As noted by Michael Calderone and others, NYT ombudsman Clark Hoyt reported in his Sunday column that, in the wake of the Van Jones and ACORN stories, the paper’s top editors have decided to “assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.” But, Hoyt wrote, executive editor Bill Keller “declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person ‘a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.’ ”
In a reply to an email from CJR, Keller wrote today that the arrangement is informal—the paper has not so much “assigned someone” to follow opinion media as asked a colleague who already follows online chatter across the political spectrum to keep the rest of the brass up-to-date. “The responsibility for covering the subject still resides with the reporters on those beats, their editors, and ultimately me and [managing editor] Jill [Abramson],” he wrote. Again, no word on who that colleague is.
Greg Marx is an associate editor at CJR. Follow him on Twitter @gregamarx.