time to check facts "because we're a newspaper." In a letter Mr. Okrent posted on his Web page, Ms. Daley wrote that Mr. Okrent had ignored the other reasons she provided, making it look as if she was "endorsing slipshod journalism."

At the time, Ms. Daley told Mr. Okrent she wouldn't answer any more of his questions, they both recall. "I think he suffers from not being a newspaperman," Ms. Daley says in an interview. "Sometimes we don't seem to be talking the same language." Ms. Daley now says she would consider having a correspondence with Mr. Okrent via e-mail.

Mr. Okrent said relations with Ms. Daley are improving. "She said 'hello' on the elevator," he says.

The section in which Mr. Okrent's columns appear, Sunday's Week in Review, hasn't been particularly hospitable either. In early April, Mr. Okrent asked the section's editor, Katherine Roberts, for a response to reader queries about the difference between Week in Review articles and regular news pieces. Ms. Roberts says she initially ignored Mr. Okrent's e-mails. When she did reply, Mr. Okrent thought the answer incomplete.

Ms. Roberts says she felt Mr. Okrent could have found the answer by simply reading the section. "Did I drop the ball and not give him what he wanted?" she asks. "Yes." She concedes her behavior was "somewhat churlish."

Ms. Roberts was also peeved over the length of the public editor's column. Mr. Okrent now prefers to avoid dealing directly with Ms. Roberts, and communicates instead through one of the section's deputies. Ms. Roberts says she accepts the public editor as a fact of daily life. "Now it's here, and we live with it," she says.

In April, Mr. Okrent wrote an unusual column that criticized an article before it had run. A theater buff, Mr. Okrent predicted that the Times would run an unnecessarily prominent account of Broadway's Tony awards, which he blasted as "artistically meaningless" and "blatantly commercial," among other things.

After the column ran, Mr. Keller says he called the paper's culture editors to make sure they were taking Mr. Okrent's complaints seriously. Two days later, the Times ran a story on the Tonys that included a paragraph echoing Mr. Okrent's point. It also ran a shorter second article that cast a critical eye on the awards.

But not everyone was happy with the public editor's commentary. Jodi Kantor, editor of the Sunday Arts and Leisure section, says she objected to Mr. Okrent's description of prior coverage of the awards as a "panting orgy." Asked whether the Tonys column affected the paper's coverage, Steven Erlanger, then the paper's culture editor, says, "yes, of course it did, but I wouldn't exaggerate it." (Mr. Erlanger is now the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief.)

On one occasion, the Times appeared to be scrambling to stay ahead of Mr. Okrent. In April, the public editor told Mr. Keller he planned to investigate long-standing criticisms about the paper's coverage of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in particular the notion that the Times didn't challenge aggressively enough the government's line. Mr. Keller told him the paper was already planning its own examination of the matter. An article by editors detailing a number of lapses ran a few days before Mr. Okrent's piece.

Mr. Keller says the editors' article had been in the works weeks before he learned of Mr. Okrent's plans. But he says he was glad the Times's mea culpa "appeared before we were lashed by the ombudsman, rather than after." As a result, Mr. Okrent's widely anticipated column was anticlimactic, Mr. Okrent says.

Last week, Mr. Okrent and Mr. Keller sparred over a column examining whether the Times erred in publishing an article about alleged sexual abuse committed by Tony Hendra, author of a best-selling memoir. Mr. Hendra denied the accusation to the Times and hasn't been charged with a crime. Before Mr. Okrent finished the column, which concluded that the Times shouldn't have run the story, Mr. Keller e-mailed to say he'd been briefed on Mr. Okrent's interviews with the responsible editor. "and I've got to say: man, you need a vacation," Mr. Keller wrote, defending the paper's decision.

Mr. Okrent agreed he needed a vacation, and suggested Mr. Keller take one, too. Mr. Okrent added in the e-mail that he hadn't made up his mind. "Sometimes, a question is just a question," he wrote. "It's called reporting, right."

"sometimes reporting looks (from the other end) like a campaign," Mr. Keller wrote back.

Mr. Keller says he finds Mr. Okrent's work valuable, despite occasional disagreements. In wrestling with complicated questions about reporting ethics, Mr. Okrent, "not only helps educate readers, he also provokes a lot of constructive introspection at the paper," Mr. Keller says.

Mr. Okrent has prompted some notable changes. In an early column, he chastised the paper for writing articles that contradicted earlier pieces without acknowledging the error. It's a "squirrelly journalistic dance step," Mr. Okrent wrote. Now, if new information undermines a previous article, the paper links the accounts in its electronic database, allowing readers to see the difference.

Outside the Times's Manhattan headquarters, Mr. Okrent is winning praise from some of the paper's fiercest critics, who feel they now have a friendly ear. Robert Cox, a consultant who runs a political commentary Web site called The National Debate, had waged a year-long campaign seeking a formal corrections policy for op-ed columnists.

Queries from Mr. Okrent, who had breakfast with Mr. Cox, prompted the Times's editorial-page editor to issue a formal written policy a few days before Mr. Okrent's column ran, a Times spokeswoman says. The policy wasn't new, but it hadn't before been made explicit. The Times said corrections would run at the bottom of contributors' columns. "As far as I'm concerned, Dan has made a very big difference," says Mr. Cox.

Mr. Okrent says frictions have eased in recent months and the paper is learning to tolerate his presence. Mr. Sulzberger says he is pleased with the project, which he expects to continue. Mr. Okrent's "successor is going to have a much easier time," Mr. Sulzberger says.

Even reporters are becoming accustomed to having an outsider peer over their shoulder. "Lord knows, we get a little puffed up sometimes," says Gardiner Harris, a reporter for the paper's business section. "Having someone who can puncture our over-stuffed egos is a really good thing."

Mr. Okrent's puncturing days will be over after his term ends. From the beginning, Mr. Okrent said he wasn't planning on staying more than 18 months. When asked, he is able to pinpoint the exact time remaining on his contract. "It's like a prisoner's calendar," says Mr. Okrent's wife, Rebecca. "Crossing off the days."

This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal on July 12, 2004.