NY Times Design Director answers your questions

Recently the New York Times has been asking its head honchos to take to the mail bag and answer some of their readers most pressing questions in a section called “Talk to the Newsroom.” Executive Editor Bill Keller and head editors from almost every section have taken part in the column, and this week interactive design guru Khoi Vinh is the latest to give us some insight into what the Times does and why they do it.

I could really quote the entire Q & A page because everything he says should be echoed in newsrooms everywhere, even the small-town papers. His best summary sentence:

We’re trying to create something that’s true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.

He also co-authored a design tutorial called “Grids are Good” that was presented at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference last year. Once you go grid, it’s hard to go back.

Wine and Multimedia — not always a winning combination

Browsing through the multimedia section of the Times online today, I stumbled across an audio piece from their Dining and Wine section (I try to pretend I’m a wine buff sometimes) on Pinot Noirs from the Russian River Valley section of California. I thought “Hey! How cool, I wonder what kind of interactive multimedia they’ve put together for a piece on wine!” My preemptive excitement was short-lived.

The thumbnails on the left side played some audio of NYTimes wine guru Eric Asimov and other wine experts describing the tastes and flavors they liked and disliked from six different varieties from the region. What a snooze-fest. “Lovely finish. Strong fruit flavors. Fleshy and fresh. Spicy.” I understand that in the wine world there are a limited selection of terms to choose from when describing the flavors that light up one’s palette.

But then, why even bother to build this piece? Why not just make a spreadsheet with adjectives down one side and names of wines across the top, with some check marks in the corresponding boxes if the word comes to mind while tasting.

And why tease the readers with a photo box on the right if you are only going to feature one photo for each wine? And poor-quality photos that were taken of half-empty bottles nonetheless. An empty wine bottle is green. Pinot noir is deep red and purple. It’s almost insulting to use photos of empty bottles. How do the non-wine conoisseurs out there know it’s not a white wine for goodness sake? Of course, it could be possible that the Times decided to add the online feature after the journalists had a nice wine buzz going, therefore leaving no choice but to take the photos after-the-fact.

Either way, there has to be a better way for the food and wine journalists to get this right. It may not come until “taste-o-internet” is invented. Ideas? I’ll be pondering a few.

A question of ethics with the New York Times — a j-student’s perspective

I’ve been thrown for a loop.

It was only a few short weeks ago that I decided to change my browser homepage from CNN.com to NYTimes.com, a move that was unquestionably overdue for someone like me who is fed up with entertainment and sensationalist headlines from what I no longer consider a credible news source. It makes little difference really, considering that the news I get comes from all over the Web through my RSS reader. I like the Times for the same reasons everyone else does (multimedia reporting, feature stories, etc.) despite its left-leaning rap sheet, but some of their recent news judgment decisions have left me, a journalism student whose brain is still being molded, confused.

By now everyone’s either read or heard about the fuzzy article that was published last week about presidential hopeful John McCain’s “troublesome” relationship with female lobbyist Vicki Iseman. The article, which made these claims using sources that would only dish the dirt on the condition on anonymity, prompted McCain to hold a press conference to handle questions and deny the allegations. So what? People use confidential sources all the time right? But I’m lost…

All UF j-students are required to take Problems and Ethics in Journalism. I did. I got an A, too, and after reading this article I pulled out some of my notes. For most journalism dilemmas we were given a checklist to determine if the decisions that are made can be ethically justified. Usually they are if at least a few of the conditions in the checklist are satisfied.
Here is the checklist we were given for using confidential sources:

• All else being equal, identify all news sources fully.
• The story should be of overriding public importance.
• Always try to obtain the same information from sources who are willing to be quoted first.
• Grand confidentiality only to someone who is relatively powerless or likely to lose the capacity to remain a solid information source.
• Don’t let anonymous sources use the cloak of anonymity to attack other individuals or organizations.
• Make sure you are willing to tell readers how you got your information and why you’re protecting the source’s confidentiality.

And here is the attribution being called into question:

Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

First, it’s tough to think that a paper as big as the Times sucked all their sources dry before having to publish this story based on anonymous sources. If there were “several people involved,” couldn’t they at least be more specific and say what positions they hold in the campaign? With this attribution, they might as well have gotten the information from McCain sign-waver Joe Schmoe on the corner at the voting precinct. Second, could a story about a questionable romantic relationship of a potential presidential candidate years ago be considered an “attack on an individual?” Of overriding public importance? To me, it’s not so overriding that it needed to be rushed to publication before more attempts at obtaining open information could be made. In this case, I’d also say that the Times did not openly explain to their readers the “how” and “why” behind the information. I think they failed the checklist.

This only leads me to my next troubling thought: Has most of the American public been conditioned NOT to question their news sources? The answer to this must be a resounding “yes” if channels like FOX News can sustain so many viewers, and this is disheartening.

Whether or not the article is true, and whether or not the voters would actually care if it is or not, was it a responsible decision for a news icon like the Times to publish an ultimately unsubstantiated story like this one? Based on my novice knowledge, I’d have to say no.