Wendell Jamieson, deputy metropolitan editor for the Web, is answering questions from readers Nov. 30-Dec. 4, 2009. Questions may be e-mailed to askthetimes@nytimes.com.
Wendell Jamieson
Most recent answer: click here.
Mr. Jamieson oversees the City Room blog and breaking metro news online. He began his career as a copy boy at The New York Post during summers in the mid-1980s, and worked at The Jersey Journal in Jersey City, New York Newsday and The Daily News before joining The New York Times as a staff editor in 2000.
In late 2001 and throughout 2002 he edited Portraits of Grief, The Times's effort to chronicle the lives of those who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He was the metro assignment editor from 2003 until 2006, and the city editor until 2008, when he took a sabbatical in the Styles department.
He has written for many sections of the paper, including an essay in the culture section last December in which he argued that "It's a Wonderful Life" is actually a horror movie. He is the author of "Father Knows Less, Or 'Can I Cook My Sister?'" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2007).
A graduate of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and Boston University, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. He is also a Shodan, or First Dan, in Kendo, which is Japanese fencing.
Other Times staff members have answered questions in this column, including Executive Editor Bill Keller, Managing Editor Jill Abramson, Managing Editor John Geddes, Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman, Assistant Managing Editor Glenn Kramon, Obituaries Editor Bill McDonald, National Editor Suzanne Daley, Living Editor Trish Hall, Entertainment Editor Lorne Manly and N.B.A. reporter Jonathan Abrams. Their responses and those of other Times editors, reporters, columnists and executives are on the Talk to The Times page.
These discussions will continue in future weeks with other members of the Times staff.
All in a Day's Work
Q. I'm curious how your day unfolds. How do you and other editors coordinate assignments given to reporters? Do you distinguish between what is for the Web, and what is for print? Are some assignments for Web-first stories, and then expanded for the print edition? Do you sit in proximity, or rely on meetings and e-mail to communicate, or all of the above, as a story breaks?
A. I usually get in to the office around 8:30 a.m. and sit directly across from the metropolitan assignment editor, Dean Chang; next to Sewell Chan, who runs the City Room blog; and cater-corner from the deputy metropolitan editor, Carolyn Ryan. I am in easy shouting distance of the metropolitan editor, Joe Sexton. I see myself as running a virtual afternoon metro edition of The Times, getting all and any articles that I can up early on our Web site, freshening those from the night before, and keeping an eye on the City Room blog. On busy days, I'll moderate comments, edit and format blog posts, and so on as well.
When a news story breaks in midmorning, one of many things will happen. It might go up on NYTimes.com as a blog post or article, and then appear the same way in the next day's paper. Or it might be moderately reworked and updated along the way. Or the article in the paper will be 100 percent different. All the editors make these calls together, and then I shepherd the thing through the copy desk and to the Web staff, who sit across the room from me.
During the day, I attend Web meetings to tell the Web producers what metro is doing, and metro meetings to tell metro editors what the Web is doing. I truly have feet in both worlds. I cajole, implore, annoy, beg, borrow and steal to get articles done early for Web readers.
I guess, in the long run, the goal of my job is to eliminate my job. One day, I believe, all editors will be editors for both the paper and the Web. No cajoling or begging will be necessary. But we aren't there yet.
Paper or Pixels
Q. I know there are, if we are to believe the reports, tons of people who read The New York Times online, while the print readership is declining. But what are we to make of all this? It seems that more and more content is appearing online nowadays, but I find the printed version visually more appealing and easier to read. How anyone can prefer the online version is beyond me, but I do hear that young people favor online news. Mr. Jamieson, I would think that your preference is for the online version, as you are deputy metro editor for the Web, but is this correct?
A. Great question. The truth is, I find both formats very appealing, and use them both — but in different ways.
Even though I know what's in it, picking up the paper that sits outside my apartment door in Brooklyn each morning is one of the high points of my day. Once, I was so transfixed by a Page 1 article that I stood in the hallway in my bathrobe reading it — and stayed for so long that my wife and children became alarmed and came out to get me.
That daily thrill is just as strong now as it was when I was growing up in Park Slope, and the paper would be tossed behind the gate of our house on St. John's Place each morning. There is something about the elegance of the paper, the permanence of ink on newsprint, and the tactile sensation of holding it in my hands.
I love reading, oh, say, an article about the State of the Union message the next day, or any front-page article that sums up some huge sprawling development and puts it all in context for me. Even stuff that's been in the news all the day before — for example, read Diana B. Henriques's article about the sentencing of Bernie Madoff earlier this year, and you'll see the best newspaper writing imaginable. Somehow, it works for me best on newsprint.
Yet during the day, I am addicted to the home page, to the ups and downs of the day around the city, the country and the world. I follow breaking news, especially, but I also find, for some strange reason, that movie reviews are better to read on the computer. (Sam Sifton's restaurant reviews, on the other hand, work best on paper for me; don't ask me why.)
I love the way photographs look online, and I now find clicking around the home page as intuitive as flipping the pages of the printed paper. Then of course there is all the great video (I am a huge fan of A.O. Scott and his weekly Critic's Picks). The stories covered on our City Room blog often make it into the print paper, but many just seem to work better online, as part of the daily tumult of life in New York City. To get the most out of The Times, I think readers can enjoy the benefits of both mediums.
Different Political Styles
Q. Is it any easier or harder to cover politicians who used to be media or business executives, like Mike Bloomberg or Jon Corzine, than it is to cover politicians who used to be prosecutors, like Eliot Spitzer or Chris Christie? Do they treat the media any differently?
A. Let's see. I think a politican's response to coverage, and to taking questions from us, has more to do with his or her personality than profession — but of course, certain types of people take certain types of jobs. I chatted about this with Carolyn Ryan, the deputy metropolitan editor who oversees political coverage.
Our thoughts are that Michael Bloomberg is sort of the quintessential C.E.O. — that he is decisive and accustomed to taking charge and having a lot of control in a corporate environment. He seems used to people giving him a certain deference and loyalty, and does not seem to relish the part of the mayor's job that requires him to take questions from reporters, to be available to the press. He can clearly be impatient with us. The media people with whom he tends to interact more comfortably, at least from our vantage point, are the media moguls, the Rupert Murdochs and Mort Zuckermans of the world.
Eliot Spitzer, on the other hand, was more used to dealing with reporters, because he used media coverage so skillfully to gain leverage when he was New York State's attorney general. Reporters were usually very hungry for details of the cases Mr. Spitzer pursued as attorney general, and he exploited that smartly. Mr. Spitzer is also, intellectually, something of a student of the press: he studies how things are played and tries to figure out why, and — of course, like many politicians — is sometimes sensitive to what he sees as slights from the media. Even after the scandal that led to his resignation as governor, he remains a very close reader of political coverage.
What Goes Up
Q. Did you see "Spiderman" climb your building? If so, how did you react? What did you think? What were people around you saying? Did everyone stop working to watch? Did the climber wave to you? Did you think, even just a little bit, that maybe you'd like to try to climb the building too? Obviously, someone else thought so because you had a copycat there soon after. Do you think someone else might do it again? Thank you for taking my questions, silly as they are, given all the sobering news out there these days. But I was just wondering.
A. I probably shouldn't answer this question, for fear that someone reading it will spontaneously decide to come try and climb our building, and the remainder of my day will be a huge headache.
But I can't resist.
Yes, I was here! I was walking to the back of the newsroom when I noticed a group of reporters standing around, chatting excitedly, taking cellphone pictures and staring out the window. I looked, and there he was, studiously ascending just feet away. I did not wave, for fear that I might distract him and cause him to fall to his death.
There was general agitation and excitement in the newsroom about this episode. We were mulling over just how big a story it was for us on the metro desk when the second climber arrived — now it was definitely a big story. Midtown was tied in knots. More impressive than the men climbing the building — going up the "ceramic ladder," as the police called it — was the sea of people watching from the street. The crowd went on for blocks and blocks. Have you ever seen the movie "14 Hours," about a suicidal man outside a hotel window? Well, if you have, it was like that.
There was a terrible moment — I saw it on live television — when the second climber, who didn't seem as well practiced as the first, appeared to falter; for a horrible second, I thought he was going to lose his grip. That would have been awful to see.
City Room covered the climbs in real time. As you can imagine, we had plenty of reporters ready to contribute material. But this event did create some journalistic challenges for us, because we had to cover this news aggressively — including bugging the people who designed and built our building and the top management of our company, about whether the climber scenerio had ever been imagined. If memory serves, it had not, and we wrote that in the paper.
They have since made some big changes downstairs, securitywise, and I don't think we'll have another climber.
Knock wood.
An Undiscovered City
Q. Covering the city every day, what parts of it do you think feel the most distant from your desk in midtown Manhattan? The most alien, the most obscured, the furthest from the media's gaze? Maybe not physically as much as in spirit?
A. New York City, its stories and characters, its scenery and culture — both superficial and deeply, historically embedded — never ceases to fascinate and amaze me. Many of my colleagues got into newspapers because they wanted to write and report, wherever it took them — to see the world. I wanted only to cover New York City.
Far from the media gaze? There's this stretch of Queens along the Conduit near Kennedy Airport, where the black cowboys roam, that intrigues me more than any destination a plane might take me to. And the northern coast of Staten Island, which is still largely home to maritime businesses. Or the last virgin forest in Manhattan, in Inwood. My travels as a reporter have brought me to all of these places, so they are not always out of the media gaze, just usually.
But perhaps those bits of New York City that are most off the media map are those that are internal, our own cross-hatched histories laid atop the street grid, each as unique as a fingerprint — on this block in Manhattan, I lived when I was 2; on this stoop on Carroll Street, I kissed a girl; in this back yard, I got married; in this storefront, I took my son to preschool; in this building on Canal Street, I saw two dead bodies, the backs of their heads gone, when I was a police reporter. I suppose it is this secret internal city we all carry with us that is farthest from the media's gaze, because it can never be truly glimpsed.
Updating Articles on the Web
Q. We frequently see stories that have been updated with notations such as “5 minutes ago,” but there is no indication as to what changed. Do you think this would be valuable, and could it be done?
A. This is an evolving question as we put more and more news on the Web during the day. You are quite right: We put an updated time stamp on an article but do not highlight what we've changed. The reason for that is that we are thinking of the reader who has come to the article for the first time, and needs all the information presented seamlessly in the right places — with the most important facts on top — whether it is new or not.
But we often cover breaking news by live-blogging it — posting incremental blog updates as the day goes on, with the most recent update at the top. (This is very similar to the way old-time afternoon newspapers slapped the word "bulletin" atop a news article and added one new paragraph of information to it just before the presses ran.) With live blogging, you know immediately what is new by what is on top. Yet the most important information might be buried far below. This format works for readers who already know the outlines of the news and are coming back again and again to get the latest developments.
In a perfect world, and with a very, very big breaking story, we do both — we blog live, and also continually update a comprehensive, seamless news story. This is how the metro desk handled the splashdown of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. A newcomer to the story got the whole thing in one well-written article, while someone who hungers for just the latest could keep clicking on the City Room blog.
And Now for a Little Real Estate Advice ...
Q. I know I should ask you about your writing, but all's fair in New York City real estate. We're thinking of moving to Cobble Hill Towers and found your comments on living there. Would we be crazy to rent the sixth floor/Statue of Liberty side with a 10-month-old baby?
A. Some background: the question stems from a story I wrote about the Cobble Hill Towers in 2003. These were the first buildings of subsidized housing in New York, in the late 19th century, and are still in use today. You've seen them if you've ever looked up along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway before the Atlantic Avenue exit — bright red brick buildings, with all kinds of towers and spiked iron work; they are especially striking when the afternoon sun hits the bricks.
Now, if you have ever read the Talk to The Times feature before, you know that the person on the hot seat occasionally refers a question to another expert here at The Times. I've decided to break with tradition and refer this one to my wife, Helene, the mother of two small children.
She replied emphatically — using several words and phrases that I cannot quote here — that you should not live in this building with a small child. You will have a terrible time negotiating the rounded stairways with a stroller, especially while carrying a baby, and will live in a state of perpetual exhaustion due to the constant stair-climbing. She reminded me that we moved in anticipation of her having a baby (I'd forgotten that!).
But to Jeff and Gretchen I say ... ignore my wife! These are great buildings, steeped with history and full of life, and you will have a great time there. Leave the stroller downstairs. The guys from Met Food on Henry Street will be happy to bring your groceries up (tip accordingly), and a small child just walking should be able to negotiate the steps, as they are very shallow (climbing to the sixth floor of this building, because the ceilings are somewhat low, feels like walking to the fourth floor of a more traditional building). You won't need to go to the gym. The local public school is fantastic, a real godsend. I look back on my days in these buildings very fondly. If the price is good, I say go for it.
Sorry, Honey.
Deciding What to Cover
Q. What is your objective? How do you decide what stories to cover? Are you driven by public interest or what interests you? How much are you influenced by the people you know who are like you and share your values and do you think that interferes with you objectives?
A. My objective is to help recreate a day in New York City on the pages and on the Web site of The New York Times, with all the humor, and drama, and sometimes horror that entails. I want the city to come alive in our words and pictures and graphics and slide shows. I want to make readers spit out coffee and call to their husbands, "Hey — read this. You are NOT going to believe it." I want to make readers laugh at the things New Yorkers say and do.
I want to come up with story ideas, and watch the fantastically talented reporters here make them better than I would ever have imagined. (Look at our end-of-summer swimming pool story, written by Ralph Blumenthal and shot by Todd Heisler, as an example.) I want to help The Times prosper in what are challenging times, economically, by doing my part to produce a great product. Then I want to have a drink.
I am driven by both the public interest, and what interests me. I know a good story when I feel it in my stomach just as much as think about it in my head. The only value that drives my judgment is, "Is this a good story?" Yes, of course, my personal history, who I am, has got to influence me somewhat, but I am very sensitive to the fact that my New York is only one New York, and that a successful paper should reflect all the cities out there. I think I strike this balance well, as do all of my colleagues here on the metro desk, but concede, alas, that I am not perfect.
Division of Labor
Q. You're involved with the City Room blog and I'm wondering how is a blog like or unlike a newspaper? Do your blog reporters have specific beats? And assuming the blog staff is smaller than the Metro staff, how do you all keep up with everything? Do you and the bloggers ever get to sleep?
A. City Room consists of a bureau chief, Sewell Chan, two reporters, A.G. Sulzberger and Jennifer 8. Lee, and a producer, Emily S. Rueb. Several copy editors, including Jim Hunt, look over our stuff, write headlines and generally make sure we don't make fools out of ourselves. At least, those staffers are the core. Sewell, Arthur and Jenny don't have specific beats, but certainly have areas of interest. Jenny, for example, writes quite a bit about the intersection of food and culture in daily life in New York City.
The fact is, all metro reporters contribute (some more than others!), and most of the other assigning editors (we call them backfielders) edit posts. It is really like an ever-evolving afternoon newspaper. We start early, and usually close up shop around 6 p.m., when The Times's effort becomes more geared to the next day's newspaper. Yes, we sleep. At least I do. I don't know about the others. Sewell is always complaining that he doesn't get enough sleep.
Is New York Any Place to Raise Children?
Q. Pardon me for asking a leading question, but don't you think New York City is a great place to raise children? Naturally, the city has its issues — all places do. But don't the upsides — the museums, the culture, the architecture, the history, the very romanticism of the place, and last but definitely not least, the best playgrounds ever — couldn't these upsides, at least for some people, make up for the lack of suburban space? I figured that since you have kids and oversee the City Room you might have given these issues some thought.
A. I certainly think it is. How could a child raised in New York City not prosper when he or she goes out into the world? He or she would be ready for anything — nothing would be too big, or crazed, or imposing. All the things you cite are great reasons to raise kids here, but really, to me, the main thing is the energy, the sense that this is the place.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a big house with a backyard. The realities of real estate prices in New York City these days mean my children live in an apartment. Oh, well. We get them into the country in summer so they can do stuff like catch toads, but the romance of that eventually wears off, and they return happily to Brooklyn and the asphalt.
The Integrated Newsroom
Q. To piggyback on Molly Mullen's and Ellen Clegg's questions, it's been two years now since The New York Times moved to the new building, and the new integrated newsroom. How "integrated" is the newsroom? For example, do A.G. Sulzberger and Jennifer 8. Lee also write for print? Do all reporters write for print and the Web depending on the day/the news, etc.? You wrote you believe that one day "all editors will be editors for both the paper and the Web." Why is that not the case yet? What do you think is needed to reach that tipping point?
A. A great question, and one for which I do not have a complete answer.
We are integrated beyond our wildest dreams of just a few years ago, yet full integration has yet to arrive. We still have editors who worry about the Web, and others focused on the paper. There is still a perception among many (most?) reporters, and many (most?) editors, that having your story on A1 of the newspaper is more important than having it on NYTimes.com's homepage. I was once one of them. No longer.
Jenny and Arthur do plenty of stuff for City Room that ends up in the newspaper. They also do stories aimed for the paper that then appear online. I believe we must be the most integrated newsroom in America (others may take issue with this). But though it might sound easy, putting these two pieces (Web and paper) together is a very delicate process. Newspaper folks like me must learn about the culture of the Web, and Web folks must learn the culture of newspaper journalism, and The New York Times. When NYTimes.com began — and there are others who know this stuff better than I do — it was created with its own infastructure layered atop the newspaper infastructure, with producers and editors who guided the paper's journalists. Eventually, this resulted in a system that, it seems to me, runs during the day on two separate tracks, with different editors making decisions about play, etc. This was a necessary arrangement once, but my hope is that these two tracks will merge into one. Reporters will write stories that will automatically go in both directions — onto your computer, and into your hands on paper.
The top editors of the paper are getting much more involved in the Web these days, which is also a great thing. All I can say is, really, what I said at the beginning: we are getting there. Some things you just can't force. It will be a natural progression, and it will grow organically out of the needs of our readers and viewers, and our desire to serve them.
Those 'Lazy' Web Journalists
Q. I read The New York Times online every day, occasionally purchase a paper copy.
Question: why does NYTimes.com, and most newspaper Web sites, not have all new material each day? Your print edition has no problem achieving this feat. Is it simply a matter of laziness? Do you recognize the irony in this fact, and do you find this embarrassing? Do you realize how dumb this makes you look? WSJ.com has no trouble publishing only new articles each day, and perhaps or perhaps not by coincidence, WSJ.com is the only online paper that makes money.
A. Chris, I'll try to ignore the sophomoric way you framed this question to simply respond that we do, indeed, publish everything on the Web every day that we publish in the newspaper and more — actually, we publish much of what you see in the paper on the Web the day or evening before. And we often update stories that have appeared in print as developments occur throughout the day. I think perhaps you may be confused and/or disoriented.
Of course, all the old stuff is there, too. Are you suggesting we delete old stories each day so the Web site every day is just new stuff? If we did that we would deny our readers much of the rich context that the Web site can provide. But I'll be happy to pass your idea on to the publisher.
Alas, you are also confused about WSJ.com being the only online newspaper that makes money. The Wall Street Journal is one of several newspapers that charges for its Web site, if that's what you mean. I have no idea if they make a profit. The last time Rupert Murdoch and I had breakfast together, I forgot to ask him. I was too busy showing him pictures of my children catching toads (see answer above). Our site is free to users like yourself, although there are ongoing discussions here — and at most newspapers — about whether to charge in the future. I am not involved in those discussions. But we have lots of advertisers, and they pay to be on our site.
Does that help?
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