Questions and Answers
Responses to reader questions from Times staffers.
Why was a rape victim’s blog mentioned and quoted from in a story on a rape in Central Park, allowing readers to identify the woman?
Wendy Ruderman, who is The Times’s police bureau chief, recounted what happened last Friday night when a story on the Web site for about two hours contained a brief quote from the victim’s blog that could lead readers to identify her by name. That form of the story also appeared in an early print edition on Saturday.
Ms. Ruderman said she felt it was important to write this third-day story to provide important context about the victim, a regular visitor to Central Park, and how she used her blog as a “wall of shame” to embarrass people who were misusing the park.
Although reporters and editors were careful about using a brief quotation from the unnamed blog – even taking the precaution of typing the words into a search engine to see if it could lead readers to the blog — they apparently were not careful enough. My assistant performed the same search and was able to find the blog in question.
As soon as a reader e-mailed The Times, saying that the quotation could lead to her blog, thus identifying her, it was removed and that section of the story was paraphrased online and for later print editions, Ms. Ruderman said.
I e-mailed the woman who was raped, asking for an interview. She said she was unable to talk now because of the criminal case against the suspect, but she clearly held no grudges against Ms. Ruderman, referring to her as “a gem.”
“Over all, the Internet is a huge challenge — I have struggled with it a lot,” Ms. Ruderman said. The lesson, she said, is that “on a story like this, we should take extra care. We need to be very careful on all stories, but we also feel the pressure to be immediate.”
Ms. Ruderman is right. The initial use of a quote from the blog was wrong. but the quick response to the complaint was appropriate; and the lessons learned are crucial ones. The issues regarding privacy and the Internet are getting more complicated for journalists every day.
Why does The Times refer to Muhammad as the Prophet Muhammad, but not refer to Jesus Christ in the same way?
Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, provides this reasonable answer: “We try as much as possible to respect the terms and language used by religious groups. Muslims routinely refer to Muhammad as “the Prophet Muhammad,” but I’m not aware of any Christian denominations that use ‘the Prophet Jesus.’”
Why is the statistical whiz Nate Silver, of the FiveThirtyEight blog on The Times’s Web site, not included as a regular part of The Times’s political coverage?
Some readers point out that his perspective would be useful in stories based on public opinion polls. Mr. Silver called the 2008 presidential election with near perfection. For many weeks now, he has been giving President Obama approximately a 75 percent chance of winning the election, at a time when various public opinion polls have been calling the race “neck and neck.”
I asked the executive editor, Jill Abramson, about this. She said she views Mr. Silver’s work as a separate entity, somewhat analogous to that of a columnist. The Times would not, under normal circumstances, use quotations from, for example, David Brooks’s column in its coverage. “It’s already in the paper,” she said.
Mr. Silver, too, prefers the arm’s-length distance. “It leaves me free to question the dominant narrative,” he told me this week.
Mr. Silver’s work, although mostly online, is occasionally used in bylined stories in print in the news pages of The Times. It will also appear this weekend in the Sunday Magazine.
I understand the separation but I’d like to see Mr. Silver’s work included more regularly for the benefit of print readers.
(Silver talked about his independence in an interview with Poynter.org last year. Click here.)