Holidays don’t make us any deeper, but they give our minds a little room to wander. I find myself with a few curious things to say about the New York Times, where the most interesting item I read over the past two weeks was a correction.
A chart on Friday with an article about racial disparities in deaths from breast cancer misstated the mortality rate gap between black women and white women in Tennessee. For every 100,000 women in 2010, the mortality rate for black women was 36, and the mortality rate for white women was 22, which is about 1.64 black women for every white woman. It is not the case that nearly 14 black women in Tennessee die from breast cancer for every white woman who does.
For example: a Reader colleague who slugged her e-mail “Block that metaphor!” alerted me to the following passage in a December 26 Times story: “Toledo is hardly the only American city pursuing investors from China, but it is punching well above its weight at a time when other cities are striking out.” I’d like to think this god-awful, though harmless, sentence would never have survived the Times‘s editing process 15 years ago.
And in a recent blog post, public editor Sullivan announced that the Times hopes for tens of millions of dollars in new ad revenues by launching a new online initiative to develop what Sullivan calls “native advertising.”
Sullivan tried to explain what the Times has in mind, which involves providing advertisers with the same multimedia tools that distinguish Times journalism online. But she wasn’t sure the Times could have it both ways: “Can it be conservative in its approach—heavy on the labeling and disclaimers, careful never to confuse—and still draw advertisers? Or will that very clarity defeat the purpose of a form that has bafflement at its very heart?”
