In my April 8 column, I commented on The Times’s failure to provide any margin of sampling error for the Nielsen Media Research television audience data it publishes. I decided not to take the time of readers there to discuss the “level of confidence” reflected in the Nielsen margin of error numbers that the paper doesn’t report.

But the level of confidence and the margin of sampling error are interrelated, and some readers may be interested the details of that relationship.

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The question from Mark Schroeder, a Times reader in New York, was a good one. “How can someone who does not speak the language of the people involved quote them and determine an accurate set of facts for an article?” he asked in a Feb. 23 e-mail.

I asked Andrea Kannapell, a staff editor on the foreign desk, to respond to Mr. Schroeder’s message. Her response explained the care that Times correspondents take in recruiting and using translators in reporting that must be done in a foreign language. I think her explanation will be of interest to many readers of the paper.

Here is the exchange of e-mails:
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Making decisions about what scientific research is newsworthy is one of the toughest editing challenges at a newspaper. The controversy surrounding stem cell research makes the news judgments on those studies even more sensitive and difficult.

A reader wrote in yesterday with a question about why a study of the potential of amniotic stem cells didn’t appear in The Times. Articles about the study appeared on the front pages of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. I asked Laura Chang, the science editor at The Times, about the decision. The full exchange is below.
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Readers of The Times could be pardoned for feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of multi-part series showing up on the front page this week.

During just the first three days of this week, seven long stories from various series appeared on the front page of the paper, my assistant Joseph Plambeck has found. Readers who move along at 250 words a minute would need to spend an average of 20 minutes each morning just to get through the approximately 15,000 words from those articles in the past three days.

Why this deluge of fine journalism just when many readers are already busy with holiday activities? I’m fairly certain it’s because Dec. 31 is a deadline for the most significant journalism contests. Editors at The Times, like those at many other newspapers, probably are rushing out the final installments of important series so they can be included in the entry package in various contests.

Are readers well served by such an abundance of demanding articles? Use the comment link below to offer your thoughts.

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“TimesSelect Features Free for One Week,” read the two-column headline on the 258-word article in The Times’s Business Day section on Monday, Nov. 6. [Image below.] But the article had little, if any, news value and took up space that the paper could have devoted to an article that would have benefited at least some readers.

The article touted a one-week promotion that allows free access to certain material otherwise available only to paid subscribers to TimesSelect. It also plugged Royal Philips Electronics, noting that the promotion is “sponsored” by that company. The company’s name, along with the TimesSelect logo, has appeared at the top of the first page of the Web version of The Times this week.

Bruce Headlam, the editor in charge of the Monday Business Day section, said that Craig Whitney, an assistant managing editor and the paper’s standards editor, had “suggested” running an article on the promotion. Mr. Whitney confirmed that he had “suggested” doing the article.

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When I wrote in my Oct. 22 column that I had been wrong in my commentary supporting the publication of an article about the Swift banking-data surveillance program, I hadn’t asked anyone at The Times for comment. The publisher observed in a telephone conversation a few days later that I had been unfair in not giving the paper a chance to comment. But he didn’t request any corrective action, and I didn’t offer any.

I was already working on my Nov. 5 column that focused on the need to give people written about in news articles a fair chance to comment. Opinion columns such as the public editor’s don’t have the same obligations as new stories to provide a chance to comment. But my holding forth on the obligations of reporters doing news stories to pursue comment made me think more last week about my Swift mea culpa.

The public editor who preaches fairness has a special responsibility to practice fairness, I decided after I had wrapped up Sunday’s column. So I sent an e-mail on Saturday to Bill Keller, the executive editor, offering to post any comment he would like to offer on my Oct. 22 mea culpa. He responded within two hours with the following e-mail, laying out his disagreement with my change of heart.

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Readers of The Times are consistently curious about how the paper decides to review books and cover authors, and I wrote a column about the process at the Book Review last year. Yesterday, Peter Lewis from Seattle wrote me to inquire about what he saw as an overload of coverage and reviews about Richard Ford’s new book. His message was sent today to Sam Sifton, the culture editor, who had answered a related question in a Talk to the Newsroom feature online in June. Mr. Lewis’s message, and the informative response from Mr. Sifton and Rick Lyman, the books editor for the culture desk, follows.
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The reader reaction published Sunday to my Oct. 8 column about a speech by Linda Greenhouse has spurred further discussion on the question of how much freedom journalists should have to express their personal opinions in public. Here are a few e-mails that I have received since the “Other Voices” column appeared Sunday.

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[Updated 10/3]

The current policy on correcting errors on the editorial and Op-Ed pages seemed clear when Gail Collins, the editorial page editor, announced it almost a year ago. Her declaration published on Oct. 2, 2005, stated: “We correct all errors, from heart-stoppingly egregious to sublimely insignificant, because we believe that The Times should take its reputation for accuracy seriously.”

While there have been corrections published during the past year, resistance remains. Two clear-cut errors in editorials and a mistake in an Op-Ed article have remained uncorrected for months. Each of the two errors in editorials has been brought to the attention of the deputy editorial page editor in at least three e-mails from me over the past four months.
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The headline on The Times’s Aug. 16 obituary for Leonard H. Marks troubled his son, because it said the late Mr. Marks had “Helped Lyndon Johnson Get Rich.” Rob Marks, the son, complained that the “get rich” phrase cast his father, a communications lawyer who helped the late President and his wife acquire the television stations that built their fortune, in “a questionable light.”

I passed the son’s e-mail to Bill McDonald, the obituaries editor, who found the complaint a valid one. But Mr. McDonald also carefully explained the space limitations that make an obituary headline difficult to compose, especially when it seeks to “put in a nutshell” the life of an accomplished individual. Here’s the complete exchange of e-mails between Mr. Marks and Mr. McDonald:

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Two political science professors from Baruch College in New York said they found bias in an Aug. 25 Times report that a new poll that showed “fewer Americans view the Republican Party as ‘friendly to religion’ than a year ago, with the decline particularly steep among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants — constituencies at the heart of the Republicans’ conservative Christian voting bloc.” They suggested “the key figure in the story is that only 26 percent of the public perceives the Democratic Party as religion friendly….”

The complaint was passed to Laurie Goodstein, a Times religion reporter and the author of the article. She promptly responded that “the only real news in this poll was the change in the perception of the Republican Party.” She is correct, and the numbers in her article support her point about what was really new.

The article had noted that the percentage of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion fell 8 percentage points to 47 percent from 55 percent a year ago, and there was a 14 percentage point decline among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants. Among all Americans, the 26 percent who found the Democratic Party religion friendly, was down 3 percentage points from a year earlier.

Here’s the exchange of e-mails:
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Sunday’s public editor column offering a guide to readers on how to distinguish between good polls and bad ones noted that The Times had recently developed an updated set of standards on polling for editors and reporters. “These standards, coming just as the fall campaign heats up, provide a timely reminder of responsible journalism,” said Jack Rosenthal, the guest columnist.

The comments by Mr. Rosenthal, the president of The New York Times Company Foundation and a senior editor of the paper for 26 years, caused several readers to request copies of the updated standards. Assuming others might also be interested, I got permission from Times editors to post the full report of the committee that developed the standards. (One paragraph listing the direct telephone numbers of editors who can be consulted by reporters has been omitted.)

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A few readers have complained that The Times reacted slowly to the power outage affecting about 100,000 people in Queens last month. At least one suggested that the paper would have given more attention to the outage had it been in Manhattan. After reviewing The Times’s coverage, I’ve concluded that the concerns were largely misplaced.

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There’s a most thoughtful analysis of the current state of Internet journalism in an article by Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, in the Aug. 7 & 14 issue of The New Yorker. His comparisons of the roles of traditional and “citizen” journalists are realistic and not overly defensive about the print newspaper and broadcast newsrooms for which his school continues to train so many professionals. It is one of the best assessments of citizen journalism that I have read.

Jeff Jarvis, a champion of citizen journalism who is mentioned in the article, has responded in detail on his blog.

Go to article from The New Yorker.
Go to Jarvis response.